Covid. Permanent suppression or truly learning to live with it?

[GaolBhoAlba]

Interested to see where people are at, as we go into our third year of the suppression approach.

Its taken a while, but most have accepted that coronavirus is here to stay, and that restrictions serve only to suppress (they cant/wont eradicate). We hear the theory (and the phrase) 'learning to live' with it, but in practice we're nowhere near to learning to live with it. Indeed, we're still behaving as though we can eradicate it via repeated 'short term' suppression. Current thinking is as it was in March 2020 ie that if we suppress it for 'just a bit longer' it'll go away. It wont. Clearly we cant continue swinging between 'living with it' and 'suppressing it' - the uncertainty of a continued stop/start for business, education (planning life in general!) etc isnt feasible as a long term strategy; we need to decide one way or another.

So... are you in favour of accepting that our current way of living must become permanent and (obviously this list is not exhaustive) masks, distancing, limits on mixing, one way systems etc are how we must live now. Funding to support business/furlough is made permanent and we all pay extra to support same (because I suppose the alternative is hospitality businesses just close? Become part of the bygone era). Remote learning in schools is a fixture (and that will be based, not on illness, but on isolation rules) every time there is a peak (and funding will need to be, I dont know, redirected from schools to parents in order to allow this). WFH is made permanent and, again, funding redirected to allow same.
Or... are you in favour of truly 'learning to live' with it, relying on vaccine to do the heavy lifting (thus not counting cases and accepting, as with flu, hospitalisations and deaths), scrapping track and trace, scrapping isolation (thus allowing asymptomatic people - including teachers and NHS staff to live/go to work normally) and essentially returning to life as it was in 2019.

YABU - in favour of permanent suppression.
YANBU - in favour of truly learning to live with it.

I think there may end up with a blended approach. Until there is a strong vaccine roll out worldwide we are going to get new variants emerging regularly so we will swing back into suppression. Once the situation has normalised I think we will move to living with it with an occasional move back to stricter measures if a new virulent version emerges.

@ChazsBrilliantAttitude

I think there may end up with a blended approach. Until there is a strong vaccine roll out worldwide we are going to get new variants emerging regularly so we will swing back into suppression. Once the situation has normalised I think we will move to living with it with an occasional move back to stricter measures if a new virulent version emerges.

As I explained though, we cant continue swinging back and forth (for a magnitude of reasons). In particular business and education, we need to establish permanency/financial support (and how we pay for that long term) to allow (many) businesses to continue. One of the biggest issue is staff shortage due to continued isolation rules (this affects the health, caring and teaching professions in particular).

So... are you in favour of accepting that our current way of living must become permanent and (obviously this list is not exhaustive) masks, distancing, limits on mixing, one way systems etc are how we must live now

England has only one of these, masks, which in practice are optional.

It has only been two years, can you imagine in the second world war people refusing to black out because they are bored of it?

We’ve hardly swung back and forth that much since the last lockdown was lifted. Not really. Introducing a mask mandate and vaccine passports hasn’t fundamentally changed what we can and can’t do.

I think that the scientific basis for sensible measures needs better explaining. People are too quick to dismiss because they lack understanding.

It would do us all well to appreciate that better ventilation and masks do a lot to reduce the spread of respiratory infections, not just covid. Washing hands and surfaces does naff all.

We also need better investment in our nhs. It’s not a coincidence that the nhs is creaking after 12 years of austerity.

@Whichjab

So... are you in favour of accepting that our current way of living must become permanent and (obviously this list is not exhaustive) masks, distancing, limits on mixing, one way systems etc are how we must live now

England has only one of these, masks, which in practice are optional.

It has only been two years, can you imagine in the second world war people refusing to black out because they are bored of it?

England has track and trace, and very strict isolation rules. These are hugely (off the scale huge) impactful mitigations.

If you actually read my post, you'd appreciate/grasp that this isnt about people being 'bored'. The very pressing need to establish a framework (for how we're going to live) is optional. Its required, and now.

*isnt optional

Somewhere in between. I'm in favour of living with it, but taking steps where absolutely necessary to manage it to minimise the impact on essential services.

@5128gap

Somewhere in between. I'm in favour of living with it, but taking steps where absolutely necessary to manage it to minimise the impact on essential services.

There cant be an in between though. To crudely summarise my OP, you either allow asymptomatic people to live normally (living with it), or you dont. And this is the crux - if not allowing it, we need to (quickly) establish permanency (for all the reasons ive mentioned).

The ‘suppression’ ship has sailed. It is not possible to suppress a virus as transmissible as Omicron and to attempt to do so would destroy our economy and our society. It would almost certainly fail anyway.

Our only option is to learn to live with it. I have been very critical of the government over the last two years, but with every piece of evidence we get about Omicron’s reduced severity over Delta their strategy of getting as many doses of vaccines into arms as possible then letting the vaccines do their job without locking down society appears to have been the right call. Well done, Professors Whitty, Vallance, Van Tam & co.

"there can't be an in between"
Of course there can. For example there is an annual vax drive for flu, combined with h&s advice re reducing spread. That's not full supression as you describe but it's also not just living with it.

Long term/permanent furlough is a nonsense. If there are jobs or industries that are no longer viable in their current form (or at all) then they will need to adapt or close, it's simply not feasible to suggest long term support

I don’t think suppression and living with it are that distinct.

We currently have minimal mitigations in place that in practice impact very little on day to day life in terms of actions we are obliged to take as individuals. Testing and masks are the only real mitigations that wouldn’t have been common pre-covid, isolation of infected people is/was very common for other illnesses along with other procedures for outbreaks of notifiable diseases. The difference now is levels of infections, if covid was circulating at a lower level individual odds of encountering disruptions would be low too. Anything over and above is self-imposed and will vary greatly because people have different situations and considerations. You can’t force people to ignore covid anymore than you can force them to pay attention to it.

