How can you do this to your children (and yourselves)?

[endoftheworldaoife]

It has been six months and it's now very clear that covid won't be doing away in our lifetimes. A vaccine won't eradicate it (just as a vaccine didn't eradicate flu).

Most of you seem to be willing to accept social distancing and masks for the foreseeable. And I don't get it. We are a tribal species. We literally die without contact and get sick without communication. Kids are learning arrange, stilted ways of being that will just worsen their digital reliance. OCD is being normalised. Dating will be neurotic and masked. Freshers won't make new loves or lifelong friends like we did. As for their working lives...

I wouldn't mind catching covid (indeed I'm sure we all will sooner or later) so can someone explain to me what on earth is happening in their heads to tip the balance? If it only affected us, I could understand (well, I couldn't but this feels like child abuse on a giant scale).

Totally agree OP.

@Flyonawalk

Lots of things kill more people that flu does. Smoking, 78,000 per year in the UK. We don’t suggest a lockdown while we get to grips with that. The discussion is not whether covid is da hero us but whether lockdown measures are proportional.

Smoking is something you do voluntary and is not contagious (effectively because we do have restrictions on where you can smoke, I.e. not in restaurants, public buildings, work places etc). So no, it's not going to require a lockdown.

@Terrace58

I’m protecting my child from killing her father. It’s that simple. Can you imagine the guilt of knowing that attending a birthday party or eating in a restaurant killed your parent? A little social distancing and mask wearing is not going to harm her anywhere close to being responsible for his death.

I hate seeing comments like this! Your child is not "responsible" for anyone's death!!!!!!

We're hardly in solitary isolation FFS. "Tribal"

DC now at school 5 days a week.

Play in the garden with neighbours/friends on weekends.

I see DH and DC every day. And work colleagues. And friends. And my parents.

Can go out on walks. To parks. To supermarkets. To zoos.

I mean as far as hardships go it's not the end of the world is it?

Marsha, shielding of the vulnerable. Necessary support structures for those who need to be careful. Education about hygiene measures for the vast majority who remain in work and education.

Perhaps most importantly, a wider range of scientific opinion sought by government than from just a few advisers whose findings are not accepted by other experts. The ‘half a million will die’ rhetoric from Imperial was unsubstantiated and not believed by all virologists.

Response will be analysed for years to come I think and judgements made.

Crunchy, of course smoking is voluntary but it costs a lot of lives. And cancer causes more than one in four deaths in Britain, which we seem to be ignoring. The focus on covid is distracting us from other health concerns which are also important.

@Flyonawalk

Mojo, that article is nearly four months old. Knowledge of the virus has advanced since then.

The death rate has likely dropped a bit but not to the degree that it's lower than the flu or even close to the flu.

There is still no vaccine nor any cure.

@Flyonawalk

Crunchy, of course smoking is voluntary but it costs a lot of lives. And cancer causes more than one in four deaths in Britain, which we seem to be ignoring. The focus on covid is distracting us from other health concerns which are also important.

Those people with cancer that you apparently care about so much are the exact same people most likely to die of COVID.

Do you really think cancer patients want to see COVID running unlimited through society?

Mojo, the death rate has dropped into single figures on recent days, despite a large spike in known infections. Surely this is the reverse of a justification for another lockdown.

Oh I missed your latest post Mojo. I think cancer patients would like a resumption of screening and treatments. Cancer is apparently not one of the top co-morbidites among covid victims.

I agree with the OP. Our kids are missing out and we need to make sure they don't miss out for too much longer. If this keeps going past next March without a return to things like school discos, nightclubs opening, group experiences like fireworks night, I really won't be happy!

Mojo, that article is nearly four months old. Knowledge of the virus has advanced since then.

Not on this thread it hasn't.

I feel like it's the heady days of early March.
"But Flu kills more than Covid...."
" Covid has already mutated many times"

Where do you get this shit?

There's only so long that I can put up with all this, my life is meaningless at the moment.

Sorry you feel like that Kittens. It is hard. However it won’t last forever and probably not much longer at all. Economic need is likely to put and end to restrictions, and while I know that won’t repair the damage it will hopefully be a chance to rebuild.

