Attitudes changing?

[CathyandHeathcliff]

Has anybody noticed attitudes changing over the past few days?

It seems to have gone from Facebook comments on articles calling for a stricter lockdown and so on, to calling for lockdown to be lifted sooner rather than later, comments about the economy failing and weighing up the balance.

[TabbyMumz]

"Similarly, every other poster on MN seems to be in the shielding or very vulnerable groups"
I agree with this. I think some people have misunderstood the two categories. Shielding is mainly for those with cancers, copd, debilitating asthma, some conditions with immuniosuppressant, ie sickle cell and Scid. You would think (apart from copd) that these are conditions only a small proportion have. I think the majority of people are actually in the vulnerable group rather than the shielding group.

[The80sweregreat]

Apart from hospital and care home deaths i'd like to see how many people have died or been admitted to hospital with covid because they have to work in the retail sector. They are at risk everyday even with the distancing measures now in place. My friend works in one and she said it's a nightmare trying to get people to follow the rules. She has to work to pay her bills and the company is happy to stay open of course. They are key workers but I think they are still a bit overlooked. Many don't wear gloves or masks either which may be company policy I don't know.
Lots of people are still working and risking their lives. No wonder there is unrest.

[TabbyMumz]

And yes, I think attitudes are changing. Only a few weeks ago, people were calling other people "murderers" for leaving the house. Now, people are starting to question "what is wrong in sitting down on a bench when on your walk", and "what is wrong with going out twice or 3 times, if you dont see anyone" or driving locally to walks.
As an aside, I'm struggling to see why people in second homes are now being told to go back to their first home. Surely if it wasnt a second home, it would be someone's first home, and the hospitals in those areas should normally be able to cope? And we are in the better weather parts of the year, when these 2nd homes would normally have people living there.

[wintertravel1980]

Why are other countries able to get going on this whilst we are still faffing about?!

But they are not. If you believe estimates from the Imperial College, Spain who has got stricter lockdown rules (e.g. no exercise) and higher penalties for non-compliance has currently got higher R0 (transmission rate) than the UK. If people are not allowed to go to parks, they find ways to socialise indoors.

[Sunshinegirl82]

@wintertravel1980

I was specifically referring to getting going on testing and tracing. Everyone seems to agree that will feature prominently in any exit strategy and it feels as though we are not moving fast enough to bring that side of things up to scratch.

[fortyfifty]

People need bite-size information. It can't be difficult to get the message across that ending lockdown too early will result in a rapidly rising spread of coronavirus. Too many people seem to be interpreting the peak as the point at which it is safe to mingle again, rather than understanding we need to be X amount of weeks beyond the peak before transmission rates are low enough to potentially control new outbreaks by contact tracing and testing. The media have been rubbish at understanding the information literacy rate of the average population and giving them the easy to digest facts about stats.

Having said that, if I lived closer to my parents, I probably would choose to see them soon - within their garden - knowing that my whole household has mixed with no-one except for a fortnightly super-cautious trip to the supermarket. Once lockdown is lifted and we're able to go out and about or my children are back at school, I won't want to see my parents as we'll be at greater risk of catching and spreading the virus to them. So, I would guess a lot of people are making calculated decisions like that and the more others see that going on, the more others are then tempted to do the same.

[SunShine682]

Attitudes are changing, including mine.

I am utterly fed up of lockdown, the same as a lot of people.

I don’t have money worries so that isn’t an issue for me.

Iv already started going for multiple walks a day in the last few days and I’m already debating seeing my family later today. None of us have health issues and my mother still has to work so leaving the house regularly anyway, I’m more then willing to catch it from her if she passes it to me considering my chance of death is around 0.2%.

