So the government has put my local region (Coventry & Warwickshire) into the harshest tier 3 when the national lockdown ends on December 2nd. This despite the local daily numbers dropping quite rapidly and the city itself being comfortably within tier 2 guidelines. This is because they lump this area in with Solihull, Birmingham, Black Country and the greater West Midlands Local Authority, who have higher numbers. Makes no sense at all. Those areas are 25 miles away and separated by green belt land. Warks was tier 1 before the lockdown but is now tier 3....how is that even possible?
One of the biggest gripes about this is that pubs in tier 3 areas are not open (for groups of up to 6 people) over the festive period. There's no way that pubs would be as busy as they typically would because the majority of people are still very wary or fearful of the virus, but there would likely have still been many going for the traditional Christmas drink and bit of food in those small groups. You also can't mix households outside of the 5 days where restrictions are lifted (23-27th December). So what are people going to do on NYE? It's obvious what will happen.
I think doing things like this will have a worse affect than the government realise. If you are in a high risk area then that is absolutely correct, if not then people feel slighted, and all that will happen is that people will meet up in greater numbers in households, all over Christmas and not just the 5 days where restrictions are lifted, and come January those areas will have big spikes again and more problems.
More on what I was saying yesterday:
So essentially there is a clear north-south divide with few exceptions - Liverpool escapes tier 3 because it has had its own very strict measures recently. Bristol area in tier 3, and one very bad area of Kent (Swale) and Medway has put the entire county in tier 3. Most of it is rural so people are also very annoyed there. Those tier 2 areas in the north (Cumbria and North Yorkshire) have low population density, they are mostly national parks, moorland and green belt. Only Cornwall and the Isle of Wight make tier 1.
To the working man it looks like Boris has sorted out the south and his cockney wanker mates so they can all have a better Christmas than us "northern monkeys" (even the Midlands is north for them).
Now you have this map, which shows infection swing during the ongoing national lockdown:
Oh look, the southeast with the only cases where it isn't going down. East Sussex (Brighton etc) with rising cases, but that is an affluent area where many Londoners live, so they can stay tier 2. And Redbridge is in London, but obviously there was no chance of Greater London being tier 3 because of one little area
MPs already talking about striking over these measures. It gets reviewed every two weeks, so don't be surprised if suddenly the map turns orange just before Christmas, because the Tories are taking a hammering over this.
The only thing I can suspect they were thinking is that they would do tougher measures for the first two weeks of December to try to negate some of the infection damage that will inevitably be done over Christmas. But what they should have done is extended the national lockdown until mid-December and then put everyone in tiers 2 or 1 where suitable, because this looks like a clear divide and bias.