Am I missing something?

[theginge]

I feel like I'm the only person wondering whether covid is the biggest threat now...

Everyone is worrying about lockdown being eased 'too soon' and for some I understand this is a valid concern. The deaths that have happened are really sad and it's horrendous for families to loose their loved ones but there seems to be little context. The general public have been scared by the media propaganda and have lost all ability to reason and self regulate.

My primary concern is the other effects this is having on life. My middle child is in reception and therefore entitled to return to school. He desperately needs it from a social and emotional point of view. The risks to me seem quite low (we live in a small village where there have been not a single case and the school is small and in the village)and our local hospital has never been working at capacity at anytime during this pandemic. The issue I have and the reason I've chosen to keep him off school is the way that schools will re-open. The school sent home a huge list of changes they will implement which in all honesty sound horrific. The children are being treated like leppars. This is going to have a huge effect on all of these children long term and (in my mind) be far more damaging than catching covid for us. What children need to protect them now is some normality.

My baby is 6 weeks old, he hasn't met any of our family. He is no longer a newborn and they have missed this - I can never get this time or opportunity back. Again, a huge sacrifice for what I deem to be a small risk.

My husband lost his job the same day as our baby was born - he was made redundant because his employer could no longer trade and the business collapsed. His job was skilled but very specific so will be difficult to find a new job in the sector.

Every measure in place seems to go against natural human nature and I'm just really fed up of making such big sacrifices for a virus that has a mortality rate of 0.2%.

The lockdown was put in place to not overload the health care system and not to get rid of the virus!!

Don't even get me started on the whole 'clap for carers' thing. It's just annoying and serves absolutely no purpose. Nobody has been forced into working for the NHS or in social care - it's 100% an informed choice (I'm a nurse and many of my colleagues are of the same opinion!).

The mother has done this to her child because she is terrified of the virus. She is terrified of the virus because of relentless government propaganda that convinced her that ‘the virus doesn’t discriminate’ - even though it very clearly does, and her children were pretty much safe all along.

The “relentless propaganda” also says exercise once a day. You can’t base policy on people who act in the extreme.

The virus is airborne. We know this now, in spite of some trying to ban this information early on when others warned of it, but this is not the point

This virus, so far, was at its peak in March and April. But because governments took action, lockdowns, we have passed the first peak. We are now in a phase of below R1. This might only last a while, but whilst it does then we can lift some restrictions.

This means that life can, for a while, return to some kind of near normality. This might only last a few weeks but we can try to lift some restrictions and this includes some children going back to school...for a while

@Sadie789

If it was airborne everyone who worked indoors would have got it before lockdown.

If it was airborne there would be no way to contain transmission within hospitals (so the COVID and non COVID ward system all UK hospitals are using would be pointless).

People using any form of public transport would have got it at the start and continued to get it throughout lockdown and then more as lockdown eased.

None of these things are happening.

Before lockdown there was exponential growth as the virus was being freely passes around in the community.

Transmission is low in hospitals because staff follow the rules and have excellent infection control procedures which they stick to. They don't make up their own rules depending on how they feel

It’s not airborne, this isn’t an M Night Shalayman (sp) movie.

sadie I have tried to be polite to you but your willfull denial of the evidence is really pissing me off now....mainly because its people like you who are making this situation even harder than it needs to be ....and those of us who are taking a reasonable stance are picking up your slack. I'm fed up with doing that frankly and I just want something like my life back after a year of not having it. So can you please just have a think about that?
I'm ever hopeful.....
Off to bed now
Night all

It’s not airborne, this isn’t an M Night Shalayman (sp) movie

If its not airborne then why does government advice now tell us not to stand close to people who are talking? The advice specifically now mentions "talking"

At first the advice did not mention this but it does now.

The measles virus is an airborne virus. I'm not saying Covid19 is as infectious as measles but it is the case with some viruses

Ffs....I'm.pretty sure that the young people in my family will understand that these measures were taken to protect them and to protect the people that they love.

@WTF99 I can see where you’re coming from. I’d hope that our young people are altruistic enough to recognise that some degree of lockdown was necessary for the greater good. But none of this has happened in a vacuum; generational injustice has been a rising issue for a fair few years now, and Covid comes on top of Brexit and climate change (which everyone has suddenly stopped talking about). The young are set to be disproportionately affected by the economic and social fallout of lockdown. Already figures such as David Blunkett are warning that lockdown has set back educational equality by a decade. It’s a triple whammy for young people and I wouldn’t be surprised if they came out pretty angry on the other side.

Also it’s arguable whether lockdown is protecting children and young people, given how low risk they are and how they may be at relatively higher risk of child abuse, neglect, domestic violence, mental health issues and so on.

I agree with all you say OP The position I am in with an adult daughter in hospital and I have been unable to see her for months now. The suffering here is immense for me and her. My job is under threat because I have developed severe anxiety, and cannot work and there may not be a job to go finally as I work for a small charity and funding is at an all-time low. I live alone and am on tons of medications just to help with my anxiety now. I say this as a vulnerable person who has cancer. The lockdown feels like it is killing me on every front.

Also it’s arguable whether lockdown is protecting children and young people, given how low risk they are and how they may be at relatively higher risk of child abuse, neglect, domestic violence, mental health issues and so on.

Exactly

I've been one of the people on here warning about this virus from the early days. When peppers were laughed at
When people tried to get topics banned for "scaremongering"

I was all for a strict lockdown and still am when its necessary

People who warned
How infectious it is
How deadly it is
How its airborne an so on and they were right

BUT there are also risks in children being off school as well. It's about weighing up risk at a certain time

If we are now in a lower risk time, even if it only lasts a few weeks, then we should seize this chance and try to get children back into school. It might not last long, but at least it's something

*preppers, not peppers

Not many @WTF99

But more than people who have simply walked past a jogger.

