For the people who think they've been duped...

[mac12]

I'm not trying to start a bunfight but I'm just curious about this thought process. People who think they've been duped by coronavirus & think lockdowns were a hysterical over-reaction...

• what do you think is going on when countries like China haven't rolled back from their strong stance on this? Do you think it's just to save face? I mean would a country really take a wrecking ball to their economy to save face?
• why have countries like Israel or some US states, which did reopen, decide to start closing down again? Why wouldn't they just crack on and carry on with full reopening if it was so clear that they had been duped & it had all been an overreaction?
• why wouldn't all governments be taking the Sweden line? Our govt isn't averse to the odd U-turn, why wouldn't they do this if they genuinely thought it was safe and they had overreacted?

I'm just wondering why people think governments would persist with this if it was so obviously an overreaction?

This lockdown has taught me how reliant our economy is on consumer spending. I hadn't really thought properly about that before. I do think it is reasonable to question lockdown but I don't feel equipped to know what was or will be the right approach. I do think protect the NHS' was a strange slogan. Surely we should have been protecting people?

This virus could have been worse - it could have spread as quickly but have a higher mortality. In some ways we have been lucky (assuming it doesn't mutate) and I speak as someone whose mother died from COVID alone. The next virus might be a lot worse so what we need to do now is learn from this experience so we are prepared for the next pandemic. Including how our economy needs to change to meet future pressures.

My hope is a fairly limited lockdown might give us the time to develop treatments and/or vaccines.

Stockholm scales up to the U.K. equates to 100,000 deaths...

I don't know how that claim reconciles with the Statista plot, which suggests Sweden has had fewer deaths/100k persons than UK. Sweden is steadily declining now faster now compared to rest-Europe, and without local whackamole lockdown adjustments, afaik. Sweden is slowly moving down this league table.

@lljkk

Stockholm scales up to the U.K. equates to 100,000 deaths...

I don't know how that claim reconciles with the Statista plot, which suggests Sweden has had fewer deaths/100k persons than UK. Sweden is steadily declining now faster now compared to rest-Europe, and without local whackamole lockdown adjustments, afaik. Sweden is slowly moving down this league table.

Stokholm is the the capital city and Carbuncle was saying how wonderfully they dealt with coronavirus. This is far from the case. She used Stokholm (see her last few posts) to compare to the UK as people had rightly pointed out you couldn't compare a country like Sweden to the UK due to population density etc. The figures you show are for the country of Sweden.

I'm amazed that anyone thinks that Sweden has had an 'appalling' death rate.

Anyone who is honest with themselves would admit that they don't really care about 5,000 x 82 year olds dying of a respiratory virus, particularly ones they don't know. It's sad, but they wouldn't be willing to personally sacrifice a huge amount to save them. They've been trained by social media to say that it's a tragedy well worth the current scorched earth policy.

Presuming you believe that lockdowns prevent deaths, i.e. lots of elderly Scandinavians would have died of covid19 but were spared by the lockdown, you must also accept that there's a very good likelihood that they'll die this winter from seasonal flu or covid19? Whereas there are far fewer of this cohort in Sweden and therefore they will catch up with Sweden this winter?

Or maybe you have a laser-like focus on covid19 deaths and you're not worried about the non-covid19 deaths?

Anyone who is honest with themselves would admit that they don't really care about 5,000 x 82 year olds dying of a respiratory virus, particularly ones they don't know. It's sad, but they wouldn't be willing to personally sacrifice a huge amount to save them."

By that logic if we don't catch care about people we don't know we wouldn't have hospitals or emergency services. If we lived in small tribes like yesteryear personal sacrifices would be needed. Nowadays we pay taxes etc to look after other and pay people to do so.

What age do you think we should write people off / stop caring about them?

Lockdown was never intended to actually save lives. All it does is flatten the curve/spread out and delay deaths so as not to overwhelm NHS.

But NHS was never overwhelmed. So lockdown did not save lives.

Now, where did I say that they shouldn't have access to medical care?

They die despite their access to medical care. It's not without limits; sometimes people die.

@Refractory

Now, where did I say that they shouldn't have access to medical care?

They die despite their access to medical care. It's not without limits; sometimes people die.

