I think I was naive.

[Gatorgator]

In my head - when this started - twelve weeks was worst case scenario. I knew the virus wouldn’t go away obviously, but I thought after twelve weeks the nhs would be better prepared, we’d know more about the virus and there would be a degree of acceptance that we just have to live alongside it and know there’s an elevated risk. I’m in an at risk category so I’m not just dismissing this risk.
However instead it seems that we are going to live like this indefinitely. I didn’t think theatres, sporting events etc would be open for a long time, nor did I think the travel industry would pick back up, but I did think I’d be able to visit my elderly parents who live two miles down the road.

Now it seems like this is the new normal. All meetings are going to be virtual. We are having (unsuccessful) virtual play dates with other children. The few friends I’m still communicating with I’m mainly messaging but really - if I’m never seeing them again then what’s the point?

There are a couple of big Christmas things nearby that are annual events and they are cancelled. More and more I’m coming to realise that this is it. This is in fact the new normal everyone keeps talking about. Only seeing the people you live with and being terrified to even leave the house to collect something essential like a prescription.

@ Hathor *And, in truth, our future as a society relies more on adequately educating our children, not in helping retired people to enjoy themselves.

If I had to pick a group who needed to make a sacrifice, I would pick the oldest generation*

I have no idea what you are talking about really. I am retired, I offer ( and I mean offer) lessons in English to refugees/asylum seekers to try and maintain their level of spoken English, I offer on line tuition to local children who want to maintain or extend their knowledge, I offer dog walking, I have cleaned a small communal space for children to play in, I care for my elderly parent, I help out my adult kids, I have a DBS and food hygene Cert and I am working on the idea of a food/play idea. Oh and I cook and deliver meals to vulnerable people.

So please, when is it time to pull up the drawbridge?

Yes this is probably the first time we have dealt with pandemics this way op but I think this is a good thing, not a bad one, because for the. First time technology (and a social welfare system) has given us enough choice to make (to some extent) our own decisions....

Before if we were in 1918 dealing with the Spanish flue or 1320dealing with bubonic plague we would have had no choice other than to keep working and interacting with others every day despite the dangers because otherwise we would have starved to death!

Now at least most of us have some degree of choice to what level we follow the restrictions and what level of risk we feel we want to take. For example I think most people in your position with parents only two miles down the road will have gone to see them by now, even if only as part of their daily exercise and talking to them two metres away....

WW2 would have been far far worse for me than the current pandemic. Disclaimer: I wfh/house with garden

Instead of knowing 19 year old DS was safe (even if I couldn't see him for the duration of covid-19) he would be hundreds of miles away, likely being injured or killed, and I would have great difficulty in contacting him. I think we underestimate how terrible it all was

Randomer what sacrifice do you think older people should make?

For me, 9/11, 7/7 and the early days of AIDS (before people knew how to prevent transmission when prejudice in the workplace was truly horrific) were all worse than COVID19 in terms of anxiety. Because we can do quite a lot to prevent transmission and stay safe, so I feel far more in control now.

@bluebeck no one is denying that. The point is that it isn't a helpful comparison in any way.

I find the war comparisons quite helpful actually. It has helped me get my head around the idea that we are in this for the long haul, it's not just a few weeks.

If people could survive World War 2 with no internet, restricted food rations, limited information, no NHS, and the constant worry that their loved ones could be dying either in a foreign land (which would have felt far more foreign at that time) or closer to home due to bombings, then I feel we are resilient enough to get through this.

I do appreciate others might not find it as helpful, for their own reasons, but yes, for some of us it actually is a helpful comparison.

