The two travel related factors that I spotted were
- Red List countries / managed isolation - the PM acknowledged that this would be reviewed, given that community transmission is happening anyway
- The self isolation requirement for those who have come into contact with Omicron and who are vaccinated will be changed to allow people to take daily tests instead of needing to isolate - clearly a bit of risk for those travelling at the moment.

plus confirmation that Lateral Flows are picking up Omicron cases.

In response to a question about the mandatory hotel quarentine requirement for red list countries, the PM replied:

" …given the way omicron is now seeded around the world and not just in red-listed countries..I think we will be looking at the red list and the way that we do it. But it’s been very important in the immediate…response to omicron to have very tough border measures to slow the arrival of the variant in this country

Well, unfortunately the government has a track record of making a law then pushing the enforcement onto organisations without any thought of the practicalities of doing so, so I’m skeptical about the implementation being smooth or considered.

Pubs will tell you a very different story about how difficult their lives became when they were required to process the Track & Trace requirements, for example.

fake news.
no masks in pubs and restaurants (no hospitality)
let’s see what happens with Covid passports in nightclubs most of them call themselves bars anyway, I guess ill Find out next weekend.

I’m used to it from Greece so i really don’t care, it’s pointless bureaucracy though given the uk vaccine rate, I guess the govt has to be seen to be doing something.

So for me day to day nothing has changed, it’s mainly a psychological effect meaning some will be less inclined to go out and the economy will suffer meaning good luck to any tax decreases !

It’s certainly going to keep a lot of Leadership teams of major sports clubs awake at night trying to figure out how to implement checks. 50,000+ trying to get into a stadium 1 or so hour before kick offs having to be checked will be chaos. I can’t see tech solving this problem as the work/implementation time is far too short. You could up the staff count but the training involved won’t be valuable enough to prevent any outbreaks or people evading the checks.

I had to do it for Wimbledon and Wembley Euro finals basically they had marshalls do it at the turnstile but they took a 5 second glance

ppl seem to forget we had vaccine passports this summer.

im sure the media will be calling for stricter measures now but no matter what I see ppl spending Christmas with family Boris has no credibility to tell ppl not to mix with family it simply wont happen

Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think events prior to today were required to check covid passes. Where as today’s announcement…

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/covid-19...at-has-changed

I’m not commenting on news stories about Christmas parties and possible events from a year ago. Emotions aside it’s irrelevant to these new guidelines.

I’m at an event on Dec 19th (10k + crowd), I’ll report back.

yeah let’s see how it works in practice it’s going to
be funny how my nightclub bouncers deal with it

Omywhatacon. Two legs good, four legs bad. There's not one person that can point to any meaningful first world data that omicron is worth any of this. For sure there are people that cannot accept any risk in their lives and seem to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about the NHS being overwhelmed whne they never gave it more than a passing thought every Christmas when it was always overwhelmed. Crikey, even the chief doom and gloom merchant Fauci even said that it might not be more than a bad cold. We've all been had.

I’d say there’s a world of difference between a tennis crowd filtering in over several hours, where it’s likely possible to close off all approach roads, and many football grounds which are hemmed in and there’s a real risk of overcrowding.

When attendances were limited to 2,000 during the first release from lockdown, my own Club had a name check vs ticket and a quick temperature check. They used the largest forecourt area they had, flooded the area with stewards and a queue barrier system, plus encouraged people to arrive early - and even then it was a PITA. It simply wouldn’t be possible to scale that up with a capacity crowd of 13x that number arriving over a much shorter timescale with more confined surroundings in other stands.

There are many professional clubs in this country where this legislation would apply who operate with less space around turnstiles and less resources. This is a recipe for disaster.

If the goal is to reduced infection it’s rather pointless as well. The main reason for using them is as a lever to encourage more vaccine take up. There is little if any evidence it reduces infection.

Use was reviewed in Scotland and at the end of the 80 odd page document they concluded there was no significant evidence it reduced cases.

Reading the bit about temperature checks made me chuckle slightly. Attending DAM Health for a day 2 PCR test today, the first few people who walked in were temp checked (still don't see the point of it) but then after that no one.

The UKHSA disagrees with you, as well as the WHO. Their latest Risk Assessment of the UKHSA has a Red on immune evasion with moderate evidence. Since it seems a third dose restore protection against Omicron any weeks where we can delay more infections give us time to put boosters in arms. As for the WHO, they explicitly say to act now:

https://twitter.com/kakape/status/1468627967786074123?s=20

As for the NHS being the same each Winter, you might want to pull yearly reports of bed occupied vs staff attendances to check out the major difference compared to last winter. Saying this winter is the same as all Winter shows blatant ignorance of the current situation.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FGG2oLCW...pg&name=medium

"however there is as yet no evidence of transmissibility...."

"There are insufficient data to make any assessment..."

""There are insufficient data to assess severity..."

As I was saying.

Hospitals admissions and deaths "from Covid" were 10x current levels around a year ago, pre-vaccines. and the NHS coped. Current infection levels and the "threat" of Omicrom do not in any way justify further restrictions.

And this is before we get into the continual over-stating of Covid-stats - eg the decent % of people in hospital with Covid who were admitted with something else, caught Covid in hospital, and are now considered a Covid admission.

The NHS is NOT on its knees and there is no prospect of this being the case.