[Romeojuliet]

ACertainSupermarket - dentists are certainly not sitting at home on full pay. They are self employed and the overwhelming majority of them are on zero incomes as whether they are nhs or private they earn on what they do. And all suppliers, for quite a while were reserving ffp3 masks for the nhs - but dentists actually had their face much closer to patients saliva than an awful lot of medical workers. 1 in 5 dental practices are reported as likely going bust. Purely private and mixed nhs and private are the worst affected. Whilst you may not feel any sympathy for the practice owners and the associates who work in them, you may wish you had felt that sympathy when it gets an awful lot harder (and a lot more expensive due to cross infection new protocols) to see a dentist.

[Widowodiw]

The government needs to tell us what the plan for exit is. My work is gearing up to open their shops mid May but from
What I read it doesn’t sound like that’s going to be feasible. Regardless we need notice so we can train our colleagues in news after working practises in store.

People need to know if the schools are opening, if summer clubs are going to be open so we can plan. It’s like being treated like a child.

[DominaShantotto]

I think it's not so much lockdown fatigue - it's the lack of any visible light at the end of the tunnel because the Government either doesn't trust us to be able to hear discussion of the exit strategy or (and I suspect more likely) they don't HAVE an exit strategy and are just covering up with the "public can't be trusted" angle of it. I hit rock bottom at the lack of any end or planning for an end last night and just lay in bed crying - I'm only keeping going for the kids.

I am desperate to get my kids back to school - not, like MN is tending to unfairly portray (but MN never misses a chance to stick a boot in), because I hate my kids and want rid of them - but because my youngest is being affected by all of this to the point her mental health is suffering so much that it's causing physical symptoms. I can jolly things along as much as anyone can do, I can reassure, hug, give a routine, give a break from routine, and the class teacher's opened an email channel of communication to try to just get her to relax and chat a bit more - but I can't be the 29 little people she's missing desperately and wondering if they're OK and what they're doing and desperately wants to play penguins with. Yes, she's an abnormally sensitive little soul - but she's 7 years old FFS! My other child is actually coping very very well and loving doing crafts and stuff - but the impact on the usually happy-go-lucky one is heartbreaking to see.

Doesn't make me some child-loathing parent wanting to outsource my kids' education and not put any effort in - I just want my little dot's unhappiness to stop and my repertoire of strategies aren't the solution to it all!

[TabbyMumz]

All kids are different. Some will cope more than others. I'm thinking this might be a lovely opportunity for your little one to build some resilience and enjoy being at home and build up a way to be able to entertain herself.

[goshdarnitjanet]

I don't think a 7 year old should have to "build some resilience"

[Hadenoughfornow]

Domina just want to say I know exactly where you are coming from and we have similar issues and it is really worrying.

We all try our best but returning to school is the only thing that will really help and I can only hope this happens before there is lasting damage.

[SarahInAccounts]

I can't believe the selfishness of some people here.

If I get it I will die. You don't get to say that's ok.

I'm shielding with 2 different conditions and both DSs are shielding with one.

You don't get to throw my DCs under a bus so you can go to the beach.

[The80sweregreat]

It's hard on the kids. I think a few may end up with mental health problems over all this and none of it is good.
My mum was 14 when WW2 was declared. My dad was conscripted at 17 and my nan didn't know when she'd see him again.
My mum had years of all kinds of horrible things thrown at her but it made her stronger. Other people went to pieces. We're all different in how we approach things and deal with it.
Some children may be more resilient and others will struggle. It's just a shame our mental health facilities are so lacking as they will be needed a lot more in the next year.
Not an easy situation at all and we're not all the same.
Some of the toughest people are know are secretly insecure they just don't like to admit it and will put on a front.

[Hadenoughfornow]

Sarah or we could argue that you are being selfish wanting us all to suffer.

You can keep yourself safe. You need to shield anyway. Everyone would support you in that. You can be protected.

If the country goes bust before a vaccine is found then you will no longer be able to shield.

[Kazzyhoward]

@Romeojuliet At least dentists will have a job when things start to return to normal. People will always need dental treatment. Practices will either re-open, or new practices will open. Dentists made redundant will fairly easily find new jobs in the same profession in the new firms that rise out of the crisis. Remember also that the entire industry is supported by the backdrop of the NHS and subsidised/free NHS treatment. Anyone setting up a new dental practice has a virtually immediate queue of NHS patients ready to sign up!