I think it is important to use whatever freedoms/dispensations there are to connect with other people in RL, rather than just virtually. So if you.can walk to a park, arrange to have a longer chat, sitting on a rug (both have your own rug), your own thermoses, drinks, biscuits. If you are two or even 3 metres away, you are being responsible, and you are benefitting both your physical and mental health. This goes for a teenager too, or a young person of say 7 or 8. Their parents could stay further away so you are tecnically only meeting one person outside your household, but what a difference that distanced meeting between two 7 year olds might make, for even just 20 mins. I think we are tying ourselves in knots here, and staying 2 m away from a friend (that is.the length of a dining table btw) in a public place is going to help all of.us get.through this.
But we are all feeling so guilty now that this is the opposite of stay at home. But it doesnt contradict it.

Also want to remind people who are vulnerable.that.vitamin d supplements and 30 mins minimum sunshine 11-3 may almost.certainly boost your immune system against serious case of covid, whilst not preventing you from catching it.

older people ( older than what?) should like everybody else adhere to the guidelines.

This is the weird and wonderful world of social media but even so I think......let them stay at home going quietly mad is a bit of an ask.

@happypoobum I’m not convinced that the internet is a positive. While it allows us to stream Netflix and talk to people the 24 hour news coverage and tripe all over social media makes it harder. The war would have been even worse I think had the internet existed.

Tea tea i couldnt agree more

You'd be surprised just how many people are loving lockdown and want it to continue indefinitely (but with their local pub open)

In these conversations there is a huge, understandable emphasis on people not being able to mix with their usual circle. I understand that - I am missing my friends, and my boyfriend - my children are of an age to miss their friends desperately. We would all love to see extended family. But what is really blowing my mind, with no sense of when this will change, is how social circles are supposed to change and evolve. What will happen to the world if meeting new people becomes intrinsically scary - borderline legal? how will people fall in love? Form bands, or other collaborations? Meet the people in the community who become friends, babysitters, gardeners, decorators, employers etc - you know how sometimes these things so luckily fall into place? It is a grim and miserable thought that the people who are in. your contacts list right now are ALL YOU HAVE FOR THE FORSEEABLE FUTURE. Not that there is anything wrong with them. not that I'm not dying to see the people I love first, and see my kids having fun with other kids again. but. it's a really horrible thought. Bleak and sad. And very .... sterile. not how people are supposed to be.

you know when you follow a recipe that says "form a well and gradually combine the wet ingredients with the dry"? Life is supposed to be like that - you have a constant mix of the established, the new-ish, and the newly incorporated, who will become established one day. how are you supposed to go on without this mix of inflluences?

This isn't the new forever normal. I don't live with my partner and I'm not spending an indefinite length of 'new normal' not seeing him. This stage will end. And I can't wait.

I am one of those who would be much happier to learn how to live with the virus and get on with life

I have young children but I recognise that the risk is low and I'm more concerned about what they are missing out on, their education and mental health. It's ridiculous that friends in their 30's are terrified, saying they are not leaving the house until their is a vaccine.

Blue beck
I have to agree with you
I grew up in the shadow of the aftermath of ww11 and believe me there was a great fear still around.

Our town was shelled and bombed a lot in both world wars and the only reason I am here today is because the shell or bomb that landed in the front room of my grandparents house either didn’t explode or they Were huddled away in their bomb shelter and my father was safe to grow up, meet mum, marry and have me.

Both sets of grandparents knew great hardship. Terrible food shortages the like of which I hope we never see..Thankfully, my grandads had done their bit in Ww1 and we didn’t have anyone actively fighting in ww11 but my uncle wasn’t allowed to fight on account of his poor eyesight. So was to be sent to the mine. He didn’t want to go down t’pit..so was sent to prison instead, much to my familily’s eternal shame.

This is a doddle compared to what families endured way back then.

We’ve just come from a drive. Had a lovely forest walk surrounded by countryside. On the way back to the car smelled the delicious smell of Indian food cooking. Put our order in and sat and ate it in the car.
A fabulous end to a fabulous day ...and not a bomb or bullet in sight.
I’d choose this any day Over the war days..especially knowing my family were safe in their homes..and I can swing by and see them anytime I choose.

So, back to those of you who wish to corale " older people" in favour of kids.......any thoughts?

try Yad Vesham for inspiration.They don't advocate getting rid of old people.

