"Never in a million years did I dream that Boris would take our freedom away from us and cause so much suffering to so many millions of people" - I'd guess he was/is trying to stop your elderly frail old mum from finishing up on a stretcher in a corridor in a hospital where the care system that has collapsed as happened in N Italy with no chance of treatment....................

Indeed. The lock down is not about individuals but the collective health of all. My work now involves me with the UK funeral trade. You do not want to know about the back log in funeral premises, shortage of coffins and more.

As Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS [a British statistician and Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge who specialises in medical matters] discussed on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago: If the virus was allowed to just let rip, it would be expected to kill some 600,000 people. That is almost the number of deaths in the UK in a typical year. No one wants to see a whole extra year's worth of deaths occur in the space of a few months. Hence lock down.

Do you think he did it just to be awkward?

What do you think he should be doing instead?

No one is enjoying it, least of all the people fighting for their lives in hospital.

During this remarkable time, my colleagues and I have allowed some threads to have a broader range of views than normal. However, there are plenty of threads for specific opinions about CV19. So let's narrow this one back down again a bit.

I certainly welcome any direct experience that folks have of 'paxing' at the moment - from anywhere in the world for domestic or international - but the future is all guesswork.

I read an article a couple of days back about Hong Kong airport testing a new cabin, rather like a large telephone box/smoker's cabin where the passenger walks in and within the closed atmosphere is sanitised of all external bacteria and virus'. This doesn't seem to have any effect on internal maladies, but by wearing a mask the passenger would be 'clean' for the pre-flight and flight segments of travel..This, or similar might make the risk lower and therefore allow somewhat normal seating configurations on aircraft and so on