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.

Pigoons.

You can’t divide the size of the country by the number of people to work out the population density.
Iceland for example on that basis would be extremely sparsely populated, however it is not as most inhabitants live in Reykjavik.

Sweden is very comparable to the UK as the vast majority of the population live in urban areas - Stockholm has a similar population density to London.

Hope this helps

Sorry I don't have time to read 33 pages, but I agree with the OP. Good point, well made.

Death was so prevelant in the Victorian times people were pretty comfortable with it.

Oh FFS the Victorians invented mourning garb. Queen Victoria spent the rest of her life in widow's weeds after Albert died. The Victorians were not at all comfortable with death and instigated a lot of formal mourning practises around it.

@RaspberryToupee

Wonderfully put 💖

Death was so prevelant in the Victorian times people were pretty comfortable with it.

What a load of rubbish!!! They may have perhaps expected it to happen more than we do now, but "comfortable" - nonsense!

I'd never even heard of the 1969 Hong Kong flu pandemic, but conservative estimates put the global death toll at 1million+. Why didn't people lockdown and panic back then?

That was 1m deaths in two years. With Covid-19 there are been 300,000 deaths in a couple of months with worldwide lockdown so clearly a lot more infectious and deadly.

@bd67thSaysReinstateLangCleg - well said. I was thinking of all the mourning rituals when I wrote my post, but forgot to mention them.

HelloMissus I’ve noticed that for the people who declare their commitment to lockdown is because they care about others, there is no engagement with regards to the real and awful problems people are experiencing because of it.
These problems are simply dismissed as inconveniences or minimised as not as important as potential COVID deaths.
It’s the opposite of caring for others.

So true.

I've noticed, in my local Covid Mutual Aid group (so people who, by definition, have signed up to actually help others) there's a quiet disagreement/scepticism about the rules. People are (generally) sticking to them, but not reporting breeches. Overall the focus is on helping people in whatever way, not just a panic covid reaction.

mathanxiety LOL, after how many years of austerity and one Tory government voted in after another, as well as Brexit - the crap from the above paragraph has been going on for years.

Yes, and it's going to get worse. But it makes the Tories reaction in all this even more bizarre - they don't care about people dying, why care now when it's covid?

DV isn't new. MH destroyed by the stress of austerity and joblessness and chronic health conditions and DV isn't new. Massive underfunding and systemic financial problems in the NHS (because taxes are Bad) isn't new and neither are the attendant delays in diagnosis and treatment, and other totally unnecessary casualties of England's insistence on blaming the poor for their own predicaments. Now, because the economy isn't working for the comfortably off any more, all of this is suddenly a problem?

The people I know who are struggling most as a result of the lockdown are not the (formerly/currently) comfortably off. It's the people already struggling for the reasons you mention. A friend has had her DC taken into care because she couldn't cope when her informal support network disappeared due to lockdown. My own mental health has reached near suicide at points, and mental health services cannot help - what's tipped me over is the lack of social interaction, being unable to see loved ones, lack of hope for the future including to meet someone and have DC.

The people who were already suffering are being made to suffer. And it will be the same people suffering in the subsequent recession, which will no doubt be used to justify further attacks on the welfare state and any social progress we've made since the Victorian era.

The difference is that the lockdown will hurt/kill the isolated and the poor. Whereas covid (mainly) hurts/kills the medically vulnerable and the old. I guess the decision was made that the latter groups get more public sympathy. As you say, the poor are blamed for their predicament, the isolated won't have anyone who'll make a fuss on their behalf. So we chose to sacrifice them.

Also, I feel like our modern entertainment culture, films, TV etc has so much end of days/ apocalypse style content these days. Maybe this has unconsciously fed into the fear?

When I saw people stockpiling in masks prior to lockdown it was reminiscent of this apocalypse genre entertainment culture. I'm thinking of shows like The Walking Dead and movies like 28 days later.

oralengineer you don't understand how lockdown restricts the spread of infection but never mind...

Peak was before lockdown, or very shortly after it, showing that it wasn't necessary: theconversation.com/coronavirus-the-uk-could-be-over-the-peak-136757

That's your evidence that lockdown was unneccary? A 3 week old article in the conversation speculating that the peak may have been before lockdown?

