(Covid) To think these recommendations are bonkers?

[NoCharnce]

So the government commission into how to memorialise the Covid pandemic has recommended the government implement “A UK-wide day of reflection should be established and held annually.”

Other recommendations include national memorials (10 sites already identified!), oral histories and museums plus additional funding for local authorities to set up their own memorials.

I can’t be the only one who thinks this is nuts and hope the government ignores the recommendations? I genuinely cannot believe people get paid to produce this crap.

@JenniferBooth so you are telling me that the majority of people in social housing are highly qualified, high
earning barristers, doctors, financiers etc?

I did say may, of course you will have highly qualified who have become disabled or had chance hard times but for the most part they buy their own homes and are not in social housing.

Anyone else enjoying the well left critique of those who live in social housing.

so unless you are a barrister or a doctor or a financier you cant understand restrictions and the reasoning behind them And you have the absolute cheek to label others as far right.

People who live in social housing are the supermarket workers the Amazon drivers who brought you your shit during lockdowns Of course they understood restrictions They had to

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/30/those-on-ideological-right-favor-fewer-covid-19-restrictions-in-most-advanced-economies/ft_21-07-28_globalcovidrestrictions_01/

Well hopefully next time you will get what you wish for and those in social housing who do those jobs i mentioned will lock down too.

@JenniferBooth I am using those examples because those professions will have passed their GCSEs, A Levels and have higher education to post graduate level.

The sort of information imparted via the government would be easily understood and furthermore with an academic background you would have research experience and know where to begin gathering your own evidence independent of that given out by the gov, discriminating between reliable/unreliable sources, and forming sound opinions.

It is of course going to be harder for someone of less educational background and it will put them more at risk.

Also to say that all supermarket workers and Amazon workers are socially housed is biased - I know several, they all have mortgages.

It’s absolutely ridiculous to assume that anyone supporting lockdown was a middle class snob. The overwhelming and vast majority were doing it because they were trying to prevent hospitalisations and deaths.

@JenniferBooth

And @JenniferBooth - your stance is putting the economic welfare of a social housing tenant above the health needs of anyone needing urgent access to hospital treatment or in a life or death situation. Which could also be deemed as ‘snobbish’. Your stance would also result in overall better outcomes for the ‘middle class’ and elites. At the expense of a resulting high death toll and collapsing hospitals that can’t treat vulnerable patients.

@WhalePolo looking at the unherd methodology the first thing I would say is that it is too vague to properly critique. The sample size and their justification of it would be my first port of call if I were looking at it. I haven’t used MRP so I wouldn’t know offhand what would be standard but it strikes me they may not have done this with the explanation there. Also would be looking at how unbiased the online platform used to gather responses is.

Personally if I were looking at it, as somebody with no prior knowledge of Unherd, I wouldn’t rate it without further understanding of their methodology… which obviously I am not going to investigate at this time; I’m going to bed lol

I wasn't going to read through the entire thread you copied, but are you talking about posts like this?

"Yes I know it's being discussed but anyone who expresses any dislike of them or discomfort seems to told to STFU. It isn't enough that people wear them. They have to submit too. Why? Why aren't they allowed to question it or at least express their dislike of wearing them."

This is one person's opinion in mid-2020. As far as I recall, no-one enjoyed wearing masks, but to get on with the things we needed to do we wore them (if we could). No-one was struck down for expressing dislike of wearing masks that I'm aware of. This is all in your head.

I agree with this.

What Sparklecats is saying is if you have a lower level of education, you may not understand the reasons behind restrictions - not the restrictions themselves. Of course, this is a generalisation.

There is no need to be professionally offended on behalf of all social housing tenants.

Not forgetting care workers, hospital porter/cleaners etc....the ones who actually had to deal with the impact of covid on a daily basis and whose risk of catching it was a lot higher than a fucking barrister or financier.

Do you think the UK government handled lockdowns well? Overall? Not just "got cases down" but overall.

I know no one who does.

Because they had been deliberately terrified by the state and the media.

I could see something like that eventually forming part of our pandemic planning yep. Afaik there's broad consensus that we're likely to see them happening more often in the future, so this is a good way to factor in how much of the kitchen sink we can get away with throwing bearing in mind there'll probably be another one in X years.

But I say 'part of' because there is again the question of how the public feel. If the population do not buy into plan 2.3.7, then it isn't going to be achievable.

Which could work for or against restrictions, in fact. The discussion in this thread has more focused on people not observing them, which is understandable as that's where we are now, but it may not be in decades to come. If plan 2.3.7 stops short of lockdown, even if it's for extremely sound reasons, if enough of the public want one regardless then it may still happen. And this goes to both of our points about the inevitability of pandemic management being political.

I think the X Y equation isn’t a bad way to look at it, better than handing over decisions to the WHO

But I’d say it is missing half the equation

You’d have to factor in harms to society as part of it. Which is why it’s not just science but societal impact, ie political arena

Harms to society could at least theoretically be factored into that equation. I think the bigger issue is that however well evidenced it might be, governments sooner or later are slaves to public responses. Especially in a democracy. So I think you're right about it only being half of the equation, but a different missing half.

People I know weren't "terrified" by the state or media. They just didn't want to get or vulnerable members of their family to get covid. One of my relatives caught it and died in March 2020 and a middle aged colleague was in ICU.

They are I agree

But the Covid response leaned heavily on messaging to provoke fear over risk

Everyone’s risk was not high but use of daily death and case counts was the most effective behaviour change programme I’ve ever seen

That was a decision made by governments which fed into public demands. You could see it on mn throughout, daily threads on numbers etc

To put it another way if we’d reacted by personal risk and messages had been based on that we’d demand different things

Yes I'd definitely expect more attempts to influence public behaviour by messaging, as we saw with covid 19. That's a given. What's less clear is how it would work, particularly after multiple goes.

My (then), 82 year old dad was. When mum died in late March 2020 dad refused to have anyone in the house for 14 days after her death as he was so scared we would get into trouble ("bubbles" weren't a thing then). He was past caring if he caught it and died...he'd just lost the woman he had spent nearly 60 years with. Imagine an elderly man spending 2 weeks grieving alone because the media and state had terrified him into thinking that his daughter could get into trouble just by crossing the threshold of his home. As for the funeral rules back then, well the less said about that the better. We all heard the "thoughts are with the bereaved" line trotted out day after day by Johnson et al but in reality they didn't give a shit about any of us.

And yet you had physically healthy people who barely went out for months/years other than for vaccinations, who were still petrified of catching it. That sounds proportionate to you?

Please don't try and re write history.

This happened. The daily death figures show (littered with half truths) was shown to frighten us.

You're assuming everyone is only interested in their personal risk though. Most people would have had close family members of friends who were at much higher risk and they were very concerned about them.