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It's all about the key workers. Medical staff, and supermarket staff, and delivery drivers, and food producers, and so on, are all key workers and just had to (and chose to) get on with it because they knew their jobs were essential. Teachers are not key workers and their jobs aren't essential...

None of that is all that relevant. The world is going to have a lot more coronavirus than we are until they catch up, so our efforts will only cut world coronavirus numbers by less than 1%. Reducing the chances of a mutation by 1% is a tiny, scarcely relevant figure. Unless we are going to...

I will bear that in mind. Thank you.

Message noted and understood. I'm sure a lot of us are worried about the health of our families. I certainly am.

Even with lockdown and closed borders we will not get this virus under control for years, if ever. And we will certainly not get it under control "once and for all", not in either of our lifetimes. With the vaccine and with a fair wind, we should be able to get this virus under control to the...

The problem is that you have so convinced yourself that the government was late enforcing lockdown, that you have forgotten what actually happened. SAGE recommended on 18th March 2020 that schools should be closed "as soon as practicable" - they were closed on 20th March. (On 16th March, SAGE...

Now that they have established that people who have been vaccinated don't get seriously ill with coronavirus, and that they find it hard to pass on, and that it is very hard to pass it on outdoors anyway, do we think it would be reckless to allow vaccinated people to sit 6 feet apart and shout...

At risk of being contradictory, you have never wholly trusted SAGE or been in favour of following SAGE advice. You have always wanted lockdown to be stricter and longer and harder than SAGE ever has.

May what year? I was thinking of going out for a walk if we get a nice day in June. Will it be safe? The thing is, people who get the vaccine AND stay indoors for the next few months are safe from the virus anyway. So why don't they just stay indoors as per now and let the rest of us carry...

What early signs?

As I have said before, any form of social distancing makes a social life for many elderly pensioners more or less impossible. A lot of old people cannot have a conversation at a distance of 6 feet, especially in a busy room, because they can't hear well enough. Which is going to be the bigger...

Agreed. I can foresee pro-lockdown people going round the chools testing children to try and get case numbers above 1,000 a day, if they can't find enough ill people to justify lockdown any other way.

I don't object to individuals who want to restrict themselves. But if deaths are low and the NHS is not overwhelmed, I do not agree with government imposed restrictions. It is not the government's place to instruct my brothers that they cannot come and visit their mother - except in dire...

If we continue to lockdown when the vaccine is doing its stuff, then all we achieve is to keep the virus running for longer. Has anyone ever done any experiments to test the likelihood of a virus mutation if there are 10 million cases over 1 year as opposed to 10 million cases over 10 years...

What they're saying, I suppose, is that even if the vaccine reduces the current fatality rate of 1% down to a tenth of that, that would still be 1 person per day dying of coronavirus, which would increase the normal summer average daily deaths from 1,500 to 1,501 which is unacceptable. I...

That particular model made certain assumptions: 1. Everyone who isn't vaccinated will get coronavirus; 2. If a vaccinated person gets the disease, the vaccine has no effect on severity; 3. Summer makes no difference to the virus. All of which are wrong. Forget that model.

If vaccination is so high, then how will R=2.4 when most of the people an infected person would meet, are immune? I think they are also assuming that the vaccine has no effect on the number of viruses that are inside you, it just miraculously stops them working. Which isn't how any other...

There is no way on earth that a scenario where telling people they may be able to have a meal out in three months' time but only if it's a nice day, can be described as optimistic. It's miserably pessimistic. And once we're immune and the numbers suffering and dying are negligible, the idea...

But it seems that the R number is pretty useless. Here's why. In the three weeks 26th December to 16th January, there were 1,084,790 positive tests for coronavirus. The R number, they tell us, was over 1 throughout that period, which means that on average each of those people will infect more...

Have SAGE made any recommendations at all about this road map, that we have seen? We have heard a fair bit from grandstanding freelancers on the committee, but isn't there a fair chance that the reason they are grandstanding is because they don't agree with the majority view?