@Flyonawalk

Marsha, shielding of the vulnerable. Necessary support structures for those who need to be careful. Education about hygiene measures for the vast majority who remain in work and education.

Perhaps most importantly, a wider range of scientific opinion sought by government than from just a few advisers whose findings are not accepted by other experts. The ‘half a million will die’ rhetoric from Imperial was unsubstantiated and not believed by all virologists.

Response will be analysed for years to come I think and judgements made.

Thanks for this. I’m not against where we are now - businesses and schools open with measures. And I do question the severity of what we did, but think that some measures should be in place, as they are now.

Do you think there is a risk that although deaths are very low this may change in a few weeks and by then it will be too late to change?

The lower socialisation has helped elsewhere. I’m thinking of what Belgium did with the restriction to five people which saw it track differently to Spain.

Marsha, I too am not against all current measures (though I have grave doubts about the rule of six), but I dread more disruption to education and restrictions on businesses. Resulting job losses are surely going to be bad enough as it is, and many children will be unable to make up for missed chances.

I don’t know much about the Belgian approach and am off to research this - thank you for the tip.

I dread more disruption too. And pretty much an ok with new changes to try and lower them.

Here’s a rolling average for the countries. Maybe a few days old.

Very interesting - thank you.

Belgium suddenly fell very steeply, didn’t it? And this chart shows new infections and not deaths. It feels grim to say it, but it could be that the most vulnerable have already died earlier in the pandemic, so new infections will not mean a proportional spike in deaths.

@Flyonawalk

Mojo, that article is nearly four months old. Knowledge of the virus has advanced since then.

Exactly. In Indonesia it was reported to have mutated to a far more infectious but not necessarily more deadly version. That's what viruses do, they mutate.

And all those quoting the current death figures, the government admitted that some of these are unreliable due to the way the numbers were counted originally

There's also the point that even the official figures mention deaths which have involved Covid rather than the sufferers having died OF it

Obviously a virus can complicate pre existing conditions and even tip some over the edge, but a couple of weeks ago the NHS released figures of those who've died purely due to the virus

I'll try to find it again, but FWIW the number was about 1380

Lady, it has been mooted that when the first colds struck (millennia ago!) they would have been deadly for many people. Gradually colds have mutated and changed, and these days a cold doesn’t cause serious harm to most. Perhaps we are seeing the start of an illness which will be on the same level one day. (I am not suggesting that this is of any practical use to us today...)

Puzzled, please try to find the source. That would be fascinating.

@Flyonawalk

Marsha, I too am not against all current measures (though I have grave doubts about the rule of six), but I dread more disruption to education and restrictions on businesses. Resulting job losses are surely going to be bad enough as it is, and many children will be unable to make up for missed chances.

I don’t know much about the Belgian approach and am off to research this - thank you for the tip.

The issue here is as I've said already I've no issue with masks or Social Distancing or handwashing, is that the demonic OTT lot won't hear that and decide we may as well be the Freddy Krueger of Covid 19, coughing on old grannies and wanting vulnerable people to die. Considering I have a vulnerable person at home it's bollocks but don't let that get in the at of their sanctimonious bull and assumption. It's classic UK isn't it? "Oh I survived lockdown and it didn't bother me, used the time to garden and read and reconnect with the children". They don't care about the people facing the threat of mental health crisis who can't get seen or even a phone call, the people with ill kids who won't see a consultant anytime soon, the people facing eviction now as this has had far reaching consequences for jobs and money and homes. The people who won't be seen in time to diagnose curable cancer. But they did OK watching Netflix and baking banana bread so how dare you shove the fact others really bloody struggled and continue to struggle in their faces. The lockdown came too late. Two weeks earlier and we would have prevented 30,000 of those deaths. If our PM hadn't of naffed off and attended Cobra meetings. If he hadn't of allowed travel in the half term. If he had of banned the Liverpool match, the Stereophonics gig and Cheltenham. It's all shoulda woulda coulda now. Now we have to learn to get on with it, and lockdowns as shown by Sweden do little.

Lady hearing about Israel lockdown on another thread has made me feel extremely tense. I can handle this six rule. But closures of businesses again, and schools across the board, is too much.

I’ll go bananas let alone banana bread. Family live in a Covid free zone, the difference is extreme and we are all suffering here no doubt.