In news that probably isn’t going to surprise anyone considering how this year has been going so far, it’s looking like tougher lockdown restrictions are going to be imposed on the nation as early as this weekend.

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The new measures that are being considered by those in power at Whitehall include: banning two people from meeting up outdoors and exercising; closing further businesses such as estate agents, click and collect retail and outdoor markets; making face masks mandatory outside and extending the two metre social distancing rule to three metres. I suppose some of those ideas might be useful – if somewhat annoying for the general public and businesses – but they don’t strike me as making too much of difference here as they all seem kinda minuscule in the grand scheme of thins?

(As an aside here, the weirdest part of all this increased measures has to be supermarkets saying they will ban customers not wearing masks? This has to be such a minority as every time I go to the supermarket or in any store really everyone is wearing a mask? Seems pretty universal even if everyone does hate it.)

Anyway, the official reason for this would be (once again) that the public aren’t following the rules and are still contributing to the spread of the virus as figures continue to go up. Nothing like the government to blame the public and never admitting doing anything wrong themselves in their guidance is it? Wouldn’t have anything to do with the catastrophic advice over Christmas would it?

A source in Whitehall says that the current compliance data is ‘mixed’ and that they should have a better idea of its accuracy by the weekend and how this will affect restrictions: However, Dr Daisy Fancourt, from UCL’s Institute of Epidemiology & Health, told BBC Breakfast that she was struck by how good compliance was at the moment:

We found that compliance has been improving month on month, and week on week, and actually it’s now back to the same levels that it was last May, so whilst we hear the stories of rule-breakers, actually the majority of the population are really playing their part at the moment.

Only a very, very tiny percentage of people are flouting the rules and doing things like holding house parties.

Well that’s positive isn’t it? Sadly though, it wouldn’t really be like this government to look at the data and opinions provided by actual scientists and seem like they’re instead more likely to instead use one single video of a house party posted on social media as their basis for implementing new rules, so expect to see them all of these new measures coming in this weekend. You can almost set your watch by it.

For more of the same, check out this woman who walked her husband on a leash around Quebec to get around lockdown restrictions. Didn’t work out for her though sadly.