UKC

Or something like that...

Yes good bit of public shaming there. How dare they stand outside in the sunshine and fresh air so that a long lensed shot has them all in frame at once!

"Too many people at Stanage today", says bloke who travelled to Stanage today.

Ah, I think that might be what you said...
...as they say to Assume is to make and Ass of U and Me. 

Brilliant!

There's no 'I' in 'team' but there is a 'U' in...   Ah no, second thoughts, maybe that's not quite called for.

You think this is OK then do you?

They don't appear to be in a large group of people, flaunting the recommendations designed to keep people safe, though do they.

We're all fooked, everyone seems to think they're invincible, for some reason.

Problem is most of those spreading it are invincible from the virus, but are also some of the most exposed to the economic consequences as increasing lockdown shafts the places where they work.  Again.  The latest ONS random sampling survey made it clear that the spread is driven by those in the 17-35 range.   (Screenshot of it below, now 10 days or probably > 1 doubling period out of date.)

I think now is not a good time to be flaunting guidance, or apologising for those doing it, or using social media to present absolutely crackpot theories to try and convince others that it’s all going to be fine.  

I also think that photo in the OP tells a very different story to the deliberately misrepresented beach photos with long lenses.

Flouting recommendations I think you mean, the only thing they're flaunting in that photo is their naked torsos.  It's always hard to say from photos like that whether people are appropriately distancing from one another isn't it, as with the long-lens beach photos we were seeing months ago I think it's quite likely that they're probably fine.  They're outdoors anyway, and it was a fairly breezy day.

Did you really mean your reply for me? I'm not looking to shame anyone though I think perhaps the OP was.  I was more pointing out a certain degree of hypocrisy, the same sort of thing we're all guilty of when we complain about getting stuck in the traffic when we drive to places - forgetting of course that when we drive to places we are traffic. 
(Also I loaned a bit of gear to the OP a few years ago and he never gave it back, so to be entirely honest I'm probably more inclined to have a pop at him than I otherwise would be.  Don't lend simondgee any gear folks.)

I was at Stanage briefly yesterday too, funnily enough.  It was as busy as I've ever seen it, one of those days when you look up at the pop end from the road and it has that 'disturbed ant's nest' quality to it, you can almost see people standing on each others' heads.  I got as far as meeting my friend at the Plantation car park, where we agreed that it was all a bit much, we kicked ourselves slightly that we really should have seen it coming given the forecast and wotnot and then we buggered off to go and play elsewhere.

If you wanted to take a photo of young people failing to do the social distancing thing, I think there would have been ample opportunity for that later on in the bars and restaurants of nearby Sheffield, the fleshpots of Ecclesall Rd for sure.  Even early on, let alone later in the evening when more drink had been taken.  We are indeed fooked, but I don't think a mad busy day at the crag has much to do with that really in the scheme of things.

But these are boulderers, trad climbers would never, ever over-populate a place /sarcasm

I don't think it matters, as the amount of fresh air you get from being outside makes transmission highly highly unlikely, even if they appear to be within 2 metres of each other momentarily (well - its hard to judge time frames, it being a photo and all).  People seem to have lost all sense of reason over real vs perceived risk, which is interesting considering how management of risk is part of our hobby.

And if I did, and I felt strongly enough about it (pick your battles and all that) I would say something at the time, rather than just take a photo and post it on UKC to feel smug. Although admittedly I don't know that the photographer didn't - but judging at the long range nature of the photo, I suspect they didn't.

You you think it matters, and if so why?

Worst economically impacted, yet least at risk, is it any surprise a lot of 17-34yo have said 'fe*k this' and just got on with things? I'm not condoning, simply trying to understand.

Has everyone forgotten about the lengthy arguments that were had back in March and April over whether the virus could be transmitted via touching holds? Doesn't really matter if they're more than 2m apart if they're queuing up for a send  

Most at risk of the economic impact should wake them up....but probably won't until they can't get a job or lose one they have. 

I feel sorry for the poor boulder....Must be able to see.your face in it nowadays. 

