When do we end lockdowns and let people live a full life

[frasersmummy]

It's looking ever more likely more cities including Glasgow will go back into lockdown..

Mainly from what I can see to stop people meeting indoors

There has to come a point when mental health is as important as physical health.. Keeping loved ones apart does noones mental health any. Good

So where do we draw the line.. There has to be a point when lockdown is just wrong.

For me it's wrong now.. Enough of keeping friends and families apart

When will people stop banging on about Sweden. We're not Sweden. Fifty percent of households are single occupancy there. It makes social distancing far easier. They also have a much better healthcare system. People are healthier. They haven't done so well in any case. Their economy (and death rate) is much worse than for their neighbouring Scandinavian countries. Personally I also don't especially think accepting large numbers of vulnerable people dying is something to be proud of. It's rather uncivilised. Heaven knows how they'll fare re Long Covid. We don't know enough at this stage. They've gambled the long-term health of their citizens - including previously young healthy ones. Perhaps there will be no permanent damage but we don't yet know. Time will tell. Until we know it's a Russian Roulette.

If we want to compare to other countries, let's do what NZ and Australia have done. Even in Melbourne things are beginning to get under control. Because they took action to nip it in the bud.

The sooner we deal with it, the sooner we can return to a relatively normal life.

I put my hand up to get a trail vaccine. It involves going for 6-12 months of blood tests. So that's the clinical trial timeline for that vaccine.

People who think there is a vaccine within a few months and are holding out for it, good luck with that plan.

Life isnt going back to normal like there isnt a vaccine just coming along very soon.

I think it's better to be realistic. This is it. It sucks. It's not going to change for a lot longer yet. I just adjusted my expectations downwards. The right or wrong are irrelevant really because we dont make the rules.

I'm living life as much as I can, while I can. The rest is out of my control. No point in getting stressed. And yes it totally sucks. But it is what it is. Protect your MH as best you can, as is is far from.over

@CrazyToast

This is a shit situation. No two ways about it. And there is nothing we can do about. This sadly is the way it is. Totally reasonable to feel bad/scared/angry and vent. It will pass.

You think less people killed themselves in the UK last week than died of COVID? Really? Maybe look at the statistics.

And that doesn't include people who died from stress related illnesses.

When there isn't a risk of exponential growth.

When people start behaving more responsibly within the guidelines en masse.

When we have a vaccine

I have no idea. But I do think until everyone sticks to what we can do instead of people deciding they can please themselves we do have this risk.

The more people meeting the greater the risk of transmission.

All the time people meet in pubs without SD or have parties etc and we get outbreaks the chances are the longest this goes on for.

Well, the problem seems to be that the politicians don’t want to look at the hard questions.

For instance: how to protect care homes when the pandemic (being seasonal) returns in winter? Don’t discharge residents from hospital without testing- that’s easy. But how about sourcing PPE? Who should pay for PPE in care homes? How will this affect business models? Should staff be required to work in only one home during the upsurge? How would this be enforced - by a regulator? The police? Should employers be required to give staff contractual sick pay? Should care homes & staff be quarantined? When should residents with Covid be admitted to hospital? In what circumstances (if any) should treatment for the very elderly with Covid be restricted to palliative care?

Hospitals- should we be building more Covid hospitals, along the lines of the old fever hospitals? Where? What should their architecture be (for instance all one storey, no lift shafts)? How would we staff them? If we don’t have these hospitals, how will we avoid hospital transmission? Does the architecture of modern hospitals potentially exacerbate transmission?

And I’m sure there are very hard questions about what the data shows us are non age related vulnerabilities- ethnicity, diabetes, weight.

Point is that these are hard issues. Politicians want to avoid them. Instead they focus on lockdown and silly requirements about bubbles. Arranging the benches on the deck of the Titanic.

In a globally connected world total suppression isn’t possible - the virus will keep on reappearing, and we’ll have no answers to these questions. We’ll just lurch from one lockdown to another, because we’ve got no strategy.

