If we could go back do you wish we went down the herd immunity route?

[Sakalibre]

Just curious

YABU - no
YANBU - yes

Education cannot be recovered - the OECD (Organisation for economic cooperation and development) predicts GDP will br 1.5% less for the rest of the century due to the education lost. Child poverty will increase. My own DD has missed 6 months of useful education which will take a long time for her to recover.

As for recovering finances - try thinking that if you can't pay your mortgage because your business has gone bust. No country ever made itself healthier by making itself poorer either - health outcomes are going to be terrible for the poorest directly because of lockdown.

I'm so sad we can't go back and make our lazy arsed prime minister react faster.

I work with someone from northern Italy and we discussed almost daily that the UK government were doing nothing, and how bad it was in Italy.

My family locked down well before the government, I cancelled a special event in Feb half term because I was worried.

What I mean is - I'm no one, and I could see what might happen. The government knew and let this happen.

Sweden near community immunity now - yes I know about the population density etc but an example to us all.

Like fuck it is. Sweden has achieved something in the realm of 15% of the population with antibodies. And has killed off a far higher number of its population than surrounding Scandinavian countries.

www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-20/swedens-herd-immunity-strategy-for-coronavirus-covid-19/12570918

www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200813/swedens-no-lockdown-policy-didnt-achieve-herd-immunity

I think Sweden's economy is doing worse than their neighbours too.
Nevertheless it would be great if we tried to be more like them. Less overcrowded housing, very good healthcare system, proper social security safety net...

Bloody hell - even Sweden’sPM regrets they route Sweden took. Hats off to him for publicly admitting his government made a mistake in their covid strategy

Where is the OP? Way to humiliate yourself, OP! Are you scuttling away to name change? 🤔

Sweden as of 3 sept (latest data I can find) has a positive case rate of 11.1 per million of population, well below the government quarantine level for travel. However government probably won't take it off the list as to do so would be admitting its approach has worked. Sweden has consistently been below this level since mid august.

Swedens chef epidemiologist Anders Tegnell admitted that they didn't protect care homes well which contributed to the higher death rate, but then neither did we. He has admitted they could have done better to protect care homes.

Swedish deaths and ICU bed occupation now down to a record low (as is ours).

Immunity is increasingly being seen as not just a case of antibody levels, its more complex than that, T cells are a real big part but you cannot reliably or cheaply measure them in the same way as antibodies. Therefore just quoting antibody level studies is not definitive proof about population immunity. Check out the work of the Karolinska institute in Stockholm on T cell immunity - also there is increasing buzz about cross immunity from other coronavirus infections.

I wish I could work out how to link to these studies - I am a bit of a computer luddite (I'm learning!) but they are easy enough to find with a quick search.

As for the Swedish PM saying they got it wrong - Stefan Lofven is quoted on 22 August as saying Sweden got it right not to impose a strict lockdown.

No, I love my parents.

I love my eighty something parents too, still think the Swedish course was the more logical one.

My parents also want to live their last years to the full and not locked in their house, so are going out and about and doing that, albeit maintaining SD and good hygiene, a very Swedish approach.

This isn’t a case of not loving your parents.

The chance of even 80 years olds with other health complaints coming through Covid is in their favour.

95 year old MIL with a host of health issues tested positive when her Home had a death from Covid.
She recovered
It isn’t an automatic death sentence.

If anything from what the nurses said she wasn’t affected as much.

I know that was only one person but given the statistics there must be thousands more.

The CDC statistics state that if you get COVID, and you are between 75 and 84 years of age, you are 220 times more likely to die of it than someone who is in the 18 to 29 age group.

That’s not a risk I want to take with my parents.

Had we gone down that route, so many people would have died or been hospitalised that things like food and power supplies would have broken down and people would have started starving on top of everything else. So no, I don't think we should go down that route.

No one starved in Sweden nor were there any power supply disruptions.

That is pure conjecture.

Plus I think Neil Fergusons death stats that prompted lockdown have been questioned extensively e.g. the code used was very out of date and I believe cannot be replicated. I think he predicted deaths in the tens of thousands for Sweden without lockdown and the actual death rate is around 6000.

So were his UK death predictions as flawed? many would argue so.

In fact Carl Henehghan and the centre for evidence based medicine in Oxford have published research pointing to an infection mortality rate of around 0.1 %, very similar to the flu.

The CDC statistics state that if you get COVID, and you are between 75 and 84 years of age, you are 220 times more likely to die of it than someone who is in the 18 to 29 age group

But that would still mean you are more than likely to survive.

You have an 80% chance of living.

From what people are reporting it could be higher because a lot of the very elderly (like my mil 95) they are getting it and either showing very few symptoms or are a symptomatic so haven’t been picked up as having had it and survived.

It does look like it is showing as fatal as flu and we don’t go into lockdown when there is a flu epidemic.

Flu doesn’t hospitalise as many people and require as many people to be ventilated on oxygen. One of the reasons the NHS has struggled is the huge number of people who have survived, but only after weeks in hospital. COVID makes even young healthy people who survive, very sick sometimes before a slow recovery.

Comparisons between the UK and Sweden need to take into account that Sweden has a population about one-sixth of ours, in an area about twice the size of ours. So much lower population density, reducing the risk of spread. Even so, their policy turned out not to have ideal results, either for people's health or the economy.

I don't know the actual numbers to be fair, but as an ITU nurse I've looked after fair few ventilated patients with flu, usually a bout of flu that has led onto pneumonia or exacerbation of COPD or something like that. Purely anecdotal of course.

My personal opinion of course, the NHS has struggled because of years of underfunding and cuts to critical care capacity. I'm not looking forward to coping with the effects of the delays to cancer and cardiology care caused by lockdown either....thinking that is more likely to kill our elderly parents in the years to come.

@Vintagevixen

I don't know the actual numbers to be fair, but as an ITU nurse I've looked after fair few ventilated patients with flu, usually a bout of flu that has led onto pneumonia or exacerbation of COPD or something like that. Purely anecdotal of course.

My personal opinion of course, the NHS has struggled because of years of underfunding and cuts to critical care capacity. I'm not looking forward to coping with the effects of the delays to cancer and cardiology care caused by lockdown either....thinking that is more likely to kill our elderly parents in the years to come.

100% agree with this. Sadly.

I fully supported lockdown initially because we wasn’t prepared so it gave time to build extra hospitals sort the PPE and extra ventilators but I don’t agree with the restrictions we are still living with. We clearly know who is at risk so we should be protecting those as best we can and the rest carry on. I dread to think what this lockdown will do in the long term. Missed treatments missed diagnosis job loses the economy crashing I fear it is gonna be far worse than the virus! This year I have never known so many people die (none Covid!) and their funerals have been nothing but disrespectful!! It’s gone too far now!!

Sweden just gone on the travel corridor list for no quarantine - Stockholm here I come!! ....though the swedes may not want us as our infection numbers are rising.

Comparisons between the UK and Sweden need to take into account that Sweden has a population about one-sixth of ours, in an area about twice the size of ours. So much lower population density, reducing the risk of spread. Even so, their policy turned out not to have ideal results, either for people's health or the economy.

This is a highly unpopular view because it involves realism and logic.

And the Sweden argument with schools drives me insane. The size and number of schos and classes, the pupil teacher ratio, the size of their buildings, and thwy closed secondary schools. Their health budget is massive, their country twice the size of ours with 50 million less people. It drives me up the wall.

Me too. You can see why Boris got elected.

Yep. I'm.nearly due another social media break. There's only so much I can take.