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.

Tbh, I felt like I was already living in the twighlight zone pre-lockdown, anyway. The world was hurtling towards disaster one way or the other, but economics said we should shove our fingers in our ears and shout, “Nah, nah, nah, we’re not listening!” The modern world is apparently poor at dealing with environmental pollution and destruction, climate change, gross inequality, habitat destruction, over-population, and pandemics. But hey, let’s all get back to “normal” as fast as possible, so that we can continue to do virtually nothing about all our other problems, because we don’t know how to deal with any of them without wrecking our economies.

@Annamarria14

“I saw one MP saying that he knows there will be inquiries into govenrments all around the world after this.”

Is there a link? This needs to happen.

@walkaround I haven't seen my family in three months, (2 hours away) because I dont drive and we are not allowed to take public transport AT ALL in Ireland. You think its okay for that to go on a lot longer?

Also in reference to other illnesses not being treated and the results of this: A very close work colleague was diagnosed with prostate cancer in Feb. He spoke to his consultant on Wed's and was told his radiotherapy will be pushed back until October at the earliest.... The earliest!!! He is resigned to the fact there are others in a more serious abx urgent position than him, but he's also petrified of the thought of it accelerating. He's been told he will have a scan in JULY to see how he's doing... Fingers crossed he doesn't progress quickly 🙄

There are a lot of Irish families who will never see their loved ones again thanks to covid 19.

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.

This is an absolutely spectacular example of false equivalency.

Measles has had a vaccine since the 1960's. And before that, it was an established disease, most kids caught it, meaning that a large portion of the population had already had it and were immune.

So even though measles was objectively a "worse" disease, it wasn't novel and outbreaks tended to be staggered, so there was never going to be a situation where an entire massive population all suddenly got it at once and started dying and overwhelming hospitals.

Covid19 is NOVEL. This is a really, really important point. There aren't generations of people with existing immunity built up.

So it's a highly infectious disease, where a significant proportion of cases will end up in hospital and absolutely nobody is immune to it. That's basically the holy trinity for shit hitting the fan.

Lockdown is not a new concept. There have been other lockdowns in the past for novel pathogens, just not in your lifetime, OP. And sure, lockdown isn't a perfect situation but without it, this disease would rip exponentially through society, middle ages style. The economy would still tank in a different way, through a sudden spike of mass illness and hospitalisation of the workforce. That 1-2% mortality rate would shoot up because there wouldn't be enough healthcare resources to treat everyone who was sick, so people who might have otherwise survived with medical treatment would die. We'd see a knock on mortality effect from hospitals being overwhelmed.

I'm seeing a lot of people who are starting to think it's not worth it and they're saying "but oh look, it's actually not that bad". This is really flawed reasoning. Tens of thousands are dead even despite the lockdown. Without the lockdown, without social distancing, that figure would be unmanageably greater. We are currently living some approximation of the best case scenario. I'm sorry that it still sucks but the alternative is worse.

I’ll make you laugh at the stupidity of some people....

I work in a large bank so obviously dealing with customers day in day out and handling tens of thousands of pounds worth of notes each day.

Worked there for years and years so I’m used to not touching my face etc and keeping my hands firmly on my desk. I view it as working in dirt and I wouldn’t touch my face, hair or eat anything until my hands have been thoroughly washed. As soon as I get home the clothes go on the wash and I have a shower. My kids are not allowed to touch me when I’ve got my uniform on.

So it’s likely that at some point in the last few months- my hands will have come in to contact with the virus.

So an elderly woman comes in, gloves on, so I applaud her for her efforts, as she was clearly in the vulnerable category.

It was her turn so she moved forward took her plastic gloves off WITH HER TEETH 😳 and looked in her bag for her purse then put her gloves back on.

I mean... for real?!!

I then had another man who took no notice of the circles they are supposed to stand in. He came to my till poking his head through and bending down through the smallish hole in the glass. And continued to lean down and peer through and breath through. I told him he needs to step back.

The amount of folk that come in the bank fit things they could easily phone up about......

It’s beyond frustrating!!

I have family and friends in Sweden, and they told me that their lives went on exactly the same as before. There was no lockdown there

I have colleagues and friends in Sweden and they aren't saying that their lives are exactly the same as before at all.

Can I state very clearly here that the model that predicted half a million deaths has now been shown not to be accurate in any way. That's to be expected - it was based on practically no data at all, it was almost completely guesswork, and it was there to predict the worst case scenario, which absolutely no one could be certain of. ALL OF THE EVIDENCE, which we now actually have, shows that with just social distancing and care around hygiene, like Sweden, the virus is controlled.

For people who need to hear it: If you are generally healthy, especially if you are under 45, you should not be afraid of covid. You may be very unlucky and be one of the very small number who gets seriously ill or dies, but the chances of that are tiny - less than the many many other risks you face day to day. You don't need to fear it. You can live your life and there is a very very strong chance that you will be fine. You may get ill, and that won't be pleasant, but you have an extremely high chance of getting better. You may get infected and not even realise it.

You may never come in contact with covid, never get infected. But you will be affected by it. Because lockdown has ensured that even if you are one of the many many people who will not suffer any ill-effects from the virus, you will still suffer. For a long time. Not from a virus, but from the reaction to the virus, where healthy people were made to stay at home as if they were ill. For months. So it didn't matter if you were sick or not, as far as the world was concerned you had to act as if you were, stop work, stop socialising, stop seeing your friends. You had to have your life damaged by it regardless of the actual affect it would have on you.

