Cinemas, restaurants and shopping centres too surely.

Pubs

lets hope there's plenty of runs

It means 1984 will soon be a reality if the scaremongering continues Good for the toilet paper biz alteast.

Or France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, USA, China etc, etc
Because people are so mobile these days, it is just a matter of time before the UK is something close to Italy, in respect of the virus.
Even though there would have been massive resistance, the travel bans should have been in place already.

It looks nailed on that sporting events will be hit and the "closed door" option will probably be the only way to have games going ahead and even that may not be possible.

Everything that I've seen and read, suggests that we may be in a similar position in the next couple of weeks.

Then, it will be a case of waiting to see just how long it takes for things to peak and then start to improve.
It could be a few weeks but, more likely to be a few months.

In the grand scheme of things RL and sport in general aren't important and we will just have to see how the situation develops.

Your comparison to Italy could well come back to haunt you though.
They may be close to the peak but, we have barely started the ascent.

Because it's been too early thus far - you don't manage the peak if you go all out too soon; ICU's end up full of people, then you have no facilities to deal with those cases that come later. As far as I understand it, the phased process is about flattening the peak, and enabling the health system to deal with cases in a gradual way, rather than all at once. There is also the social and economic impact to consider - for example, if you close schools and all the Dr's and Nurses suddenly have kids at home who need childcare, who staffs the wards?

I suspect that after today's COBRA meeting, we'll be officially in phase 2 - Delay - which means you might get some of the things you want; school closures, cancelled events etc etc.

Agreed
The only aspect where we should have moved more quickly is on international travel.
There would have been huge implications in cost and the survival of the travel companies but, it seems crazy to allow people to travel into the affected areas and then have the difficulties in repatriation and isolation etc when they return.
I know this would be massively unpopular with families going on holiday etc but, it does seem ridiculous that people were still allowed to travel to places like Italy when the problem was mushrooming.

I have some sympathy with understanding how to formulate an official response to the Italy situation; they have a first class health system, but it's very regionalised - so they don't have the type of centralised data and information as readily available as we do - the NHS being very much a command and control model - which has its own issues - but does enable really detailed and comprehensive data to be available from the get-go.

The US has the same issue - their Health Sec was unable to say the other day how many tests had been done - because their health system is almost entirely private, so whilst tests were being done by separate private providers, there was no central recording of how many and what results they had.

I go to total fitness in Huddersfield , past 3 weeks have been wiping equipment with anti bacterial before use. Literally in that time not once have I seen anyone wiping the equipment with anti bacterial before or after use. You could see the greasy hand marks on every piece of glass, have now stopped going and am going to cancel for the foreseeable

Although football is the focus for the media, a ban on public gatherings of, say, 1,000 in any place governed by fire regulations (you have to find a way to enforce it) would stuff rugby league. And be disastrous for us, I imagine.

Do you play behind closed doors and lose a shed load of money, or can the league postpone the whole thing and allow clubs to claim on insurance.

We have three big home fixtures coming up. If its played behind closed doors, the club will lose many thousands of pounds, unless the RFL somehow plug the gap.

Never mind the powers that be are in New York ready for the next round draw!

I would not have a problem paying a match day ticket price for a live stream if for a few weeks matches were played behind closed doors.