Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
I didn’t question whether you were a “key worker”.
As Carth points out 100,000 touted now (critical workers seems to be Government parlance) is far fewer than those who in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, critical national infrastructure, Civil Servants. The total under the key worker definition would be well into the millions.
|
Well it does seem to be somewhat loosely correlated with "people who can't work from home".
But that's somewhat unfair, isn't it? I suppose your 999 call handlers or whatever are vital service providers, yet there probably isn't much requirement for them to be sat in a call centre, given they could be given computers, headsets, softphones and VPN in from their homes, like most people are doing. You could do the same with basically any call centre setup which uses VOIP these days I suppose. Plus of course those who support the key infrastructure, a fair amount of this can be managed remotely too, with no systems support for the website or the tills tesco wouldn't be able to sell anything would they?
I suppose though that actually, those people who can work from home are already minimising their contact with colleagues and/or the general public, whereas checkout staff in a supermarket for example, can't do that and will be in contact with loads of people in a day, and the plastic screens, cloth over your mouth isn't necessarily going to stop the virus. It did already make sense that people in jobs in contact with the general public all day did a LFT before going to work to try and be on the safe side.
Though I guess in the short term this could lead to worsening of the staffing issues (with people returning +ve LFTs who have no symptoms or ones which they don't think are covid) it will at least reduce transmission by getting these people out of the system.
I've said for months now that testing is the key to finding people who have the virus so they don't pass it on. Aside from vaccination, which is still very good at preventing severe illness, they are the two key weapons. Working from home helps reduce the requirement for testing (no point testing if you're not going out to work is there) but the remaining Plan B measures don't really do a lot IMO. If we must insist on masks, at least go for a suggestion these are ffp2/kn95 where possible.
---------- Post added at 21:47 ---------- Previous post was at 21:42 ----------
I notice Aus have kicked that anti-vaxxer out. Good on them.