As someone in that demographic, entirely. I've lost my job after the second "once in a lifetime" recession in my (nearly 12 year long) adult life. As you point out, my age group is least at risk, and its easy to perceive that the restrictions are for the benefit of the older generations. If I put my cynical hat on it's easy to blame the older generations for the ridiculous housing market and climate change, and at a push even Brexit. As such its easy to feel little obligation to help them out by not passing CoViD onto them, when they've had their cake, eaten it and pulled up the drawbridge. 

I've lost my job, and still go climbing loads. Somehow I suspect my presence at crags will may very little difference to CoViD spread when contrasted with someone who gets the bus to work, spends 8 hours in a office, maybe goes to Pret for lunch, then goes to the pub for 5 hours after to get over it all. I very much doubt not going climbing will magic up a decent job for me to apply for. 

I think, after the deaths and long term illness, thats the next most sad outcome of this pandemic. Young people on average further screwed over in a society that is already working against their opportunities. It's hard to explain to kids in spreading this virus you are impacting the average economic future of your generation.

Back on the photograph, I know that space well and that's not just a long lens problem... some people are too close and it's unnecessary, as there is hardly a shortage of bouldering at Stanage. Yes the risks are lower than indoors but it sets a bad example.

https://elemental.medium.com/the-most-likely-way-youll-get-infected-with-co...

On Deepsoup's point going to Stanage isn't the issue here, its being closer than 2m to people outside your household for periods of time. Outdoor formite (surface) transmission seems to be low risk, very low with good hand hygene (just use alcohol gel when you take a break or eat).

There only seems to be 5 or 6 of them towards the foreground that aren't properly distanced.  The others are climbing, away from the main group, sitting down etc.

Is it so hard to believe that those 5 or 6 come from 1 or 2 households? If they are housemates, they might as well be sitting on each others faces for all the difference 2m will make.

but yes, burn them at the stake

Perhaps not unexpected but selfish.

Why should I condone behaviour that increases risk of infection, is likely to result in a tightening rather than loosening on restrictions and will lead to more deaths?

I don't have an issue with the sort of thing pictured in the op....the risk is clearly minimal.

More the groups of young getting pissed up and throwing all social distancing to the wind or numerous reports of house parties etc etc.

More worrying is, if the logbooks are anything to go by, no-one actually got up Deliverance. For shame. 

I do I'm afraid.

The risk of transmission may be lower than indoors but still exists. They don't need to sit so close together, they don't need to mingle. Just a little consideration could reduce the risks to zero.

Typical Deliverance session that

Socialising is a lot more important to kids than to grumpy old gits like me though.  Perhaps they understand that but just think it'll be dwarfed in the medium term by Brexit, which in turn will be dwarfed in the long term by climate change.  If so it would be hard to explain to kids why they're wrong about that, because they're probably not.

Is there any police drone footage of this horrendous occurrence?

The risk will never be zero, even with a vaccine, people will die from now to eternity from coronavirus, the same way they do of other diseases / illnesses. The question we have to ask ourselves as a society is do we want to live in a world where it is acceptable to try and shame people for simply enjoying life.

Well as long as you don't think so, eh! never mind any science or epidemiology.

How do you know they felt smug, that's your interpretation / feelings, only.

What do you think would have been the response if they'd said something?

It matters because they are obviously not 2m away from each other, and I doubt very much they're from only two households.

It matters because spreading the virus kills people, maybe not the people in the photo, but their parents and grandparents. Being young also, doesn't make you immune from the other effects of the virus, like lung damage and other organ damage.

The question might well be, "do we not take sensible precautions to help out the more vulnerable in society, in favour of doing what WE want to do?"

Sure but that wasnt the tone of the original post was it...

It also matters, because being young, they have more of a chance of being asymptomatic, meaning they'll have more chance or spreading the disease around without knowing they are doing it, infecting more and more people as they each do their bit in spreading it.

Obviously, there are worse people doing worse stuff but this doesn't excuse ignoring recommendations or simply "thinking" about you own actions and considering possible outcomes from such actions.

