I'm finding the reaction to covid utterly bizarre

[TheDailyCarbuncle]

If anyone had told me that healthy, fit people would willingly put their livelihoods at risk and deny their children an education for months on end, that they would send the country into recession putting healthcare, education and public services at risk for years and years to come to avoid getting a disease that had a very very small chance of killing them I wouldn't have believed it. If you'd said people would be afraid to talk to their healthy siblings I wouldn't have believed it.

I had measles in the 1980s as small child - the vaccination programme where I lived was slow to get off the ground - and it nearly killed me. In 1980 2.6 million people worldwide died of measles, a very large proportion of them children. No one ever considered a lockdown, it was never even suggested.

I think all the analysis of this situation in the coming years won't be about the pandemic, but about the contagion of fear that made people so terrified of something that wasn't a real threat to them that they created huge, long-lasting, in some cases devastating problems for themselves, problems that were nothing to do with their virus and everything to do with their reaction to the virus.

My main beef is that a lockdown of this scale would not have been necessary if the Gvt had thrown everything they had into finding cases, isolating them and tracing all contacts right from the beginning. And isolating everyone entering the country from hotspots. But they didn't, because to do so would have disrupted the economy - even families returning from Italy with symptomatic family members were told they were fine to go to school/work. And the lack of early action has meant we found ourselves in a situation where far more dramatic (and costly) action had to be taken.

They did fail us - although they were by no means the only Government to make a similar failure. But now we need to get numbers low enough that they can actually try to pursue that course... and the only way to do that is by suppressing infection by keeping us all apart.

Who compared it to road deaths ? Ridiculous in 2018 there were 1784

And hate to tell you they are not infectious..

For all we know it could turn out to have a higher mortality rate than the overall 1% estimate. There are different and conflicting indicators out almost every day. Or it could turn out to be way lower. Who knows. So I'm not exactly going around licking tube rails, but how do all the advocates of the lockdown propose getting back to being a productive society now that the media have worked everyone into a frenzy? The "lockdown" in a misnomer anyway, given it was used to describe China welding people into their apartments. It's interesting to note that Germany's timings and rules on restrictions to movement have almost exactly matches ours. And they have a very low death rate - because they can trace everyone and made the effort to do so. That is the key, not some insane blunt instrument with catastrophic collateral damage.
I mean in terms of stats, there are so many out there (from official sources) you can basically pick whatever proves the point you want to make. I'm not a scientist, but there is not one "science". You could look at the article on the BBC a few weeks ago where random testing in NYC suggests only about 20% of the population have been infected. So with a death rate of about 160 per 100,000 in the 45-65 age range, if you assume that would be a linear increase if the remaining 80% were infected, then in theory that's 640 per 100,000. So if the population is about 10 million, 64,000 people in the prime of their life could die in New York. Which sounds absolute terrible. But if I look up the stats on all cause mortality, I find this roughly matches the death rate in a given year in that age range in the US. It then becomes a more nuanced picture which makes me think we absolutely should be careful (because matching all cause mortality over a year with one single new disease in a few months means we operate in at least double the background risk of death), but we don't have to go flipping nuts. Nor inform on our neighbours, bleach a beach, or start swearing at children for not keeping their distance - which did actually happen to my sister.
www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page

Perfectly healthy people die every day in car accidents. We don't ban cars.

Taking this false analogy apart,

• We ban dangerous drivers.
• Cars are essential for some people, opening the pubs and clothes shops isn't.

A lot of elderly people die every year of pneumonia.

So let's add more dead people, yay! fucksake what is it with the false analogies?

• We have the hospital capacity to treat those elderly people, we don't have the capacity to deal with large numbers of corona cases.
• Pneumonia is far less transmissible than corona.
• Most pneumonias are bacterial and can be treated with antibiotics, CV is a virus and antibiotics won't touch it.
• Most pneumonia cases are secondary infections after a cold or flu. We already try to protect at-risk groups from pneumonia by immunising them against flu. There is no vaccine for CV.

Haven't RTFT but this is textbook reaction from the public. When the government take measures that work, it appears the measures were unnecessary, because the deaths have been averted.

I also am puzzled at the people saying such a small % of people die. Case mortality in the UK is over 14%. I realize there's a lack of testing, which skews this number, but it's pretty scary. It is not 1%, like we all thought 2 months ago.

The UK has the highest death toll in Europe, almost 35 000. Presumably the expected toll without lockdown was in the 6 figures. And people are drawing a comparison to domestic violence? How many people are we talking 100? Doubt it's that much. I am not being cavalier about DV it's horrendous if 1 person dies -- but the goal here has to be preventing as many deaths as we can.

Thanks @guylan! yes Peter makes more sense!! Thanks for your wise contributions, have spotted them on other threads too. Night!

Reassuring to read so many reasoned responses contesting the OP’s position– the thread was beginning to read like an advert for the so-called ‘Freedom Movement’ lockdown protests - the timing is remarkably convenient given that some of these are scheduled for tomorrow!

