Pro triathlete and Ironman champ Joe Skipper turns Deliveroo cyclist

the risks associated with a single 200mile solo bike ride were minimal, but if he had an issue technical/accident or medical (or just stopped somewhere to purchase food/drink) whilst 100 miles from home might have made  contact with others. Multiply that risk by every pro rider and weekend warrior who may do similar it could have caused spread of the virus and outbreaks in other regions. It would seem reasonable to minimise this risk by following the general advice at the time to keep your excercise local. Especially at the start of the pandemic when the spread and risk were little understood. I do know "fit" people who suffered detrimental health impacts from the virus, but just because someone is "fat" or old doesn't mean their lives are worth any less.

Yep, it did come across as "I can do this so will," when it should have been "I can do this but should I?" Very "me me me" attitude (especially posting and bragging) when it should have been more community focused at the time. 

What nonsense. And none of this nonsense made any difference to the spread of covid. As evidenced by there being no reliably discernible difference in outcomes between high restriction countries/regions and low restriction ones.

The best defence against covid is exercise, as part of a healthy lifestyle, and stopping people from engaging in the exercise they enjoyed most was unadulterated idiocy - particularly when it was outdoor exercise.

To worry about a cyclist - out keeping themselves fit and healthy - having a **rare** mechanical and having to phone a relative or a taxi driver - the former who they will see _anyway_, and the latter who is seeing lots of different people daily _anyway_ as part of their job, as being in any way relevant to covid spread was _madness_.

Even *IF* cyclists with rare mechanicals HAD been some kind of risk for covid spread, this risk would have been MORE than offset by the health benefits of having more people out cycling.

Idiocy.

Well said Paul, and you are of course perfectly correct. Just be careful what you write here - people were banned from Road.cc, or labelled as "conspiracy theorists", "far-right nutters", or "anti-vaxxers" for stating the same in the past.

The very same people arguing for draconian lockdowns in the UK now appear to be cheering on the anti-lockdown protesters in China as "freedom fighters". Funny old world huh?

Rakia wrote:

The very same people arguing for draconian lockdowns in the UK now appear to be cheering on the anti-lockdown protesters in China as "freedom fighters". Funny old world huh?

It's mind-boggling to have to listen today to all these people - some ministers in governments - go on about supporting right-to-protest of Chinese citizens against 0covid policies there, when the same people were cheering (or even ordered) the police cracking the heads of people protesting similar policies here over last few years.

The rank hypocrisy.

I wouldn't disagree with hypocrisy angle.

Thing is though... * that comparison is very easily overdone.  In China you don't even need to "protest" in a sense we'd understand.  Go and hold up a blank piece of paper on the street on a school night **, or even make mention of any number of factual (even historical) things and you're not just "in trouble".  It may lead to the rest of your life being even more radically circumscribed than it was already.  Passing through Chinese detention centres may leave you thinking longingly of the prospect of e.g. being deported to Rwanda.

* Don't agree with "similar policies" - the difference in degree is massive - but anyone can read about that.  Better not dwell on Covid here anyway as some folks have ... strongly held views.

** Not talking about trolling the police and them just looking foolish at a specific event either although police overreach is never a good look...

Rakia wrote:

Well said Paul, and you are of course perfectly correct. Just be careful what you write here - people were banned from Road.cc, or labelled as "conspiracy theorists", "far-right nutters", or "anti-vaxxers" for stating the same in the past.

The very same people arguing for draconian lockdowns in the UK now appear to be cheering on the anti-lockdown protesters in China as "freedom fighters". Funny old world huh?

Got to hand it to you, given that you didn't live in the UK until a few weeks ago - you must've spent ages on researching the road.cc bans. Unless you have personal experience of it?

Paul J wrote:

What nonsense. And none of this nonsense made any difference to the spread of covid. As evidenced by there being no reliably discernible difference in outcomes between high restriction countries/regions and low restriction ones. The best defence against covid is exercise, as part of a healthy lifestyle, and stopping people from engaging in the exercise they enjoyed most was unadulterated idiocy - particularly when it was outdoor exercise. To worry about a cyclist - out keeping themselves fit and healthy - having a **rare** mechanical and having to phone a relative or a taxi driver - the former who they will see _anyway_, the latter who is seeing people _anyway_ as being in any way relevant was _madness_. Even *IF* cyclists with rare mechanicals HAD been some kind of risk for covid spread, this risk would have been MORE than offset by the health benefits of having more people out cycling. Idiocy.

Additionally, there doesn't seem to be the same scrutiny of motorists who can equally suffer from a mechanical failure and have to rely on others to get them back home.

