Quote Originally Posted by CCFCC3PO View Post
When numbers of new cases and numbers in intensive care (currently 1600) start falling, they will relax the restrictions a little.

The key thing is how quickly the number of new cases drops once we reach the peak.

Once that drops, they will allow kids back to school (maybe with monitoring of their temperature). After a few weeks of that, people will be allowed to travel back to work, maybe shops will reopen, but with a maximum number of people allowed.

The vulnerable are only on week 2 of a 12 week lockdown, so that gives you an idea of the timeline. Ideally, they will want kids in school before removing restrictions on the vulnerable.

However, if people continue flouting the rules, then this will go on a lot longer. Mainly because we can't be trusted to follow guidelines.
But how (and this question is aimed at everybody not just you) does slowly relaxing the rules not mean a slow build up of patients again? So if we slowly relax the rules and in 8 months it's more or less back to normal then why doesn't the virus spread like wildfire again in 8 months? There's no vaccine, nothing's really changed, nowhere near enough people will have had it for effective herd immunity (assuming that 80% of the population won't have had it by then)

So how do we get back to normal before a vaccine arrives? What am I missing?