The majority of people seem genuinely terrified

[thewheelsonthebus23]

I keep reading threads on Facebook and elsewhere, I will also include my own mother in this. There are so many people genuinely petrified of life returning to normal right now.
I can’t get my head around this. Yes, it poses a threat to some, but the survival rate is incredibly high for most of the population. It seems a lot of people think lockdown will eradicate it completely and it also seems that they believe if they get it, they’ll almost certainly die. I know that’s what my mum thinks. She’s adamant if she gets it, she’ll end up on a ventilator.
Someone posted about sending their child back to school and said something along the lines of: “I’d rather pay the fine, than pay for her funeral”.
Has the media been really irresponsible here? I feel the mass media has a lot to answer for.

People “I know two doctors, one intensive care nurse, one health care professional and one nurse involved in front line data collection and research. All of them are utterly terrified by what they see and deal with every day. They cannot believe how fast the virus can take a life once things start to go wrong. They have virtually nothing to help patients who they know won't make it”.

My late father was an HCP. All of the above is... stuff that can happen with a new disease. I hadn’t realised terror was such a thing among HCPs.

Then again, he was moved to a hospice far too late because his doctors just couldn’t accept he was dying. Is this a modern thing I wonder - humanity has made so much “progress” many people can’t believe death and nature can still be more powerful?

50,000 excess deaths and you're saying people are over reacting?

I know the government wants people to get back to work but if they hadn't messed out the testing/ tracing back in March we could be like Germany now and starting to get back to normal.

They want us to get back to normal before we even know where the outbreak are.

People are scared because our government are incompetent.

@Mynydd here we are now, entertain us

@LilacTree1 I take your point but they are unused to seeing deaths on this scale. Caring for dying people whose main wish is to see a loved one but who can't. Updating distraught relatives by phone.

The pattern of people arriving being quite unwell but able to chat and being full of hope to them becoming extremely sick and dying in days is again not something they are used to in modern times.

They are skilled, professional and dedicated but very scared and feel helpless.

Worth bearing in mind that every vulnerable person lives with on average 2-3 other people.

So it’s not just the vulnerable who are very worried, but those who live with them you.

And those who love them who reside in other homes who don’t want their loved ones to die.

There are many more vulnerable than those on the gov list too.

I still don’t think they are ‘terrified.’

I can tell you that as the wife of an ITU consultant who had to face watching this unfold in Italy, literally pacing the floor waiting for it to hit. He wasn’t sleeping, he was nervous.

He was never terrified. I hope I never meet a terrified HCP in the line of their duty.

I haven't seen many completely terrified people myself. I've seen concern.

Concern or indeed terror is an understandable reaction. It's sensible to fear the consequences of the Pretend It's Not Real and The Virus Will Go Away approach.

Unfortunately that approach won't magic away the pandemic. In fact it will further delay a return to any semblance of normality.

Fair enough, but I can assure you that the HCP I know are certainly terrified. It sounds like you think I'm making it up, which I'm not. But in the interests of not repeating myself I'll leave it here.

Hmm. I'm not convinced by flu thing or excess winter mortality stats. They're not comparable. Winter mortality presumably covers deaths with variety of causes and is influenced by completely different factors. There's vaccine programmes, the elderly and vulnerable are protected to some extent. You know and recognise the symptoms. The general population also has some immunity built up for certain strains of flu.

The effects of covid are more severe and mortality rate is higher. Plus there's this question over asymptomatic carriers too. Longer incubation time presumably means greater opportunity to spread covid. And viral load. That too.

So much we don’t yet know about it. Concerning, certainly,

When it comes to HCP.

It's insulting to dismiss their fear. Most normal people would be scared too. They're dying in disproportionate numbers. Because our government still hasn't got them enough PPE.

Wouldn't you be scared in their position? Being forced to do a dangerous job without the appropriate protection.

They're seeing their colleagues die. They're scared of the same happening to them and their children being left without a mother or a father.

It is our HCPs and other frontline staff bearing the brunt of the pandemic. And it is they who will suffer more than many if we ease lockdown too early and have the inevitable second wave.

True. There is also a lot of fear mongering though.

I was on a thread earlier where somebody said that perhaps people weren’t getting support for mental health because the staff were dead. Sort of ‘nobody to answer the phones.’

I find it worrying that people think this.

And the MMR comparison - prior to introduction of the vaccine you were looking at around 100 deaths per year or something around that level. Whole different ball game.

