Originally Posted by Chris

Oddly enough I had a conversation with the head of waste collection at my local council not so long ago after we had a run of missed wheelie bin pickups ... the conversation wandered a bit and we ended up talking about the design of bins and the way routes are plotted and resources allocated.

The most efficient way of doing it, with wheelie bins, is to tell residents to present their bins facing a certain way, and to deploy a vehicle that can lift them directly from the kerb without having to be manually put onto the metal arm. These are very widely used in Europe. The reason most local councils in the UK don’t use this system - and why some who have tried it have abandoned it - is because we are ... guess what ... behaviourally different than a lot of other places. We simply won’t position our bins exactly the way the council tells us to.

As I said, there is social modelling going on here as well as virology. It is simply the case that in the UK if mass gatherings were banned too early, there is a risk people would get bored of official advice and start ignoring it too soon, while the virus was still present in enough people to start a resurgence.