Getting recreation and leisure up and running again.

Just reading the amusing advice to Lloyd Webber re musicals: don’t sing. Love it. Talk about clueless. But other stuff in the piece mentions covering door handles. No, missing the point. Remove door handles. Either have automatic doors everywhere or people to open them for you. Cover the doors with something that can be removed every day. Put removable covers on stair rails - cling film- yes. And this goes for all venues not just theatres of course. RIP up the carpet and have easily washable flooring with material that absorbs sound. And if I may introduce my favourite topic, automatic flush on loos. And those constant water washing fountains, no taps. I’m afraid they have to spend the cash to get the cash. Auto loos, more attendants cleaning the loos down all the time. More loos, maybe those portocabins outside to allow for more people in the older theatres. No bars, sorry, but attendants can give out drinks and eats in packages paid for with prepaid vouchers. All common sense. We can’t expect to go back to what it was like before. I’m bemused that the impresarios haven’t already put this kind of thing into action and are not showing the public what the news arrangements are. A video tour of the self flushing loo, the no tap basin and the uniformed attendant would go a long way in building confidence. And dare I say it, fewer seats in the auditoria, imaginatively arranged so you are not a million miles from the next person, grouped seating perhaps and discounts for group bookings so you can go with a bunch of pals of family as people like to do for the big shows. Smaller venues could experiment with cabaret style seating like I think some of the cinemas have been doing, with small tables and food and armchairs. What the actors do I can’t say but if a socially distanced Romeo and Juliet is not an option, then let’s have testing and health checks available every week. Mind you I did once see a production of Tristan and Isolde where the two lovers didn’t get anywhere near each other. It was terrible of course but given the talents of our directors ....

Which is ridiculous because 90% of the people going to Panto are not high risk. This really is ridiculous and as much as I fear getting the virus I can see how ridiculous it is.

The suggestion that social distancing will still be needed in December is ridiculous to me. We need to get back to normal life. 

The way this country is going, of course social distancing will still be here in December! As long as there is no vaccine, social distancing will remain.

We're all vulnerable. This disease has a mortality rate of around 1% even for healthy people. That was one of the big flaws in the government's original plan: they assumed only people with preexisting health conditions were at risk, and they were wrong.

I feel that people really aren't understanding the purpose of the lockdown. It's not to protect the vulnerable. It's to prevent the healthy from spreading the disease all over the place. As far as a disease is concerned the vulnerable are literally a dead end, because once someone has succumbed to a disease they're not going to be spreading it anywhere unless they turn into a zombie. A disease depends on the least vulnerable to survive, and the people with an attitude of "I want my life back no matter what the cost in other people's deaths" are exactly what it needs.

We can't stay in lockdown forever, but we also can't risk a death toll between half a million and a million in the UK. Yeah, it means life sucks a bit for a while but at least you have a life that's able to suck. It's easy not to worry when it's not your life or that of someone you know on the line, but I bet all the people here who are so dismissive of the risk would feel very differently if they were on a ventilator with a 10% chance of dying and plenty of time to think "If only I hadn't...".

But the point remains that there's no such division as "the vulnerable" and "the rest of us". There are some people who are considerably more vulnerable than others, but we're all vulnerable. Even 0.01% is a lot when you multiply it by the number of people who go to the West End in a week.

We will never know the true mortality rate as at the start, there were tens, potentially hundreds of thousands of cases which were never picked up in the UK (and everywhere else).
Millions of people will be unemployed if another lockdown happens. I'm sorry, but disease is a fact of life and we really do have to just get on with it, whilst doing the best we can to "stop the spread"