Be grateful it's not like the hospitality/entertainment/tourism industries where many places will never re-open, many staff will never get similar jobs, and even those which re-open may struggle for years due to lack of business.

[GreenTulips]

The issue I suspect is the government refusal to articulate an exit plan. People are starting to take the matter into their own hands. It’s a situation that most people were more than willing to comply to protect the nhs, but with no treatment, no vaccine and no end in sight to corona, and a death rate of likely one percent, then people would rather live normally and take the risk, than continue to live like this

This is also part of the plan. They know people will break rules, carry on going out, socialise and mix households. These people think they are clever. They aren’t. They are being played. They are the next wave. And guess what? The government didn’t tell them to go out, so they aren’t responsible for these people.

[BlackCoffeeExtraStrong]

I honestly think that the government don't believe we can handle the most likely scenario.

If they tell us, yes, we could very easily be in full lockdown for 12 weeks, people handle it very differently to, we are in lockdown for at least 3 weeks and will review as we go - every 3 weeks.

I think they're terrified of giving any exit plan, in case it doesn't go that way and then they appear completely untrustworthy and incompetent. I understand plenty of people feel like that already...

[ACertainSupermarket]

It is getting odder not to know many people who have had it, actually. There has been one NHS staff death in my area that I know off (was in the local news) and one distant relative hospitalised. We have been saying at work it is strange that no-one we know of our large staff of supermarket has been infected.

[BirdieFriendReturns]

Sarahinaccounts - I feel your frustration but soon we will be able to go back to work and see family. People who are shielding can choose not to do those things. Sorry if that makes your angry watching others get on with their lives as best they can.

[nellodee]

I don't think it is the government's plan for people to get this slowly. The plan currently across Europe appears to be to keep R0 below 1 and to get numbers of infections low enough for contact tracing to be effective. This is not herd immunity. This is massive suppression.

When governments talk about "easing" the lockdown, what they are talking about is using up the slack in R0. If R0 is currently 0.7, then there is up to a 0.3 amount of slack. Easing in this case will be a small measure, not total lifting. I would imagine, as an example, permitting some additional shops to open and opening up schools to year 10 and 12 may use up all of that additional R0.

If R0 goes above 1, then we will be in a far worse state than we are now. R0 above 1 will result in exponential growth. This may well be slower than we saw before, where cases were multiplying by 10 every 10 days. However, even if the x10 time were 1 month (so three times slower than when we were just washing hands), this is what would happen to the figures:

May - let's say 100 deaths per day
June - 1000
July - 10,000
August 100,000

As you can see, even slower exponential growth is not something we can contemplate.

Because figures have never grown so high, they seem unrealistic. But this is how exponential growth works. Remember when we only had 1 known case in the country? It didn't seem like we would get here. But the gap between then and what we got to now was only a couple of months. A couple of months from here is hundreds of thousands dead.

We will not be getting anywhere close to back to normal until we have a vaccine and people just need to get used to that, hard as it may be. The choice is between some form of stringent social distancing or hundreds of thousands dying per day. There is only so far we can ease before we flip to the position of having an unconscionable amount of deaths.

[Jourdain11]

@ComtesseDeSpair Agreed! So I am now "one of those people" - shielding due to a medical condition diagnosed 2 weeks after lockdown! But apart from myself and people I've met in hospital, I don't know anyone who is actually shielding. I know some people who are doing extra social distancing due to medical conditions and being over 70.

I know quite a few people who have had it and they all have recovered - some very quickly, some were killer and took a bit longer (2 weeks or so and some residual fatigue after that).

Interestingly, DH has a colleague whose partner was shielding, as they were on immunosuppressants for IBD. They caught the virus (and it was actually confirmed, as they were tested). They didn't actually require any additional medical treatment and were fully recovered within 10 days.