Half-marathon goes ahead in Britain despite coronavirus pandemic

Thousands of runners participated in a half-marathon in Bath, England this weekend despite warnings from public health experts that it could expose runners to the novel coronavirus. Organizers of the event, which usually attracts crowds of more than 10,000, refused to cancel it despite hundreds of cases in the U.K. and a growing tally of the dead.

Bath's MP Wera Hobhouse was among thousands condemning the decision to go ahead.

She called for the event to be cancelled saying protecting "the most vulnerable in our city from a further spread of the infection must be the priority". On the Bath half marathon's Facebook page some 1,800 people left comments, with a large number against the decision to go ahead.

The newspapers over in the UK are presenting the pandemic as if it were The Blitz, an opportunity to show Wartime Spirit and to enact War Measures and indulge the immortal British boomer fantasy that life there was never better than when the Germans were making the rubble bounce.

So we end up with 10,000 people in a slow-moving crowd spending hours grinding their bodies to gasping exhaustion during a viral pandemic, all to show 2019-nCoV What For. Read the rest