to ask if you resent the shielded?

[BlackBucketOfCheese]

I have seen a lot of people saying on MN and across social media that they now resent giving up months of their lives “to protect the shielded” as they have put it.
And that those shielded should show gratitude.

Now, no one has zero risk. That's just silly.

"I'm not aware of people being left with long-term health problems from a harmless little flu"

I actually can't tell if you are being sarcastic? Lots of people have long term health problems caused by the flu, including, erm, death. Death notwithstanding, lots of people with respiratory illnesses have irreparable scarring on the lungs triggered by colds and flus.

I’ve googled it and can’t find anything about long term effects on children anywhere, if you find the link please share.

I don’t resent anyone. Healthy people have died. We were all at risk. Not just the ones shielding. We needed to bring the virus under control to allow normality

@Eyewhisker

The trouble with people thinking they understand complex medical conditions is that most of us lay people do not understand complex medical conditions. It has now been discovered that certain types of immunosuppressive medication (for example, anti TNFs) is not a risk and in fact, may decrease risk. However, other evidence has found other immunosuppressive medication (certain long term doses of steroids) increases the risk of you do contract Covid19.
It is unhelpful - and potentially dangerous - to suggest what you did. People take advice about their specific circumstances and you’re completely wrong to think the risk of covid19 isn’t that high to all people in the shielding group.

I think the fakers have caused trouble by saying they are 'shielding' when really they just cant be bothered to go to work. I canf imagine anyone minding genuinely ill!

The word shield is being used in abundance in a way I've never seen before. I saw someone say that we need to 'shield' the aviation industry on the news the other day. It definitely seems to have captured the imagination.

I don't resent the shielded but we can't all put our lives on pause for an indefinite period

@JovialNickname

I wouldn't say I resent the shielded - I feel horrendously sorry for them and consider myself lucky to be in excellent health with (as far as I'm concerned) zero risk from the virus. I live with 2 shielded people unrelated to me, in a shared house where we were all placed by the council. I have to admit that I do wish that they had even once said, hey thanks for not going out. Thanks for sacrificing your entire life so that you don't accidentally bring something back here, and we catch it. Instead they just complain that my life is so much better than theirs and I am so lucky because I can, very occasionally, go out in the open air. I don't resent them, really, but I am surprised that there's never even an acknowledgement that I am, out of choice , giving up my civil liberties and everything I hold dear in life to keep them safe.

You really want a thank you for not bringing a virus into the house that could kill them?

I take your point four but not on this scale.

Can I just point out that the "shielding" metaphor is based on the notion that the shield is something strong and impervious that comes between someone vulnerable and some threat which they face! It is mostly being used in a way which is nonsensical.

I've seen a lot of this too OP and it deeply upsets and worries me. On a school thread just now someone said kids will one day be up in arms that they were forced to stay in for a 'few elderly and infirm people who would die in a few months anyway', and that sums up something of the rhetoric I've noticed, especially around MN sadly - that somehow fit and healthy people and especially children are giving up their freedom for people who don't deserve it because they have less worth because they are 'close to death anyway' (not true actually in most cases). It's led to a kind of categorising of who deserves to live more which I find disturbing and rather dystopian.

I've seen thinly veiled resentment all over the place, like in the post quoted above which talks about how we the shielded should at least say thank you and show some gratitude. This to me is so strange and makes me feel a bit sick. Why don't you say thank you to us for stopping the NHS get overwhelmed by patients who need to be in hospital much longer and take up necessary equipment for weeks and months which might save a young and fit person (that much lauded person so much more worthy of life) in a few days?

No one should be thanking anyone in terms of lockdown. We're all merely trying to follow guidelines to control a novel virus the science doesn't know enough about.

I'm also so tired of being polarised up against mental health issues - all those posts about how lockdown will create far more mental health issues and why do shielded people think covid is the most important thing? Yet I've never seen anyone - shielded or not - say covid deaths trump other deaths, just that we are doing our best not to overwhelm the NHS so that more deaths across the board can be prevented. And these posts which so pit physical versus mental health conveniently forget shielded people have mental health issues to contend with, as well... But we should just sit in a room until a vaccine is found so the young and fit can get back to work and stop sacrificing their lives for us.

I hear you, OP. I see it everywhere and I am tired of it. What happened to be kind? What happened to caring about one another, not pitting one group against another, not blaming one group for the future recession and havoc caused by this lockdown?

Some of the comments on here make me lose my faith in humanity but then I see so many others which always restore it. Thank you.

Poem for the shielded

So what am I worth
In this scourge of the earth
It seems I am cursed
As my body is worse
Than the young and the fit
I'm a number, an it
I know I'd be missed
But I'm on The List
I'm measured as less
My health in a mess
But my worth is in more
Than my CFS score
Value beyond age
Or words on a page.

I agree @Madhairday - well put!

When I can be bothered, I report the more offensive ageist / ablist (??) posts Which have invariably deleted - but I tend to keep off these threads as they appeal, upset and make me despair in a way the racist ones don’t.

Racism is easier to call out than the othering off the old and the vulnerable

My children are the generation who will be paying for this and I resent every single person who isn't taking it seriously.

Do you also resent the people who have recently crowded onto beaches and into parks? Now let me see - yes, there were children in their midst accompanied by doting parents.

Thanks, @Aridane. I think you're right - the othering of elderly and sick people in this whole thing has been allowed to stand time and time again here. It makes us shielded people feel lesser all the time, as if we don't matter enough. Those who keep saying lockdown will cause more misery and suicide, then appear to blame this on the vulnerable - words such as yours will lead the vulnerable towards misery and depression in and of themselves. They will feel as if they should simply move over to let the more worthy people live, so might as well die now

I don't feel as if shielding is something that is being done for me, I am protecting myself by staying in, I am grateful that shops will deliver food to my door, and that the staff of the NHS are working hard to help people who are ill, but I am always grateful for that. I am lucky in that I am happy with my own company and I have a garden. I presumed that everyone who has stuck to the rules, has been doing it from choice, in order to protect themselves, and their circle/ family, I have never considered that we should be any more grateful than usual for what people are doing.
If I see resentful posts I consider them in the same way as when I see that people are breaking the lockdown, they are misguided idiots.