Imho, where we are failing is the capacity to absorb covid into our current health provision, not just the UK but globally. But then covid hasn’t shown the stability anywhere needed for planning for provision yet.

We are in the process of shifting and things are very different to this time last year but I don’t believe that we are in a position to completely discount covid as a threat on multiple levels. Developing strategies to live with covid will involve suppression whilst we learn more about it and the effect of vaccinations/treatments.

@Lavender24

can you imagine in the second world war people refusing to black out because they are bored of it?

A bombing isn't really comparable to what is now essentially a common cold though is it?

Actually when the medical director of the NHS says on record that they are "on a war footing" and we have field hospitals being setup in car parks, it's quite an appropriate analogy.

And for fucks sake - it's NOT a cold.

@CastleCrasher

"there can't be an in between" Of course there can. For example there is an annual vax drive for flu, combined with h&s advice re reducing spread. That's not full supression as you describe but it's also not just living with it.

Long term/permanent furlough is a nonsense. If there are jobs or industries that are no longer viable in their current form (or at all) then they will need to adapt or close, it's simply not feasible to suggest long term support

Very fair points. In these chats, there's much down to interpretation (and nuance), mine is that how we manage flu WOULD be living with it (thus I deliberately mentioned flu in that option). Living with it isnt ignoring it; I didnt mean to give that impression.

@Lavender24

can you imagine in the second world war people refusing to black out because they are bored of it?

A bombing isn't really comparable to what is now essentially a common cold though is it?

Covid has killed more than the Nazis.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-kills-more-british-civilians-than-nazis-2021-1%3famp

A bombing isn't really comparable to what is now essentially a common cold though is it?

We don’t have hundreds of hospital admissions daily with a common cold. Nor do we have a death tally.

I think we are at the point of understanding that there will be an annual covid death toll, just like there is with flu, which is sad and frustrating but just the way it is. What we can’t have with the state of the NHS, is any illness that puts major pressure on the way covid is doing. So I think we need to accept that living with it means upping health care capacity wnd paying for that. I also think that whether we like it or not, restrictions are always going to be a possibility. We do have to accept that normal is a new normal and we may never get back what we had.

Often I see "live with it" meaning little or no mitigation and taking the consequences (which aren't life threatening for most) in terms of hospitalisations etc. The problem is that our health care system is not prepared for that, we have underfunded it for many years and it arguably couldn't cope with the demand for services pre-pandemic nevermind now when there's a large backlog and higher levels of demand overall.

If we had unlimited healthcare capacity then I could support just living with it and dealing with the consequences. However we don't have unlimited healthcare capacity.

We now understand very well that not having healthcare capacity to deal with covid doesn't simply mean that everything else works as normal and covid patients aren't seen. It means that all services are impacted - we all suffer.

It's a failure of our government that we're in this situation re the fragility of the NHS, but we are where we are and we can't improve it overnight so for the time being we need to suppress the virus.

Honestly, I think talking 'permanent' anything at this point is ridiculous. Do you have a crystal ball that we are all missing and know what covid is going to look like this time next year? If the answer to this is no then I don't know how you can make 'permanent' plans to tackle or not. What if by some freak chance it mutated to having a 10% death rate? Would you want to sally along with your plan to do nothing? What if it mutated to have a death rate of 0% would you continue with your plan for suppression? Or would you do the sensible thing and realise that it is an evolving situation and 'permanent plans' for evolving situations are never going to work and just make people pissed off if the 'permanent plans' have to change?

I think it's still about flattening the curve to some extent.

If dropping isolation/ restrictions means hospitals being overwhelmed and not having enough ICU beds to recieve non-covid patients or to perform life saving operations then I don't think that can be an acceptable way forward.

if not allowing it, we need to (quickly) establish permanency (for all the reasons ive mentioned)

But your desire for speed just isn’t possible without a period of stability from the virus itself. There have been a lot of variations in a short space of time (for example, vaccines have been available for just about a year and not universally).

The emphasis is on the ‘learning’ bit of your original statement. You can’t learn information that doesn’t exist yet. We’re not even through our first winter with a largely vaccinated population.

This doesn’t bode particularly well for anyone or anything struggling with any aspect currently because I suspect we’re at a point, particularly economically, where less and less can be supported because of the effects of something that isn’t going anywhere and going forward finances will have to take it into accounts In that respect I agree with you, but that needs to come as a clear message from those in leadership.

I'm in favour of removing restrictions, removing isolation and instead funding the NHS properly to deal with the percentage of people who will end up hospitalised.

Living with it, 100%. We do need to see some changes in order to do this effectively, such as massive investment in healthcare. What I do find frustrating though, is that most years in winter the health service has been overstretched by normal winter illnesses. It's with covid this time, but this happened each year before covid too.

Also I'm happy to admit being 'bored' with it.🤷🏻‍♀️

That’s factually incorrect. ‘In WWII there were 384,000 soldiers killed in combat, but a higher civilian death toll (70,000, as opposed to 2,000 in WWI), largely due to German bombing raids during the Blitz’
There’s no need to blatantly misrepresent facts

Based on previous examples, eg Spanish flu, I reckon we are currently in process of moving to learning to live with it, 3 years is a normal time frame for something like this and the suppression while the vaccine was drafted has mitigated deaths as much as it could and it was necessary to do so, I reckon this year will be the transition, that monitoring is required for now until we are sure we have as much a handle on it as flu.
So I have voted yanbu but I don't think current caution is unnecessary or a sign that people are under the impression that we will continue to live like that, and I don't think anyone wants to either.

@Whichjab my previous post was in reply to your claim about covid killing more brits than WW2 eye 🙄