Aircraft and theatres

I trust you all had a decent weekend and hope that many of you managed a visit to the pub. The pub, of course, is far, far more than just a sector of the entertainment industry – it is local democracy in evidence, a temple to free speech and expression, free from the constraints of remote censorship but subject always to peer evaluation. Drunk people may be incapable of maintaining social distancing, one police service senior manager opined, and undoubtedly for many who managed to get a leg over at the weekend there will be a degree of gratitude for this grievous failure. 

The question this morning is what is the difference between an aircraft and a theatre, in epidemic terms that is? Why is it OK to sit close to a group of people for several hours in an aircraft but not OK to do so in a theatre? I suspect there may be an answer in the air filtration and circulation systems, but it’s hardly convincing.

It seems we’ve found the path to living with Covid some months after other nations – testing, testing and testing. Sweatshops, meat plants, overcrowded housing and other risk environments will all incubate new outbreaks, but the swifter we detect and contain them, the more the rest of the economy can attempt to recover before the big dip hits.

One final tiny point is niggling at me. Is the imaginary line that separates the legal and administrative jurisdictions of Scotland and England a border or a boundary? I’m genuinely not sure.