Deeferdonk wrote:

the risks associated with a single 200mile solo bike ride were minimal, but if he had an issue technical/accident or medical (or just stopped somewhere to purchase food/drink) whilst 100 miles from home might have made  contact with others. Multiply that risk by every pro rider and weekend warrior who may do similar it could have caused spread of the virus and outbreaks in other regions. It would seem reasonable to minimise this risk by following the general advice at the time to keep your excercise local. Especially at the start of the pandemic when the spread and risk were little understood. I do know "fit" people who suffered detrimental health impacts from the virus, but just because someone is "fat" or old doesn't mean their lives are worth any less.

How often do you have a mechanical or crash severe enough that you require outside assistance? How many people would have felt well enough to cycle and also have COVID seriously enough to be infectious? And even if someone who was infectious needed to be picked up in a car, the risk was manageable through the simple act of opening windows. I would hazard a guess that the number of people who caught covid from a random cyclist is approximately zero.

AidanR wrote:

How often do you have a mechanical or crash severe enough that you require outside assistance? How many people would have felt well enough to cycle and also have COVID seriously enough to be infectious? And even if someone who was infectious needed to be picked up in a car, the risk was manageable through the simple act of opening windows. I would hazard a guess that the number of people who caught covid from a random cyclist is approximately zero.

I would go further and state that there are exactly zero people that have caught covid from a passing cyclist (or a rescued previously-cycling-before-mechanical-issue cyclist).

hawkinspeter wrote:

I would go further and state that there are exactly zero people that have caught covid from a passing cyclist

I think you'll find it was PROVED by EXPERTS that cyclists were definitely the worst spreaders of Covid with a personal viral cloud about the size of the Chernobyl fallout. It has to be true because it was in the Daily Mail.

AidanR wrote:

How often do you have a mechanical or crash severe enough that you require outside assistance? How many people would have felt well enough to cycle and also have COVID seriously enough to be infectious? And even if someone who was infectious needed to be picked up in a car, the risk was manageable through the simple act of opening windows. I would hazard a guess that the number of people who caught covid from a random cyclist is approximately zero.

I agree. There was a great deal of hysteria, exacerbated by some of the things said by politicians, who we later found out were partying, making £millions on shady PPE deals and taking unnecessary trips to Barnard Castle and elsewhere. Their shameless hypocrisy has left a bitter taste that will linger for a very long time.

During the lockdowns I was commuting every working day, mostly by bike. I didn't do any long rides in the first lockdown simply because none of others in my household could drive and I thought it was sensible to not risk being stranded many miles from home and having to knock on someone's door to ask for help.

During one ride I stopped to check on a chap at the roadside who'd had a puncture. He was fine, as he had already phoned his wife to come and get him. I'd have given him a tube or mended the puncture if he needed it.

[/quote] How often do you have a mechanical or crash severe enough that you require outside assistance? /quote]

Very rarely if at all, but over any given weekend nationwide there is probably a significant number of people who do - even though that is a very small percentage of people out riding their bikes.

Deeferdonk wrote:

 

How often do you have a mechanical or crash severe enough that you require outside assistance? /quote]

You're talking maybe 1 in 1000 rides, out of a minority of the population. To think this could in any way have had a bearing on covid spread is just not rational.

Very rarely if at all, but over any given weekend nationwide there is probably a significant number of people who do - even though that is a very small percentage of people out riding their bikes.

[/quote]

It depends how you look at probabilities & risk management, past successful avoidance of mechanicals does not guarantee future avoidance.

I certainly rode with that in mind in terms of distance I rode from home.

Quite, he should have stayed at home and sat in his sofa instead, perhaps gone to the off licence for some beer and fags to help with the boredom, since that was deemed essential shopping.

Surely this would be less risk

wycombewheeler wrote:

Quite, he should have stayed at home and sat in his sofa instead, perhaps gone to the off licence for some beer and fags to help with the boredom, since that was deemed essential shopping.Surely this would be less risk

But thats not what i said, I went out and cycled everyday at the start of lockdown - just kept it local as the advice (and arguably common sense) said. Actually got alot more excercise than normal. 

Looking at the replies to my post it appears people have a very different recollection or approach to the early lockdown as myself.

Watching the news, hearing about regional outbreaks and death figures. Being worried sick about my elderly parents and disabled relatives who i couldn't even visit in case i delivered them the virus that would kill them. 

Due to the extra free time and fair weather i went outside and excercised most days, with local rides or jogs within 10 miles of my house, i knew i could walk home if there were any issues.

I could have used the spare time to do some extra long audax distances, but travelling across different regions at the start of a little understood pandemic for recreation just wouldn't cross my mind as being a sensible idea, when we'd all been asked to limit our movements for the sake of our vulnerable fellow citizens and to stop our health service from being overwhelmed. Yeah, i could reason that the chance of a single cyclist being typhoid mary might be low, but I'm part of a community and I thought we were coming together as a population to tackle this threat.