Like drink driving having a pint over the limit isn't an excuse because someone else has three over.

It doesn't really matter what the tone of the OP was, it's what's happening that's the issue, and letting people do what they want to simply enjoy their lives, might well be deriving others of theirs.

My aunt is a nurse, she's had to tell people they can't see their loved ones before they die, because of covid, imagine how much fun that is.

Climbers are by their very nature immune, they must be, all the fuss over holds and chalk, laughable "scientific" papers to back up their claims. 

All the while the elephant in the room is ignored and shared ropes and gear are slabbered all over. 

I must ask Boris to add fingerboarding to the list of virus preventer, along with cash, hunting and going for a kebab an hour early. 

Those people were taking an unnecessary risk which ultimately could kill others.

So yes, behaviour like that needs to be criticised.

Enjoying LIFE as opposed to the opposite, you mean ?

I'm not sure we do, no. I'm not sure that, as a society, we can function long term on this basis. What we need to do is to offer the more vulnerable the means to protect themselves while also pressing the point that it is their responsibility to do so.

I was at Plantation yesterday (climbed a few things between Paradise Wall & Wall End Slab) and it didn't seem busy at all. There was loads of room in the carpark when we got there (~10:30am) and still when we got back (~6pm). I didn't see any massive groups of boulderers at all. I'm not saying there weren't groups there but people were certainly not all on top of each other. 

Of course they are and as one of my mates suggests, the virus is all made up, because he doesn't know anyone that's had it, so how can it be contagious or dangerous.

My other mates dad died of it, but mate No.1 also suggests they were saying anyone who died at the time was a Covid death, and nobody checked!

Mate #1 wouldn't be a mate of mine for long.

Actually the science here has a reasonably large consensus that outdoors the fresh air quickly dilutes the amount of virus to insignificant amounts very quickly and UV has a time constant of about 10mins as far as denaturing virus particles. May I suggest you familiarise yourself with some of the literature including the effect of UV on the virus and the ratio of spreading outdoors vs indoors (a chinese study found the ratio to be over 1:1000, and the 1 case was a face to face conversation).

2m is an arbitrary distance, hence different values in different countries - its not a binary on off thing, risk is a function of distance x time and even that is an oversimplification.

If Mate #1 and Mate #2 are in the same group of mates, I can certainly envisage some friction.

Whilst I'm confident that outdoor transmission is a much lower risk, I'm not sure that UV wavelengths found in sunlight are as efficacious as you suggest; I think it requires shorter wavelength, artificial UV sources. If you can point to some of the literature you think is available, that would be helpful. My quick search backs up my understanding that UVA and UVB, found in sunlight, are not effective, and it is only UVC, handily filtered by the atmosphere, that can be used for disinfection.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200327-can-you-kill-coronavirus-with-u...

The study was done with UVC, but the authors then calculated how long a suitable dose of sunlight would take to do the job.

They speculate that 30mins of sunlight at a latitude like London would kill 90% of the virus, leading to a time constant of 13 minutes. Moscow needs 33mins of sunlight for 90% leading to a time constant of 14 minutes.  Stanage is about halfway North between the 2, so the time constant will be around the same.  That is during the solstice so mid September it will be longer.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/php.13293

"Lively" discussions, sometimes yes. They're both good lads and would do anything for you if ever you needed help they'd both do all they could to help you, strangely Mate No.1 was very anti-mingling when CV first reared it's ugly head. It's just an example of how some people think, and then convince themselves every thing is OK, or not what the facts demonstrate.

It's very strange but it's also quite nice to have other opinions to my own, frustrating but interesting all the same.

Then factor in a little thing called "clouds" and "winter solstice" and you start to get to times of way more than an hour.

The key point to me being that the time between one person exhaling droplets and another inhaling them is way less than 13 minutes - especially outside.  What the right kind of UV does is kill stuff on surfaces reducing exhalate>surface>surface touch>face touch transmission.  Under any sort of natural or eye-save UV irradiation, it makes bugger all difference to person/person transmission through respiratory droplets or close physical contact. 