Lockdown is basically now a dangerous diversion which enables politicians to avoid addressing really important issues about how we handle the virus. They just can’t admit that we need to learn to live with it in a way that minimises disruption to society.

Yet my 42 year old neighbour with no underlying health concerns .. died on the 22nd of April. Leaving a deviated husband and two children under 10.-

My feelings are ;

Anyone who thinks this is a 'conspiracy' is a fuckwit

Anyone who thinks this 'won't happen to you'. Is a fuckwit

Anyone who thinks it's 'just like flu' is a fuckwit.

She was a solicitor. Worked from home in a rural area.

Went out to pick kids up from child minder twice between Feb 18th and March 20th.

Went to a Tesco 4 times in same period.

Got a 'cough' on March 21st
Hospitalised on April 4th, ventilated on April 7th .. died April 22

All of you who think it 'won't happen to you .. carry on. You are all fuckwits

@LaurieFairyCake

When there's a vaccine

Before then it WILL mean the NHS will become overwhelmed and there will be thousands on ventilators if we all just do what we like

Too few people clearly know someone who has suffered with Covid

I've been counselling medics with PTSD from watching people gasp their last breath at the beginning with no treatment, no help and no family around them

I cannot emphasise enough how many doctors and nurses are going to end up with long term trauma because of this

I asked a nurse on a thread the other day how her and her colleagues were doing as I'd heard that now that the peak bit is over a lot of nhs staff have suffered mentally from the reality of what they faced.

It must have been awful

@disorganisedsecretsquirrel

Yet my 42 year old neighbour with no underlying health concerns .. died on the 22nd of April. Leaving a deviated husband and two children under 10.-

My feelings are ;

Anyone who thinks this is a 'conspiracy' is a fuckwit

Anyone who thinks this 'won't happen to you'. Is a fuckwit

Anyone who thinks it's 'just like flu' is a fuckwit.

She was a solicitor. Worked from home in a rural area.

Went out to pick kids up from child minder twice between Feb 18th and March 20th.

Went to a Tesco 4 times in same period.

Got a 'cough' on March 21st
Hospitalised on April 4th, ventilated on April 7th .. died April 22

All of you who think it 'won't happen to you .. carry on. You are all fuckwits

Thats awful.

However, it hasn't happened to tens of millions of people.

I tested positive and my wife didn't even get it despite the exact opposite of social distancing (hugs, kisses etc.) on a daily basis. Also treatments are much better now.

We cant al live in fear forever. I have friends in their 30s and 40s who have died from aneurisms, Strokes and pneumonia . Its awful but it happens

"Personally I also don't especially think accepting large numbers of vulnerable people dying is something to be proud of."

Neither do I. All those people who've killed themselves, died of stress-related diseases, of all sorts of diseases that could have been treated had they been able to access treatment in the last few weeks, but couldn't because, despite being in no way overwhelmed by Covid patients, the NHS is just not treating so many patients.

You can recover your mental health but you can't recover from death. Deaths from COVID are many many many times higher than those from mental illness.
When we have effective vaccine or treatments, the restrictions will be lifted.
Can you remember at the beginning before restrictions when hospitals were overwhelmed and the terrible death rate?
We cannot just let this virus rip through the population. The death toll would be horrific. Have you seen the leaked SAGE report 85,000 COVID deaths this winter?
OP yours and your family's personal risk may be low but all lives matter - we need to think about the more vulnerable in society, the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.

People with no underlying health conditions die from viruses, all sorts. Someone on here years ago, her husband got a cold, the virus attacked his heart and he ended up needing an organ transplant in his 20s.

But for the most part, this virus does not kill the majority of people it strikes.

There's nothing fuckwitted about that fact.

@Desperado24
When it comes to suicides, it's very obvious we need to improve access to MH services. Quicker and better support, be it face to face (with masks or other precautions) or telephone and online. It's been sorely needed for a very long time pre Covid. We also urgently need to reverse the benefit 'reforms', which have been the cause of thousands of suicides. Likewise homelessness, which needs to be ended. That's if people are genuinely concerned about suicide.

we have to do our best to contain this virus in order to protect the NHS. I know that it is difficult for people with poor MH.