How are people not questioning this more? Why do people believe that government who brought us a system that declared people who were on death's door 'fit for work' knows what it's doing to the extent that they will comply with measures that are guaranteed to cause them huge problems for years??

What is going on?

@XingMing

@AlexaShutUp

Can I ask if those who think the lockdown is an overreaction know any young (below 60), healthy people who have died from Covid-19

I don't. In fact, I don't know a single person who has had Covid mildly, let alone died of it.

However, one of my best friends was killed in a car crash on his gap year. He and his girlfriend and two other friends had to be identified by dental records.

Another friend died of cancer in her 30s, when she had two small children.

Another friend has cancer and the treatment which might have shrunk it to the stage where it would be operable has been stopped because of Covid. She has three children under 14.

A colleague of XH's was involved in a car accident in his 30s. He survived. His wife and two children died at the scene.

A friend's son took his own life as a teenager. Another friend's son died in an accident on holiday (drinking was involved).

My mum's best school friend died of leukaemia when they were 20. Mum is in her 70s now and still misses her.

These are hideous, horrendous, unthinkable things that I just happen to know about. I have other friends who have had similar experiences. They are gut-wrenchingly horrendous.

It would be sort of tempting never to get in a car, never to go anywhere, never to have a drink, never to breathe the same air as anyone else - never mind go to a big public space. I was in Brick Lane minutes before the nail bomb went off (if anyone remembers that).

But we just can't live our lives on the basis of fear. We make risk assessments every single day, especially as parents. We cannot just carry on living in terror and hiding away from one of a million things that might harm us.

OF course there will be enquiries, both the UK and the Scottish Governments are already talking about holding their own.

There will be enquiries, and then the governments will do what they always do, which is to effectively go 'Ok then', shrug, and fail to implement a single recommendation because of cost. Just like the UK government did when there was a Pandemic exercise in 2016.

@mathanxiety the numbers of deaths are really low in Ireland.

@Annamaria - no, I would much rather stick my fingers in my ears and shout out that I’m not listening, so that my life can go back to normal and my dh can get back to his job that is impossible to do during the pandemic, even though I know that in the longer term, normality will also ruin the lives of future generations. At least it won’t ruin my life now, though - and after this temporary aberration due to the pandemic, we’ll all be back to messing things up in other ways, anyway...

Thanks to the poster who linked to lockdownskeptics.org

This even shocked me!

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Dr Jeannette Young, the Chief Health Officer of Queensland in Australia, has told the Brisbane Times that she urged the state’s premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, to shut down schools in order to send a “message”, not because she thought it was scientifically advisable. Here are the key paragraphs:

Dr Young told Ms Palaszczuk to shut down schools on March 26th.

She says while evidence showed schools were not a high-risk environment for the spread of the virus, closing them down would help people understand the gravity of the situation.

“If you go out to the community and say, ‘this is so bad, we can’t even have schools, all schools have got to be closed’, you are really getting to people,” Dr Young says.

“So sometimes it’s more than just the science and the health, it’s about the messaging.”

Lets ask everyone on this thread. Does anyone know anyone who has died of Coronavirus?

I don't

I absolutely agree OP - the hysteria from otherwise healthy, working age people is utterly disproportionate. People seem to think that it’s a death sentence for anyone who catches it.

The “medicine” we are applying is so much worse than the disease. Our children will be paying for it for decades.

The extremely vulnerable can continue to shield (if they want to), everyone else needs to get on with it.

I do.

I also know of three more confirmed cases who have since, thankfully, recovered.

Postponed diagnosis and surgery is par for the course for the NHS even at the best of times, Whattodowhattodooo. The UK has the worst cancer outcomes among seven developed countries.

www.bbc.com/news/health-49661516

All the young people leaving university, school and college, with little job prospects, what a price to pay, They have the least risk to coronvirus but their futures are screwed.

Perhaps consider whether you are suffering from hysteria.

It won't be the government dishing out millions , it will be us, our children and out grandchildren paying it off through taxes for many many years

@Whattodowhattodooo

Yet, we clap every Thursday at 8pm. Give the nurses and doctors on the frontline a pay raise and end the hypocrisy of worshipping the NHS.

We’ve been clapping every night while millions of people are out of work. The entire population has been forced to stay in their homes for weeks. Thousands have had medical treatments and appointments postponed. Thousands who don’t have Covid-19 are dying at home because they’re not getting medical help. The NHS sent Covid-19 patients back to their care homes where the virus spread like wildfire.

I have not clapped. And will not clap for this lunacy.

@XDownwiththissortofthingX thank you. Can I ask you what age they were

AnnaMaria

I do and others extremely close to dying as well.

Cantata

I'm really glad you're still on MN. I nearly left myself yesterday after seeing a post saying we can't meet parents in back gardens because we're idiots.

I remember the nail bombs very well.

I don't know how the UK will recover from this in so many ways. It's hard because I feel like there's nowhere to go that isn't doom and gloom but knowing that posters like you are around makes me feel better.

Truth is we should have locked down far sooner and it would have been far shorter as a result. This talk about flattening the curve infuriated me. The curve should never have been allowed to get so steep in the first place!!
We missed an opportunity. We are an island nation (like NZ who handled things differently and are now out of lockdown). And could have stopped travel in and out and locked down internally far sooner. We twiddled our thumbs and carried on stressing about Brexit.
So YABU up to a point.