Obviously other people seem to have viewed this more cynically and took it less seriously than myself, including the prime minister and (hopefully) to a lesser degree some of the posters here.

Maybe that makes me a mug. But at least  it definitely doesn't make me a tory. Not all my family and friends made it through the pandemic, but at least i can hold to the fact that to the best of my ability i didn't do anything to spread the virus.

If your feelings on this differ, I understand and please don't take this as an attack.

Deeferdonk wrote:

Obviously other people seem to have viewed this more cynically and took it less seriously than myself, including the prime minister and (hopefully) to a lesser degree some of the posters here.

I actually stuck to the regulations - which in my country meant being confined to 2km and then 5km from home. Meaning I had nothing but 1 loop around the country lanes behind my town and through our town. There's only so times you can go around the same 5k loop of lanes and suburban road before you start to go mad.

What really got to me though was that the people who were the most preachy and holier-than-thou about the regulations on social media gave out shit to me for questioning the utility of these _stupid_ and pointless regulations to stop a cyclist just having a long cycle on quiet roads - with smears about being "right wing" and wanting to kill grannies. And then these *same people* would then later post photos of themselves to facebook breaching the regulations far more egregiously (e.g., in one case, by having builders over to their house for a month - when building work was generally meant to have been stopped, other than some exceptions that didn't apply to them).

And of course, there were many many other examples of rank hypocrisy by the holier-than-thou covid-evangicals, and the decision makers, in every country.

We, the little people, were not allowed to make common-sense risk-benefit judgements for ourselves. We were tied up with *criminal* regulations, too often enforced by power-tripping police. And some people were _arrested_ for breaching them - including for sitting in parks, or for swimming in the ocean, off empty beaches in the winter!

While the covid-gelicals and politicians, of course, quite happily were able to make such value judgements for themselves and their situation.

The stinking hypocrisy of these ignorant people.

Never EVER again must this happen. Never ever again must public-health advice be allowed to metastasize into petty, over-bearing, ridiculous micro-management of our lives by criminal regulation.

(And to re-iterate, there has been no reliably discernible difference in covid outcomes in reasonably proximate regions with high or low levels of these criminal public health regulations, anywhere - it was all a nonsensical act of great self-harm).

Oh, and Mr Barnard Castle must be one of the most disgusting examples of that hypocrisy. For he was /both/ a covid-gelical (by his own account) AND of great influence on the decisions to bring in those regulations.

The man should be strung up (in a non-deadly way) somewhere public, with ample stocks of rotten fruit and veg provided nearby for the public to be able to express their feelings for him to him.

You better not look at the mental health system then.  There's a nice intersection of a genuine complex issue, the law and large bureacracies e.g. the criminal justice system, medical system, social care...

From the little I understand the key balancing act was "how not to fill up our hospitals so the healthcare system breaks down" / "lose enough workers through (non-fatal) illness at once so that other crucial things stop working" and "better not let too many of the vulnerable die as the relatives will complain" against "but my children's education" / "but my business" / "but I want to party / ain't gonna wear no stupid mask - so screw you".

Massive government corruption (procurement) plus failure to "lead by example" (parties, Dominic C / Boris J / Catherine Calderwood) and - with hindsight - plenty of cock-up / flip-flopping.  Some of that could have been avoided I guess.

Overall it seems we came out rather average (better stats than e.g. US, less "micromanagement of people's lives" and economic damage than some more "lockdown-happy" places).

Multi-variate analyses of identifiable variables against covid outcomes suggest things like age-of-population (obvious) and markers for underlying health of nation and access to quality health-care, along with things like UV index, explain much of the variance in covid outcomes. E.g., the worse the prior underlying health, the worse the covid outcomes.

The USA has quite poor underlying health, for a developed nation, and also poor access to health-care for a large chunk.

Paul J wrote:

... along with things like UV index...

I shouldn't ... but do you mean UV externally or where the sun doesn't shine?

I thought one of the characteristics of this particular virus was that it wasn't stable on the outside for very long and primarily spread via droplet / aerosol / direct human contact (so "where people mix" basically)?

Anyway there are far more qualified / knowledgeable people on here than me so best leave it there!

UV index as in how much sunshine there is outside. That may translate to behavioural factors, such as propensity to stay outside - which itself may depend on latitude and region (in some places, people go outside when it's sunny; in others they may be more likely to go stay indoors). Other possible reasons UV could affect things are effects on human immune function from sunlight exposure, and the more obvious direct effects of UV on quickly breaking down virions.

Underlying health and quality of health care are some of the major factors that 'explain' variances though.

Very much 'does'. His Strava posts on deliveroo-ing are informative, amusing and rambling. Worth a follow.