@randomer surely trying to extend lockdown measures for longer for those at higher risk, including the over-70s, is saving them and not getting rid of them?

It's not fair, but unfortunately it is the virus that's doing the age-based discrimination, not the young. It's also not fair that perfectly healthy teenagers with full lives just like yours are under total shielding isolation due to a past organ transplant and will be staying at home for the foreseeable.

It's particularly unfair for the healthcare workers who get infected by high risk people who chose to take part in unnecessary interactions because they couldn't manage a few more months without going to the shops or seeing friends. These healthcare workers then pass on the illness to others and keep it circulating in the community and potentially die with high viral load. In a pandemic, it's not about your personal choice or your full and interesting life.

You mentioned whether it should be the same for BAME people. The risk for over-65s is 34 times that of the working age population. BAME is 2.5. If someone told me that my risk was actually 34 times the average AND just like an over-65 on a pension, my income would remain the same if I stayed on lockdown a little longer than the rest of the country... Then yes, I'd stay home for my own sake, for that of my family, that of the NHS and to give the country a chance of getting new infections under control.

@Stuck, I am not advocating those in a higher risk group run amock.

Nor do I think this sort of thing is acceptable..If I had to pick a group who needed to make a sacrifice, I would pick the oldest generation

Imagine if I said I would pick the teens or the BAME or the under 5's?????

@helpfulperson

I think it's harder on the under 40s because they have never lived through huge quick changes to life before Those of us older remember the impact of AIDS, of 9/11, of lockerbie, of the miners strike. Those of us that did remember the feeling of nothing will be ever be the same but know things will settle down. In a year memories of how things used to be will be vague and we will adapt.

I lived through all of those events and they were nothing like this quite honestly. Lockerbie for instance was awful but so was the Boxing Day Tsunami - they were awful one off incidents which were tragic and very upsetting but really didn't affect pretty much everyone on the planet, far from it. This virus has far, far bigger ramifications than any of your examples.

I feel like at some point a critical mass of people will just snap psychologically if it goes on for too long. I feel like a spider scrabbling to get out of a jar at the moment :( every day I wake up and remember and it's horrible.

My DD said to me at the start of this that her generation (she is 16) would grow up with collective trauma afraid to be close to each other; the longer this goes on, the more I do think her ‘normal’ future is disappearing. It is exacerbated by the fact that we have all have covid 19 and although she had it mildly, she has lost a lot of weight, she has not regained physical fitness and she still gets odd chest pains. She was in tears yesterday after trying to get to grips with all the new work she is being given (her school moved them up a year on Monday and started classes). She is a resilient person but she has grown up with me as a single parent leaving an abusive marriage and her brother is on the autistic spectrum so lockdown is difficult.

There is simply no precedent in history for the way we as a society, national and international, are dealing with this pandemic. We did come to the conclusion the other day that the closest parallel we could think of was World War One - not because the situation was similar but because of the way people thought it would be over by Christmas and then it lasted four years. But even then the parallel only works on that point. There is no precedent for social distancing, self-isolation and lockdown on a large scale to contain a disease.

The only people who will be able to make some sense of it are the historians of the future. I saw a wonderful quote yesterday which was if I recall correctly - there is no path, paths are made by walking (Antonio Machado).

I would say the Spanish flu has more parallels, look, even social distancing and masks:

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/29/us-responses-1918-flu-pandemic-offer-stark-lessons-coronavirus-now

My DD said to me at the start of this that her generation (she is 16) would grow up with collective trauma afraid to be close to each other

That's quite worrying.

Yes, the Seattle comparison during Spanish flu is interesting, I saw a photo of people wearing masks then a couple of weeks ago. But it was a young couple stepping out together, and not walking two metres apart. So there were restrictions, quarantines and business closures but not lockdown and social distancing. It is the scale and extent which is unprecedented, I think.

I would need to go back and re-read what I used to know about the Black Death because I think you would have to go back that far.