I think you must be a conspiracy theorist

@askmehowiknow

Lockdown was never intended to actually save lives. All it does is flatten the curve/spread out and delay deaths so as not to overwhelm NHS.

But NHS was never overwhelmed. So lockdown did not save lives.

We'll never prove to anyone's satisfaction how many people would have died had we not locked down or had we locked down a week earlier, but there have been quite a lot of studies that suggest there's no correlation. That's before you take into account the financial implications & resultant deaths which will take some weeks/months/years to reveal.

Naturally there will continue to be more deaths from covid19 just as there are from other infectious diseases, in the end I suspect most every country will have roughly the same deaths per million (controlling for risk factors e.g. obesity as they are better understood).

Absolutely, conspiracy theorist.

@Sunrise234 oh come on! at this stage in the debate you should be showing a little more insight?

Look at the "deaths per million" column in your worldmeters link, same numbers as my link.

Populations do matter.

I'm amazed that anyone thinks that Sweden has had an 'appalling' death rate

Sweden has a lower deaths per capita than both the UK and Spain.

As for saving lives, the UK has failed again to deal with CV, a poor Track and Test system and no App.

What is perhaps more amazing is that the Cons would win an election if held now, so obv very easy to dupe the electorate.

I'm a died in the wool conservative and I would vote for my dog before I'd vote for Johnson again. She would do a much better job.

dyed.

Sweden have done just as well/bad as we have. They had a much lesser lockdown which did not impact the people there as much. They didnt have total freedoms and they didn't get it 100% right but it was better than the alternative.

@Refractory just curious but did you vote for Johnson is last election? Is it solely COVID that makes you think you would never vote for him again?

Yes and yes.

Refractory,

What studies show no correlation between saving lives and locking down? Cases were doubling every 2-3 days pre lockdown and the lockdown virtually (albeit temporarily) eliminated Covid from the community.

Sweden just is not a comparable country for many reasons. Every other country in the Western World locked down following epidemiological models.

The Swedes are possibly less stupid than we are but it's still comparable. If people could have seen Fred and Ethel in a socially distanced manner, instead of saying no contact for 5 months then I believe people wouldn't be acting so irresponsible right now.

Before lockdown was enforced Boris did ask people to increase our hand washing and socially distance but many people ignored him

From a scientific perspective perspective lockdown makes a lot of sense.

From an economic, social and cultural perspective it makes less sense.

This is really interesting. And it’s probably why there are a lot of disagreements.

I am a scientist and can easily understand why the rules have been put in place.
The worst thing that can ever happen to humanity is if an unknown communicable disease appears. As it can spread quicker than we can manage or understand it (this is why we have a panic about some viruses but then we realise they’re not so bad so most forget about them eg. bird flu). This is why bioterrorism is one of the biggest threats and there’s even a law which bans countries using any type of biological or chemical weapons in a war.

To me the health of people (science) is more important than the economy (as surely if the entire world is going through the same thing everyone’s economy will be in the same situation so surely it wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway?) so those who don’t believe in the lockdown/virus and are more concerned about the economy, do you have jobs in finance and things more related to the economy which is why you see that side of things as more important/easier to understand?

@askmehowiknow

Lockdown was never intended to actually save lives. All it does is flatten the curve/spread out and delay deaths so as not to overwhelm NHS.

But NHS was never overwhelmed. So lockdown did not save lives.

The NHS would have been overwhelmed without lockdown - that's was uncontrolled exponential growth causes!

@ineedaholidaynow

Before lockdown was enforced Boris did ask people to increase our hand washing and socially distance but many people ignored him

And some people, even with symptoms, still went to Cheltenham, Anfield, etc!

Probably why they had to put the fear of god into us, to make people listen.

Before lockdown was enforced Boris did ask people to increase our hand washing and socially distance but many people ignored him

I agree with this.

In theory social distancing and hand washing could maybe work and we tried to hold out for a lockdown as long as possible. But many didn’t take it seriously and then there was the lockdown and the rules were you can only go out once a day - there were loads of threads on here asking if they can go out twice a day. Another rule was only go shopping if it was essential - there was threads on here talking about going to the shop for a certain chocolate bar. There was also many threads about neighbours having BBQs and things.
So even if it was proven that a lockdown vs socially distancing etc makes no difference to case numbers, then there’d still be no point not locking down if people didn’t follow the rules properly.