The deaths from cancer that are currently going undiagnosed will probably be in their thousands

The only death I’m personally aware of that’s related to cancer is a friend who died a few weeks ago, he was beating the cancer it was the Coronavirus he picked up attending his hospital treatments that killed him. And sorry to disappoint but he was nowhere near 70 and had two kids, for those of you who seem to think anyone elderly is just ripe for culling.

Since many cancer patients are frail and/or immunosuppressed any assessment of missed diagnoses would surely need to be balanced by an assessment of the risk of death or disability during subsequent treatment if the virus spreads unchecked?

If people are really so concerned about lockdown, why not write to your MPs, and protest the appalling disorganisation of the current government’s approach, demand adequate resources for all sectors with vulnerable workers, decent testing, decent tracking and tracing. All the things that have made/are making it possible for many other countries to move towards resuming normality.

And as for the poster who equated wearing masks with fear, I wear one because if there’s even a slim possibility that it may slow down the spread of the virus, particularly as any of us could be asymptomatic carriers without knowing it, then I think it’s worth doing. Fascinating how many people will wear pretty much anything as long as it’s in fashion or cheap in Primark, yet wearing a mask or a simple face covering that might stop them making another human being ill, or worse die, is too much to ask.

@Pickles89

I think we should continue to shield the most vulnerable , Whatever age they are .

That is important.

Agreed op. We need to learn to live with the virus - we may never get a vaccine. We can’t go on like this.

We're not just talking about domestic violence deaths, although that is horrific enough, what about all the treatments and diagnosis and checkup appointments that have been cancelled. And the surgeries. The backup after this amount of lockdown will be disastrous.

The mortality rate is not 14%.

"Maybe the answer is for all those who want business as usual to get deliberately exposed to the virus."

I'd agree but 15% of them would end up in hospital and the nhs wouldn't cope. They'd also pass it to keyworkers, and then lots of them wouldn't be able to go to work and keep things running. I wish people would realise that it's not just about being brave about catching it yourself.

My aunt died today of coronavirus. Her (young) carer died earlier in the week from coronavirua. Our loved ones lives are far more important. YABU.

Op I salute you!

@Teapot13

Correction we do Not have the highest death rate in Europe per million .plus we are not reporting in the same way .

Plus we are one of the highest density populations .

'We don't ban cars'

But we do insist on training and a driver's license before people can use them. We do set strict rules about where and under what circumstances and how fast people are allowed to drive cars. We set safety standards for the vehicles.

If we knew as much about the risk factors for Covid as for car accidents, we might indeed be better at preventing it, even before there's a vaccine. The number of fatal car accidents has gone down dramatically since the 1960s, despite their being more cars around, so we've put our knowledge to good use in preventing road deaths.

But let us not forget that the number of deaths from Covid this year has already greatly exceeded the number of road deaths per year, even at a time when there were more road deaths.

@Chickenwing. Sorry for your loss . We have lost 4 members of our extended family . It’s brutal .

If this is such a big silly fuss over nothing, why have so many nurses and doctors died?

Think 24 news and social media obsession has a lot to answer for.

I don't know how many times it has to be explained that the lockdown, in the UK at least, is not aimed at preventing deaths. Not at all. It's aimed at slowing down deaths

I can't be bothered to read the whole thread so I'm just gonna assume plenty of people have told you how wrong you are here, OP?

Christ I can't be bothered to read beyond p2. If you can understand that vulnerable people can be worried, understand that they are worried about you. You thinking that social distancing is unnecessary, you demanding that everyone gets back on public transport, you thinking that people don't need to wear masks, whatever. Everything that pushes people back into closer contact that will spread the virus more widely and rapidly, which threatens everyone - people who know they are vulnerable, people who don't know that they are, because we have not had time to work out yet how this virus affects people and who it affects worse. And you think you could have your nice life back if we all braced up and ignored it. You stupid stupid innumerate twats.

@Teapot13 and others, I highly recommend listening to the radio 4 programme More or Less on the subject of case vs infection fatality rates. They think the latter is probably around 0.8% based on research, but that's not perfect.

I read this a few months back and found it a very interesting alternative take on what's happening (or was about to happen at that point) www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/202002/the-coronavirus-is-much-worse-you-think%3famp

As for lockdown, I have vacillated between opinions on this but I do believe that getting covid is a bit like Russian roulette as it's an unpredictable and still relatively little known about virus. So on balance I'd rather not. But I'm also not going to live in fear of contracting it.

My main issue is how the media and the government have handled the whole thing. Leading with daily deaths every news bulletin (which are often meaningless figures depending on how they're calculated) and the absolute car crash of daily briefings.

I too am reluctant to send my y1 child back, but due to the potential for trauma due to social distancing. It worries me how quickly our children have assimilated these rules. Hopefully they'll unlearn them as quickly, but I'm not so sure. And I'm a mental health professional who is fed up of all the assumptions that everyone will have ptsd after this.

What this pandemic has generally done is exacerbate any preexisting problems. Be that with the NHS, social care, or individually with mental health or poverty. Those issues were crippling many people before this, lockdown or no lockdown.

...'just because we managed to avoid bodies in temporary morgues...'

We haven't avoided this though. We had a marquee erected in my hospital to house the overflow of people dying. We weren't the only ones. It's still there but not as full.