Speculate, is a nice word. What happens when it's cloudy?

This amount is not well established for coronaviruses, but it has been reported that nasal secretions contain up to 107 infectious influenza viral particles per ml (10), from which aerosolized droplets generated by coughing, sneezing and talking can contain several hundred infectious virions (11). These micro droplets can reach distances of 12.5 meters (over 40 feet, (12)).

12.5m, funny how you cherry picked the details you quoted.

Unlike people spouting off on the internet, scientists normally take a measured approach with their language.  It means they have not gone and actually tested at these various locations but use their data and modelling to predict.

When it is cloudy there is less UV, but by looking at the photo that kicked the thread off, the sun seemed to be out...

I made no reference to distance in my reply to captain paranoia, as he was asking about the type of UV ray. Of course a sneeze can project droplets a long way.

Yes well the photo was taken on a sunny day with winter solstice being 3 months in the future.

If one person is breathing in another person's exhaled air the location of where they are is irrelevant, but you have to get very close whilst facing each other to do that outside as any sort of air current quickly blows away and dilutes the air. To be slightly un-polite, having your mate fart in close proximity is a very different experience indoors to out and provides a reasonable demonstration to the importance air currents, or lack thereof, play in how much of someone elses air you breathe in.

My point remains that the person-person time for a droplet is way less than 13 minutes if transmission occurs in close contact (and settling or evaporation will limit times much beyond that anyhow), so UV irradiation at typical natural levels is irrelevant to the transmission risk by droplets, which seems to be the predominant method.  So your comment on UV is irrelevant.

To me, the risk comes down to dilution of droplets by diffusion and their removal by wind.  If the wind is strictly planar and not driving turbulent mixing with height, it only reduces transmission risk if you're not down wind of others.  Turbulent mixing when the wind is more than a gentle breeze will dilute it into the third dimension faster than diffusion.  I don't know about Stanage, but the last few days here have been really quite still.  So, the main difference then between indoors and outdoors is access to the third dimension for diffusive dilution away from point sources.  Given the droplet size, that will help.

My bigger concern would be lift sharing to/from the crag.

Ahh, good old prediction using modelling.  Many scientists spout off that such things aren't worth the paper they're written on until validated by experiment, the touchstone of actual science.  I would argue that lot of our current mess traces back to silly scientists getting carried away with hubris at a clever model and not noticing that the number of free parameters (implicit and explicit) in their model exceeded the number of data points they were fitting to...

I was there in the same area on Saturday and it was quite noisy down at the boulder where the photograph was taken. 

I don’t know about the social distancing - I only noted the group as I was feeling quite jealous as I huffed my way up a chimney in the blazing sun! 
 

Funny how it changes from day to day isn't it.  I've occasionally been there on days when you'd have expected it to be rammed, bank holidays and such, and it was actually very quiet.  Perhaps because everybody else thought it would be rammed as well and went somewhere else, a sort of crowd inversion with the Pop End empty and the hordes descending on Agden Rocher instead.

At noon on Saturday the plantation car park was absolutely rammed solid and people at the Pop End had parked on the verges (and in the passing places) so far down the road that it was actually a bit difficult and frustrating trying to drive by.  As much as anything I bailed because I didn't want to contribute to the parking chaos by leaving my van there as because I was concerned about overcrowding at the crag.

The parking issues could be covid related. People will be avoiding car sharing. 

Living near stanage and frequently cycling there a large number of the cars are from non normal visitors out for a quick Instagram selfie and 20min walk not there for climbing.

Knowing how stingy and impecunious climbers are they may all be from the same household. There's only about 16 of them after all.

How dare they. 

I was there early on Sunday and was amazed how many other climbers were there! Most of the other people at Popular End parking at about 9 am seemed to be climbers like us.

Did you read you article you posted, 12.5m?

You just posted to my post saying "I made no reference to distance in my reply to captain paranoia, as he was asking about the type of UV ray. Of course a sneeze can project droplets a long way."

And then you post this!!