Quote Originally Posted by Muddy Retriever View Post
If that's correct then fair enough.

But there are still a few things the don't add up for me.

1. Why has it suddenly increased so much? Apparently in the week before the 10pm curfew was announced pubs and restaurants were only contributing 3% of new cases, down from 5% the week before. Perhaps it's the daft curfew rule itself, which has led to lots of people being chucked out at the same time!
2. Why is the increase in infections not more uniform across the country? Pubs are everywhere after all.
3. Why did Sheffield's new cases triple in a week? They've had their pubs open for a few months so why such an impact now?
Simple answer, I haven't a clue

Maybe part of the answer is that the national lockdown, both going in and coming out, was too London centric? There were perhaps relatively few real cases in the north in February/March but, by the time lockdown was ending, covid was still knocking around, albeit in small pockets. For sure by then there were a lot of the public really thirsty for the pub, with a fair few of them I'm guessing (up north) never really experiencing much in the way of friends and family getting covid in the first place. So you then have a bunch of drinkers, many a bit too relaxed and/or sceptical about covid, with not much of the wider population (up north) having had exposure to covid, all starting to socialise and lose social distancing after a few. And then the fast accelerating compound interest of covid takes over?