Im OK at the moment but my mental health is vulnerable, and I have close relatives who have more serious mental health problems than I do, and I completely agree with you.

If this virus was left to it's own course without lockdowns then the health services would collapse within a better of weeks. This would put people with mental health problems in more danger. Danger of not receiving medication and of not having a functioning service to help them in a crisis

Deaths from COVID are many many many times higher than those from mental illness.

Right, that same mental illness which is behind at least a third of all substance abusive behaviour and that is a major cause of premature death? Death from mental illness is not just suicide.

*matter not better

@disorganisedsecretsquirrel

Yet my 42 year old neighbour with no underlying health concerns .. died on the 22nd of April. Leaving a deviated husband and two children under 10.-

My feelings are ;

Anyone who thinks this is a 'conspiracy' is a fuckwit

Anyone who thinks this 'won't happen to you'. Is a fuckwit

Anyone who thinks it's 'just like flu' is a fuckwit.

She was a solicitor. Worked from home in a rural area.

Went out to pick kids up from child minder twice between Feb 18th and March 20th.

Went to a Tesco 4 times in same period.

Got a 'cough' on March 21st
Hospitalised on April 4th, ventilated on April 7th .. died April 22

All of you who think it 'won't happen to you .. carry on. You are all fuckwits

Very very sad.

Many posters are more passionate about mitigating tiny risks thorough rear facing car seats than they are the risk of leaving their child without a parent.

@InDeoEstMeaFiducia

Deaths from COVID are many many many times higher than those from mental illness.

Right, that same mental illness which is behind at least a third of all substance abusive behaviour and that is a major cause of premature death? Death from mental illness is not just suicide.

Exactly. Plus hardly anyone is being killed by COVID at the moment in the UK, or in fact in most of the world

We cannot eradicate the virus or hide from it, therefore there has to be a point at which life returns to ‘normal’. The number of Covid related hospital admissions and deaths suggests to me that we have now reached that point.

But for the most part, this virus does not kill the majority of people it strikes.

There's nothing fuckwitted about that fact.

The lockdowns are to protect the NHS.

Hopefully we can relax by early summer. I'd rather my family were all alive and healthy tbh.
Scientists just need a bit longer to get to grips with it.

What’s the alternative? Going back to a situation where potentially hundreds of thousands of people will die? Because that’s what happens when you let a virus rip through the population.
I’ve seen loads of family and friends outdoors, it’s been great. What have you been doing all summer?

@Flaxmeadow

But for the most part, this virus does not kill the majority of people it strikes.

There's nothing fuckwitted about that fact.

The lockdowns are to protect the NHS.

The NHS are fine. There are barely any hospital admissions at the moment due to COVID and pretty much everything else is shutdown.

So, we rip up restrictions, everyone goes back to normal. Coronavirus spreads, including back into the elderly and vulnerable. And you think at that point, with huge numbers of staff off sick or isolating or unable to get childcare or just scared, with the elderly/vulnerable terrified to attend hospital lest they catch it, with a queue of people and ambulances with breathless, blue, dying patients, (not to mention the usual winter stuff) the NHS is still going to return to routine hip replacements, mental health related appointments, smear tests etc?! Unless you’re proposing to treat everything but covid and effectively refuse treatment to covid patients?

But why aren’t there any admissions due to a Covid? Because people are for the most part behaving. If we stop they will go up dramatically. It’s simple?

What are all these people who say they can't live a normal life actually missing?

In past 4 weeks I've met family for meals for birthdays. Been to beach. Had bbq with family. Met various friend for a coffee/lunch. Taken da swim training a few times a week with his club. Been to a theme lark. Been to supermarket and been to town.

Ok, have to wear a mask, social distance etc.

But I don't feel I have restrictions on my life as such. There are restrictions on how we do these activities though.

I just don't let that be my focus.