The latest data is available up to yesterday with date of death.

www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/

The peak of confirmed cases was 8/4/20 (15 days after lockdown) at around 900 deaths. At that point we weren't doing community testing and thousands of deaths were missed, so it's very possible that the real peak was later.

I find your confidence that the vastly more qualified people than you who advise on public health and have access to far better information are wrong, and you are right, to be laughable.

The difference is that the lockdown will hurt/kill the isolated and the poor. Whereas covid (mainly) hurts/kills the medically vulnerable and the old. I guess the decision was made that the latter groups get more public sympathy. As you say, the poor are blamed for their predicament, the isolated won't have anyone who'll make a fuss on their behalf. So we chose to sacrifice them

The poor are at higher risk of death from Covid as well.

I agree OP. Totally 100% agree

Yesterday, I was literally attacked on a WhatsApp group for my children's primary school. They were all saying that they aren't sending their kids back, it's the worst thing ever blah blah blah. I commented really nicely and tried to reassure them by saying that at the school I teach in and am covering 2 days a week, that we haven't had any outbreaks and all kids are fine.

They were like a pack of dogs on me ....I honestly am looking at changing my children's school as they were so nasty to me. And for what? Giving a reassuring opinion as someone who is currently in a school for 2 days a week.

The whole thing is a shit show. I don't even have the words for it all anymore . But it's certainly made me not want to engage with humans anymore!

But it makes the Tories reaction in all this even more bizarre - they don't care about people dying, why care now when it's covid?

Covid kills the old. Covid kills Tory voters.

Re Hong Kong flu and other earlier pandemics: in this pandemic, global air travel is affordable and accessible to a higher proportion of the world's population than ever before. This means that corona spreads between countries and continents like never before.

@TurtleTortoise yeah, the mentally ill have never been a sympathetic group for the media. I thought things were getting better in recent years, but feel like Covid has brought up all the old prejudices about whether mental health issues are 'real' illness, compared to Covid.

I agree. It's total insanity. The government have handled this appallingly which hasn't helped. We are not going to have another lockdown even if r rises (this is not lockdown). We have to learn to live with this virus and its consequences.

@MH111111

My original post about Sweden was expressed badly. Sweden population density is different to the UK
I am aware that Stockholm has a higher population density but the cities in Sweden tend to have lower populations than equivalent urban areas in the UK. Goeteborg for example is half the population size of Birmingham.The population of Stockholm is only about 2.5m including the outer urban areas - so still not comparable to the UK.

If you are interested see
worldpopulationreview.com/countries/sweden-population/

OP - are you an epidemiologist?

What bemuses me is the difficulty that people seem to have between differentiating between:

1. High Risk (people over 75) and Very Low Risk (people under 18) but instead lump them all in the same basket.

1. The inability to realise that lockdown also has some risk (reduced healthcare such as cancer diagnosis, decreased fitness, increased weight, reduced vitamin D levels all of which are known to increase mortality). So it has to be a balance between risk of premature deaths as a result of lockdown versus reduced deaths from coronavirus if we continue lockdown. Given the media headlines it is easy to see why we fall into the trap of thinking the only deaths occuring are due to coronavirus but this is simply not true.

but we are all in this together

I'm not in anything with anyone. I'm sick of these slogans that are being thrown about to make everyone feel like they're in some sort of war.

The whole camaraderie of it all is actually giving me the dry boak.

I am 44, fairly fit, healthy, worked as a cleaner 6 days a week so on the go all the time. Was not worried about getting CV as ' it mainly affects the elderly and sick'.

I have had CV for 9 weeks now. I am lucky to still be here. I still can't breathe right, I still have burning in my chest and back.

Yes, I understand we need to get back to things, but all of you saying it will mild if you get it, you just don't know whether it will be you it affects badly OR for a longer period of time.

I thought I would breeze through it, how wrong was I.

I’ve never read so many ill informed posts!

New Zealand and Germany took action to lockdown quickly. Deaths low. Economy not as hard hit. Able to return to normality sooner than us.

No we are not all going to get it. Herd immunity is not the answer now or in the long term. My best friend and my mother would be dead if that was the case.

You all need to read more and get better informed.

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Image shows deaths per day worldwide and causes.