I don’t know why people don’t do their own disinfecting. Outside the homes, I wipe everything down or sanitise my hands after touching it. Petrol pumps, handles, buttons, I clean my hands afterwards or the surface beforehand, it’s become an automatic thing, I hardly think about it now.Exactly as I forecast and demonstrated the other day with its total failure here in London from day one of its introduction. It can't be made to work because it cannot be policed without completely paralysing the country and finally destroying the economy. Freedom of movement of people and goods is the very foundation of our whole economy.
The fact is that none of the defensive measures against the virus are working anywhere in the world, and we are no exception in having the huge current increases in infection.
The defensive measures don't work because they cannot work as I've repeatedly been posting. My first mention of that right at the start of the measures in spring was how supermarket basket handles were virtually never being disinfected, passing from hand to stack and back to hand without any attention. Since about a third of that shopping is done using a basket by the near third of all households that are single person, that system is a failure.
Nor is such disinfecting a success on trolleys, since after an initial burst of a fair degree of compliance many locations are only doing it in cavalier token fashion. At the huge superstore I use almost every trolley goes from hand to hand without any disinfecting, not because of negligence but due to it's structural circumstances. They do some disinfection, but the disinfected trolleys are not the ones that get used.
There are parallels with those failures for every defensive measure tried, from disinfections and social distancing through to the current attempts at tiers.
The only thing that works, but only to a very limited degree, is total lockdown, but the country cannot live with that indefinitely since we cannot live without a fully operational economy.
We might as well take the hit because we all will in the end anyway.
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