It's just an overreaction.

[madcow88]

Now don't get me wrong I followed the rules to the letter and still am doing as I don't want to break the law.

However I think it's all a massive overreaction and I don't want to sit by and allow my children's generation to be destroyed.

Their education is totally fucked, they will not get to have the same social experiences as we did as young people.

Why is everyone happily sitting by and allowing our government to restrict our lives over a virus that kills 0.01% of people. Whilst 1000s of people are dying every day due to the lack of treatment and social interactions.

I really just do not feel comfortable with all the laws on our freedom being changed so dramatically over a virus if truth be told is not as deadly as they would like us to be believed.

Don't get me wrong I have sympathy for those people who lost their lives and for the people who will lose their lives in the future but no more than for the people who die of flu and other viruses each year.

It may have only been 6 months but the economic impact of this will affect a generation. My daughter has just lost her job and is in an industry (drama/film/theatre) that may never get back to where it was. Another daughter is in her final year at uni, throwing cash at a few online lectures, with no internships available and few jobs.

So if we are allowed to carry on as if COVID doesn’t exist what precautions, if any, will you take for your extremely vulnerable DC @madcow88

We should get the NHS up and running for all treatments and appointments to run as they did pre-Covid

The difficulty is that if hospitals don’t enforce rigorous Covid safe practice, infection will run rife amongst people in hospitals - many of whom are extremely vulnerable.

If ICU’s are already maxed out with covid cases on ventilators (hospital admissions are doubling at the moment) then where do you put the people already in hospital who contract covid and become critically ill?

I agree with you OP and I suspect more do now than in March. We’ve seen that we lockdown and all the economic/mental hardship that entails. Then we open up and cases just go up again. And repeat and repeat. So all those people lost their jobs for nothing really? Because we’ll be back to where we were in March soon (I actually don’t think it will be as bad as March but many do) but it will be flu season. So flattening the curve for so long was a great idea! Let’s have a second peak in Winter instead of summer!

I don't get the 'The NHS wasn't even overwhelmed last time' argument. Because the measures worked. It's a good thing it wasn't overwhelmed. This time around it's also flu season so we have a double threat emerging.

Do we really need to see bodybags in the corridors before we think it's all been worth it?

@bg21

the hospitals were never over run the first time round, thousands of people denied vital cancer treatments and 21 drs and nurses standing around with only maybe 10 on ventilators at anyone time, excellent work by the government and BBC to put the fear into people = 100% compliance

You’re right the hospitals weren’t over run and thousands of people were denied treatment. Because it wasn’t safe to have them in hospital where covid cases were being treated. The last place an immunocompromised patient really should be is around a virus that could easily kill them. I don’t know why people can’t understand this, and before you tell me that stopping treatment will just as easily kill them - I know that too. So what is the answer?

🙄

There seems to be a group of people who seem to think that if we abandoned all precautions life would be back to normal pretty quick? Am I reading this correctly ?

I don’t know why people can’t understand this, and before you tell me that stopping treatment will just as easily kill them - I know that too. So what is the answer

Depressingly it increasingly seems to be just ignore it.

It’s shit and it’s hard but that’s not a good enough reason to passively allow the virus to run rampant imho.

I would love all the ‘let nature take its course’ people to be right but I’m yet to be convinced that scenario would play out comfortably without much worse consequences than our current restrictions and potential lockdowns could cause.

You lost me with “thousands of people dying every day from lack of treatment and social interaction”. You literally just made that up. It is demonstrably untrue as even the most cursory look at the ONS death records will tell you.

We probably have built up problems of undiagnosed cancers for the future, but we do not currently have noticeable numbers of people dying from the effects of lockdown.

If it is 0.01% (and that's way lower than usual estimates) then that's 660,000 potential deaths. But as some people have had it, yes revise down but you're still looking at hundreds of thousands.

But it couid be more - as NHS would be overwhelmed and so all the deaths from their causes would still happen (especially as HCPs tend to get it badly)

Add on the chaotic collapse of normal life, in the weeks whilst everyone is ill, including supply chains of goods including food and medicines, and you get a very gloomy outlook.

And of course it's much harder to rebuild from that sort of collapse. It would be utterly misearble

As i said above. People were frustrated that my community team moved away from f2f visits. We still allow them in emergencies.
However our staff was massively down. Lots of our staff have kids, kids were home during lockdown (those obviously not school age, needing to isolate or now being sent home for their bubble bursting). Lots of our staff are vulnerable them selves with everything from cancer treatments, to imuno compromised to really blooming old consultants. One of out consultants (which is a 1/3 ish of our doctor capacity) ended up in icu due to covid as like many consultants he is over the age of 60. Staff were also pulled away to cover other wards who were struggling with staff sickness.

Any service thats not an A+E, acute ward etc are likely to be expected to cover other wards if.staffing is hit.

