So how do you suggest lockdowns are enforced then in this country.
In honesty I'm not even sure it'd be possible now, at least not without resort to desperate measures such as backing up the police with some sort of army presence, after nearly a year of living under restrictions of one form or another, so many people have just well and truly had enough of it and I'm not convinced there's a good way to do it.
And that's not just the UK either of course, many other countries around the world have similar problems, it could well be that mass vaccination programmes, probably on a rolling basis to counter new variants as they emerge, are about the only route left back to normality at this point.
That said, the current UK lockdown, as flawed as it is, is starting to get the numbers down, so it is working in that regard, but as was the case previously, it's starting from such a phenomenally high infection rate that it takes a long time for it to have an effect.
(The opportunity the UK had to get well and truly on top of Covid was last summer, when infection rates were low, an effective track and trace system at that point was critical, but it was completely bungled. Also it would have been handy
not to do, and let's just consider this for a moment, encouraging people with freebies to go out to pubs and restaurants and 'eat out to help out'
in the middle of a fucking pandemic. It did help of course, but what it helped with was sowing the seeds of a second wave and getting infections going again, as well as sending an incredibly muddled and confusing message.)
One thing that could be done, I guess, is to make it viable for people to self-isolate when they're supposed to with extra financial assistance. If people are having to choose between earning money for rent and food, or isolating because they're supposed to, you can't really blame them for choosing rent and food and continuing to work despite having symptoms, or deliberately not getting tested. There are always going to be those who will wilfully disobey lockdown restrictions, and they're the ones the police should be dealing with, people who are simply trying to survive is a whole different thing, and that's where government support needs to be available.
As I said a few posts back, the virus can only spread through human contact, stop people moving around and you stop the virus moving around, and thus infecting people. If people are moving around because they
HAVE to (i.e. working to make ends meet because they have no other option) then we can't really blame them.
Other countries in the world have managed this, Australia is a first world democracy, with some densely populated cities, and an overall population of over 25m, and they had
TWO CASES in the last 24 hours - so there are answers out there.
(The border changes the UK government has implemented in the last week should help too, I mean, they're pretty much a year late, but they've got there in the end.)