Our infection rate is still far too high to get back to any semblance of normal.

There's no normality or a healthy recovering economy when half or more of the workforce including HCP are off sick for weeks on end. Or dead.

We could've been ready to ease lockdown by now had we followed the lead of other countries. Enough PPE for frontline staff, masks for the public, drugs and equipment, accurate testing.

We're not even treating patients. They're being left to die at home or only admitted at a stage survival is less likely. We need to change this.

Further three weeks lockdown. Use that time to finally sort the above out. Shouldn't be too difficult. Countries poorer than us have managed it. Then we could look at safely easing lockdown without countless more avoidable deaths and further economic damage.

www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2020/05/06/mental-health-worker-and-best-dad-ever-dies-after-contracting-coronavirus/

In the thread Daffodil refers to someone was struggling with their mental health during the pandemic.

Clearly lockdown is irrelevant since urgent MH care is essential work. If someone's not getting the help they need something's gone wrong. One reason for this, amongst many potential reasons, is the fact that some staff will be off sick. Or as in the sad case, in the article, dead.

The media haven't made lots of people panic about dying. Some people who are of younger ages, as opposed to those who are oldies, have not had the experience of having to cope with such an awful time of such tragedy and worry such as this before.

The media reports all the horrors of this Virus,and all the death rates each day, but you have to try and believe that things will get better, and as they say, stay positive and strong.

I'm personally worried that the country will go back to how it was, working until you're sick with stress, huge traffic jams, kids tested u TIL their MH suffers, queues in drs surgeries out the door, pollution. I would like someone to go back and start over...

Not that any of it matters for my family, my DS certainly will die if he gets it, his consultant is re writing the shielding guidelines atm, we'll not be going anywhere for a longtime.

Government soon

"The government did a great job of terrifying us all."

Yes, because in a very short space of time they needed to persuade a cynical public to stay at home.

Anyone with a passing understanding of exponential growth understands why.

Fear of easing lockdown arises from a fear that the suppressing impact of lockdown could now be undone.

30,000 people, who wouldn't have died otherwise, have died. Compare data from Soring 2020 with any other year. Many more have been hospitalised, or have been very ill at home of course.

That's a lot of people. You'd probably buy a lottery ticket and consider it good odds if they said there'd be 30,000 winners this month.

Without lockdown, how many would it have been?

I understand the need to balance health and the economy, and that we need a plan to gradually relax lockdown. But anyone asking what all the fuss is about, or insisting that we need to get immediately back to normal, doesn't understand the data imo.

Unfortunately the media is always aimed at engendering fear in the public. We are always misled in one way or another by journalism. Fear is what sells newspapers and fear keeps the public compliant and obedient citizens.

"Fear is what sells newspapers and fear keeps the public compliant and obedient citizens."

Given the number of people who didn't adhere to lockdown, despite our relatively relaxed approach to it when compared to other European countries, one could argue that the politicians and the media did not do a good enough job at this.

It really gets on my nerves aswell. The hysteria and the anxiety.
Seriously hacks me off. We are all supposed to get it. Most of us will get it mildly and be ok.

This hysteria that it means death is just not true.

It’s down to the media scaremongering. I was absolutely terrified too and it was giving me anxiety ( I am not an anxious person!!) until I caught it myself. Luckily I was one of the 80% mild cases and it was definitely NOT the most ill I have been in my life - not pleasant but I feel SO SO much better about it and less anxious now having had it (or what I think was it). However it IS ridiculously contagious - firstly in the way I caught it and secondly I gave it to my mum while dropping shopping off and standing away from her for a few minutes. She’s in her 70s but fortunately she’s had it fairly mildly too and is getting over it. Now I feel I’ve had it I’m not petrified to set foot outside or go to a shop etc.

"This hysteria that it means death is just not true."

Well it has meant death for 30,000 people who wouldn't have died if it didn't exist in the world.

And lots more with unpleasant hospital experiences, or who have been very unwell at home.

And of course the certain knowledge that without lockdown you could multiply that number by 10.

And all the while young, healthy people wondering what the fuss is about. Well, not everyone is young, not everyone is healthy, and some of us have loved ones with vulnerabilities even if we aren't worried about ourselves.

With 8 vulnerable family members, I am not willing to risk their lives on the hope that 'most people' are fine. And I don't feel unintelligent because of it.