What annoys me is the view that COVID is some kind of once in a generation or highly exceptional event when they are relatively common. There was the Hong Kong Flu in 1968 that killed 80k in the UK or the 1957 Asian Flu that killed 32k both at a time when the UK population was much smaller and in neither event was the UK locked down. What is different this time and what is once in a generation is the economic damage which is the worst in 300 years and will cause many more deaths through poverty and suicides plus the long term mental health and educational damage.

I'm not sure it's always about people being afraid of coming out of lockdown because of the virus. I wonder whether people's apprehension is more to do with a lack of trust in the government's ability to make the right decisions for us at this moment, where other countries are apparently now succeeding because their approach had been so different from the outset?

Also when people appear to oppose coming out of lockdown, are they really saying that, or is it that they're opposing a perceived lack of distancing? I am not at all bothered about catching coronavirus but I am still cautious about distancing and washing my hands. I think that given that the government doesn't know its arse from its elbow, and there is still quite a lot of inconclusive evidence, it's probably a good idea for us to still follow hygiene and social distancing practices. If not for us as individuals, at least for the sake of others. I feel that is quite different to not wanting lockdown to end.

I totally agree there are some very serious problems at present. But I don't solely blame lockdown for the number of social problems that we are talking about on this thread. I work in the public sector and these problems have been sadly apparent for quite some time - mental health issues; educational inequalities; families not coping; poverty. So I blame successive governments for creating the already very negative and damaging conditions that are compounded and magnified by lockdown.

I think we clearly did need to lockdown. The mortality rate might be quite low but the exponential growth was the problem. 1% of a lot of people is still a lot.

However I think we do now need to look at how much ordinary citizens can be expected to sacrifice to “protect the NHS”. Most deaths now are in care homes. Not that these people don’t matter but they are hardly out spreading the virus. Where I live not counting care home deaths there have been 80-odd deaths in a population of 180000. Most of them will have been older. Again, not that they didn’t matter, of course they do, but how much do our children, economy, jobs have to suffer to keep the virus at bay

What annoys me is the view that COVID is some kind of once in a generation or highly exceptional event when they are relatively common. There was the Hong Kong Flu in 1968 that killed 80k in the UK or the 1957 Asian Flu that killed 32k both at a time when the UK population was much smaller

But did they have the potential to kill half a million people in a country the population of the UK in the space of a few weeks.

These type of comparisons always seem to miss that point

When the virus was rampant in feb March. Were schools overrun with it?
We were not bothered then.

This is what I can’t get my head down.

The week before lockdown when I was already wfh, we were already not seeing people socially, my son’s school of 1600 kids had parents night, hundreds of kids and parents swilling around everywhere and no one seemed bothered. Now what will be 5 months down the line with much less virus they will only open for pupils part time? How does this make sense? Can anyone explain why it’s OK for our children to be let down like this?

I was thinking this today.
My dad can play golf but my kids can't play with anyone. They have seen no family or friends, been in no shops or parks, for 10 weeks.
The virus is almost no risk to them at all.
We would never let them get near older people, would not visit family. But to see a friend their own age from another low risk family, to play in a park.
And the sacrifices teenagers have made! And all the jobs lost.
It is starting to feel like we should have shielded vulnerable people somehow. They are isolated now, as they would have been anyway. Put in the support there.
I know it's an unpopular view, but I think there have been too many sacrifices by too many people.

@Flaxmeadow - of course both the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics had the "potential" to kill half a million people in the UK except they didn't. The mortality rate of both these pandemics were much higher than COVID although I recognise advances in medical care since then makes them difficult to compare. Interestingly they did develop a vaccine to the 1968 virus but by the time it was widely available the virus had burned itself out (herd immunity) 4 months previously.

@SudokuBook

Can anyone explain why it’s OK for our children to be let down like this?

Because children don't vote and therefore politicians don't care about them.

I really think children and young people have been truly screwed by this event.

@Flaxmeadow - of course both the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics had the "potential" to kill half a million people in the UK except they didn't. The mortality rate of both these pandemics were much higher than COVID

Did they? They were nowhere near as contagious.

This virus is not the flu. It's much worse. Up to the 7th? of May. Covid19 if left unchecked, without lockdown, would have killed half a million people. Add to that the health service collapsing and the many more deaths that would have caused.

I agree with you, OP.

I think there's a middle ground here.

We needed to lockdown we weren't ready to cope with this and it bought us time. Of course now we have to try to get things back to as normal as we can, whilst taking sensible precautions. That is exactly where we are.

People aren't just blindly signing away their freedoms, I can't speak for everyone of course, but I genuinely thought about all the Government advice and followed it because after careful consideration I decided it was the most sensible thing to do. I'm relieved that, so far, it hasn't been as bad as first thought in terms of how the health service coped but I understand that this would have been very different if we had done nothing.

One other thing, schools were empty way before they were officially shut, because parents were concerned, there was a lot of criticism of keeping them open.

You can't please everyone, I don't know what the best way to deal with this was/is, but I will continue to assess government and scientific advice and follow unless I feel I'm more knowledgeable that the source of said advice.

Here here @poetryinaction

I have also experienced individuals who are literally diving into bushes to avoid the lepers (my children)

I completely agree with the bulk of your sentiment.
(Except working in the covid pandemic which has killed many health care workers wasn't exactly an informed choice when these professionals started training and working. So whilst I agree the clapping should end now, I think the sentiment of thanking these people for the extra risk they are taking (whilst the majority of others are hiding safely at home) is a nice and reasonable thing.
From an a&e doctor who never signed up to working with or bringing home a highly contagious virus to my family).