I agree with pp the government’s handling of the crisis – too little, too late – plus the lack of funding of the NHS in previous years have made things far worse here than they might have been. The funding given to NHS still won’t bring it back to where it was in 2010 let alone be sufficient for what’s needed now.
As for the ‘bad cold’ analogy, healthcare professionals increasingly comparing Coronavirus to HIV/AIDs and other conditions that can lead to lifelong health problems. It’s not so much a respiratory illness as one that attacks a host of areas of the body.
Even if you don’t care about elderly or BAME population dying – and it seems that many of you really don’t. Then perhaps you should care about:
- the people of working age being discharged as recovered but needing oxygen to breathe and sleep many of whom may never be well enough to work again;
- the people who’ve had mild cases at home later found to have heart damage. The kind that can be hard to notice at first, because they take time to get really bad, unless of course they kill you first - like certain forms of hypertrophy;
- the possibility of losing a limb;
- strokes, and pulmonary embolism in younger people;
- the people who have lung damage; liver damage; cognitive problems and so on….
The government presented the issue as you die, you recover or you get it mildly. They were misleading, recovery from hospital – and this included people who didn’t need a ventilator just oxygen – is proving slow and many are needing extensive aftercare. And getting it mildly at home is no guarantee that you won’t develop serious health problems.
Lifting lockdown will not only increase deaths but it will also increase the numbers of people developing lifelong problems, and that will in turn make it harder for the NHS to provide for existing ones. Lifting lockdown when we still have 8,000 cases a day - and that’s the figure coming from government briefings – will lead to increases in deaths but also in lifelong conditions all of which will impact on NHS provision and on the economy.
If you want decent, accessible medical treatment for your daughter or anyone’s daughter, it’s in everyone’s interests to keep cases of Coronavirus low not just for now but in terms of how mass cases will impact services in future. This is not to mention that a high number of healthcare providers will die or be seriously ill further disrupting services.
YANBU to want care for your daughter but YABU to think lockdown is the issue, in the area of the country I’m in, lockdown has brought cases down and people in our Trust have had scans, cancer treatments, tests, and other provision available for a few weeks now.
BUT If number go up again then those treatments may not be available. Lockdown also buys time for a better understanding of the illness and how to treat it effectively. It’s only recently that it was recognised as something far more complicated than a respiratory illness, and breakthroughs in suitable medications are increasing.