All of that isnt anything to do with social distancing or covid restrictions. Nhs services are staffed by humans. I would love to know what peoples plans are when people say to get them up and running

And it’s not just about people dying from Covid, some people are and will suffer life long complications from this virus or the treatment of the virus. What if this was you or someone in your family, that will also have a massive impact.
The NHS can not do everything, even though people seem to think it should. Part of the problem with the testing centres is that staff who were redeployed have moved back to their original posts so now there is not enough people to test. If the NHS is overwhelmed people will be dying from appendicitis’s, sepsis, heart attacks, car accidents etc because they will not be able to treat them. Protecting the NHS is not just about Covid but about all the services that we use and save lives.

@Dreamcatcher34

I 100% agree OP. It’s been blown out of all proportion. The NHS wasn’t even overwhelmed in the last wave. The Nightingale was barely used. I have no idea why they are putting cancer treatments on hold and playing with people’s lives over a virus that will not seriously affect most people.

They weren’t overrun because we locked down though... Left unchecked what do you think will happen?

And no of course it doesn’t kill 0.01% of people - that’s another statistic that the OP has just made up because she has her own preferred version of reality.

If the fatality rate was 0.01% and every single person in the UK had caught it then that would be 6,700 people, when instead it’s somewhere between 40 and 60 thousand.

I think the loss of education can be worked around. The govt built hospitals in weeks. If they wanted they could have re-sit classes for those screwed over by the exams fiasco.

Once the epidemic takes off, it becomes harder to get under control and we may not be able to take that many more actions to prevent deaths.

I think that for education, we have months to years to get additional support to the year groups affected - eg discount of tuition fees for whenever they do end up accessing higher education, more work-and-study programmes.

For corona, we have weeks to months to take action to affect number of deaths

Drop the restrictions or enforce them - be consistent and do it! No excuese, if you choose to go out you wear a mask in shops and you socially distance or get a big fine. this would then avoid stupid things like rule of 6

(I think you’ve had a problem with the percentage button on your calculator scaevola)

Your sums are wrong @scaevola, but so is the quoted percentage of 0.01%

General emerging global view is that the infection fatality rate is likely to end up at 0.1%. Therefore with our nearly 68 million population that equates to 68000 deaths. The case fatality rate is looking like it will be about 1%. However there is a big difference between case fatality rate and infection fatality rate, they are not the same thing at all.

Unfortunately for us Ferguson decided to predict an infection fatality rate of 0.9% not 0.1% when he plugged the numbers into his model. He did this based on a document that one Dr Fauci eg al published 28/02/20 whereby he mixed up case fatality rate and infection fatality rate, therefore putting out predictions by a factor of 10.

So yes, OP, I agree with you.

@kursaalflyer

Bloody hell. It's been 6 months not a generation.

Yes but if it's another 6 months and we're looking at another disrupted summer of social distancing and masks then more will be unhappy about it.

Unfortunately for us Ferguson decided to predict an infection fatality rate of 0.9% not 0.1% when he plugged the numbers into his model. He did this based on a document that one Dr Fauci eg al published 28/02/20 whereby he mixed up case fatality rate and infection fatality rate, therefore putting out predictions by a factor of 10.

Ferguson's modelling software had more problems than that. His programming ability is not much more than amateur and is bug ridden.

I know @PhilCornwall1 I just wanted to specifically pick up on the figures that were being quoted upthread as I believe them to be way, way out!

How on earth can you say his predictions were out by a factor 10?

His prediction about 500,000 dead IF NO ACTION TAKEN

We lost over 40,000 ALREADY. He wasn't predicting what we would lose if we took action

Most of them infected BEFORE we took action

Honestly, the logic of some is beyond belief. You are like saying hey I got pregnant the first time after sex with my husband, I'll not bother with the sex next time and just get pregnant

@Ibake

Your sums are wrong *@scaevola*, but so is the quoted percentage of 0.01%

General emerging global view is that the infection fatality rate is likely to end up at 0.1%. Therefore with our nearly 68 million population that equates to 68000 deaths. The case fatality rate is looking like it will be about 1%. However there is a big difference between case fatality rate and infection fatality rate, they are not the same thing at all.

Unfortunately for us Ferguson decided to predict an infection fatality rate of 0.9% not 0.1% when he plugged the numbers into his model. He did this based on a document that one Dr Fauci eg al published 28/02/20 whereby he mixed up case fatality rate and infection fatality rate, therefore putting out predictions by a factor of 10.

So yes, OP, I agree with you.

But we've almost had that many deaths already.

General emerging global view is that the infection fatality rate is likely to end up at 0.1%.

Sorry, but that's nonsense. Not that an overall IFR is particularly useful given the age differentials, but the consensus view is not that it is that low. CDC and WHO both around 0.65%. Large serological studies in UK, Italy, Spain all gave a range of 0.5% to 1%. But as I said overall IFR not that useful as it depends on average age of population and who in that population gets it.