Glyndebourne will play full from next week
NewsMessage from the meadows:
Following the government announcement that social distancing restrictions will be lifted on 19 July, Glyndebourne has confirmed that it will release more tickets to Glyndebourne Festival performances after that date. Audiences were previously capped at 50% of capacity.
All seats in the opera house’s 1,200-capacity auditorium will now be available for performances between 19 July and 29 August, with additional tickets to Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Verdi’s Luisa Miller, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and three concerts by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
19th of July may be great news for theatres, musicians & performers from a financial point of view, but catastrophic from a public health point of view.
No mask mandate & no vaccine passports in a full capacity theatre / concert hall when the pandemic is raging is the perfect recipe for mass infection!
I for one won’t be going to any concerts or operas for the foreseeable future & wish brave audience members the best of luck as the government throws unvaccinated children & vulnerable people under the bus for the sake of the economy and to build up herd immunity for the winter.
Have you ever heard of personal responsibility – that it is people’s responsibility to get vaccinated and that if they are vulnerable, they should not attend such events, which, btw, are not compulsory. But, of course, people like you always abdicate personal responsibility and say it’s the government’s fault.
To emulate your flippant tone:
Have you ever heard of the epidemiological principle of vaccination?
Ok, let’s get down to numbers.
The current estimate for the Delta variant, now dominant in Europe, is that one infected person will, on average, infect six (in figures: 6) other people if left unchecked.
This explains the exponential growth of infection numbers seen in the UK, Spain, now in the Netherlands, and soon elsewhere. Explosive.
But we have vaccination, don’t we?
Assuming, optimistically, a 90% protective effect of mRNA vaccinations against the Delta variant, what proportion of the population needs to be fully vaccinated in order to stop the spread of the virus?
Answer: roughly 89 to 97 percent of the population.
Taking the mean: 93 percent.
More than nine out of ten folks need to get both shots, ASAP, if the pandemic in its current form is to be stopped.
This is no longer a matter of individual responsibility. This is no longer discretionary.
It has become a large-scale public health emergency. Emergency rules must apply.
Your numbers on the R-value of the delta variant are…bollocks. The R is about 3 and not about 6. Only about 70 percent of people need to be vaccinated (or to recover from catching Covid). Bluntly, the public health emergency is largely over.
And the virus will never be eliminated. We are going to have to learn to live with it and accept that from time-to-time some people will catch it (almost all of whom will be no more than mildly ill, if that).
Covid is spreading rapidly among unvaccinated children. It’s very serious. They get it from other kids at summer schools and camps and bring it home to their siblings, parents or other adults at home. The vaccinated adults are getting sick too, although the vaccinations seem to minimize severity and hospitalizations. But children under 12 cannot yet get the shots. https://www.newsweek.com/mississippi-official-urges-caution-10-children-put-life-support-delta-variant-1609380
Children under 12 have some a good immune response that it really doesn’t matter that they are not vaccinated. It is the old and poorly who need to get vaccinated.
I think that many of those going will probably opt to still wear masks as we have been advised to do!
[for the sake of the economy]
The economy, too, is actually a matter of life and death for working people. Hard to imagine, I know.
“Glyndebourne is strongly encouraging the continued use of face coverings in the auditorium, in line with the theatre industry’s ‘See it safely’ guidance.” So, not compulsory then! What a relief.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Social Care has just declared Brighton and Hove (about 20 minute drive away) “an enhanced response area following an alarming rise in Covid cases” and advises against travel into and out of the area.This does not feel like the right time to pack concert halls full again, especially without mask mandates. And why is the government so opposed to using vaccine passes?