How was your day? (Random off topic chat)

OK. I'll bite.

There is no such thing as a safe contact with another person. There is always a risk. The only way we could be perfectly safe is if nobody ever came close to anyone else. But that's obviously not practical: every business would come to a complete halt and everyone would starve to death, and that would generally be considered to be somewhat undesirable. Some contact has to be permitted, but a balance has to be drawn between safety and economic benefit.

Going shopping has a low risk and a high economic benefit, so it's allowed. Commuting to work has a higher risk but a higher economic benefit, so it's also allowed. Meeting your friends and having a chat has an extremely high risk and zero economic benefit, so it isn't allowed. We must get the reproduction rate of this disease below 1 and the restrictions are trying to do that with the lowest possible damage to the economy. Anything that increases the risk pointlessly has to go. Meeting even one person is already a concession that we'd be better off without.

Why does meeting friends carry an extremely high risk? Because humans are absolutely abysmal at judging risk. If people feel safe they assume they are safe and they don't bother with precautions, and when people are with familiar faces in familiar places they feel safe. But the virus doesn't care whether you're with a friend or a stranger, and with the former you're likely to be closer for longer and not bother with a mask so you're actually at far greater risk than standing near a mask-wearing stranger in a shop for a minute or two.

I should perhaps say that my aunt & uncle were both wearing masks, my mother had her scarf over her face, & I made sure I kept well away. I haven't been to work or into any shops since mid-March. In fact before today the only person outside my household I have had a (brief) face-to-face conversation with in about 2 months was a Sainsbury's delivery driver last week when there was a problem with leaking fabric conditioner. I don't even like walking past people when out walking. I spend a lot of time on walks dashing off paths into undergrowth to keep 2m away from people. I am really trying.

The meeting one person from another household is also confusing depending on which way you look at it. On Monday my mother is meeting a friend to walk round a local National Trust garden. I can't work out if I'm allowed to join her or not. From our point of view we would be meeting one person from another household, which is allowed. But from my mother's friend's point of view she'd be meeting 2 people from another household, which isn't allowed. So the same meeting could be both legal & illegal depending on which way you look at it.

I don't know why the government chose that particular limit, but there has to be a limit somewhere and that's the one they've chosen. I presume it's because they think it would be ridiculous if people can't talk to anyone and a simple "Hi" or "How do I get to...?" in passing would be illegal, but you'd have to ask the government themselves why they went for that exact situation. All I'm trying to do is explain the flaw in reasoning "If I'm allowed to encounter other people when I'm shopping that must mean there's no danger to meeting other people so I should be able to meet as many as I choose". It's never been a matter of "this is safe", and anyone thinking that way needs to stop.

You're right that it's arbitrary, but all laws are arbitrary. That doesn't make them stupid or wrong. You might as well ask why it's legal to have sex when you're 5844 days old but not 5843, or why an English road with street lights 183m apart is a restricted road and subject to a 30 mph limit while one with lights further apart isn't, or why in Scotland that boundary is 185m. Whenever you have a restriction that restriction is always going to have a boundary between when it applies and when it doesn't apply, and whenever you have a boundary you are going to have people claiming it's stupid because what they want to do is slightly on the wrong side of the boundary. Why was that particular boundary chosen? Who knows? The people who chose it, that's who. They had their reasons, and the fact that other people don't know those reasons doesn't invalidate the choice.