Is it really worth all this?

[Dustballs]

What are we shutting down for? What are we trying to save?

I don't understand what the purpose of this is anymore.

Having to sacrifice the things I love most almost to the point of my mental health suffering...yeah really worth it....not!

@bumbleymummy It's not the fatality rate you need to look at, though even that would be a shocker in raw numbers across an unvaccinated population.

What Wuhan, Lombardy and the rest have shown is the hospitalisation rate and is far higher than for the previously circulating respiratory viruses. Also the age profile of the badly hit : It's the 40 / 50 / 60 year olds who would be off work.

Allowing "natural" spread (in our unnatural towns and cities) is not going to save the economy.

I hope that immunity is building but it's far from adequate. London looked like it was doing not badly over the summer but detected infections are taking off again so the next week couple week's hospital admissions may tell us more.

How anyone can be adamant on a national scale right now that it's an overreaction is hard to see. ( Sure I can see individuals can see the balance for their own prospects but we can only deal with this as a group.)

If Spanish flu killed 50 million when global population was 2 billion..

And today we have almost 8 billion but deaths might reach the 'terrible' outcome (says WHO) of 2 million.

Expectations sure have changed.

then surely we should learn to live and manage it?

That's really tricky to do when you're dead.

Having to sacrifice the things I love most almost to the point of my mental health suffering...yeah really worth it....not!

Surely sacrificing someONE you live will make your mental health suffer more.

@ragged

If Spanish flu killed 50 million when global population was 2 billion..

And today we have almost 8 billion but deaths might reach the 'terrible' outcome (says WHO) of 2 million.

Expectations sure have changed.

Well yes they have. Do you apply that to all areas of modern medicine and sanitation or is it just this particular scenario you take exception with?

We are living with it.

The debate should be how to mange it better so that life is better for more people

The WHO have given a few hints about using testing tracing and isolation

@SallySeven At the start of the pandemic. Even then, our hospitals weren’t over run as originally feared. Lots of the nightingale hospitals weren’t even used.

Now, as I said earlier, the hospitalisation rate has not risen in line with the sharp increase in cases that we have seen over the last 6 weeks or so. I would like to think that if we do not see a spike in hospitalisations in the coming weeks (to allow for the lag after the recent case increase) then these recent measures will be reversed but I’m not sure they will be. People seem to be focusing on increase in case numbers and panicking without taking into account that we are now testing more people in community - far more people than would have been tested at the start of the pandemic. If we had been testing at the same levels then, no doubt the number of positive cases would have been much higher. Only a very small percentage of patients need hospital treatment and they were the only ones being identified in the early stages.

Time will tell if it’s an over reaction or not. I’ve just expressed my opinion fwiw. You’re perfectly entitled to think differently.

Come work with me where people have lost both parents within days of each other, where almost all our clients who were in care homes have died. There is a point to it, saving lives

@Bananaman123

Come work with me where people have lost both parents within days of each other, where almost all our clients who were in care homes have died. There is a point to it, saving lives

Is this recently or is this during the height of the pandemic?

@bumbleymummy, I don’t think that you can conclude much from the fact hospitals weren’t pushed to breaking point in the first wave because pretty much every other service ground to W complete halt bar emergencies. The capacity utilised during the first wave would have overwhelmed the NHS of other services had carried on. It depends very much on what criteria you’re using to define overwhelmed. I would argue that the NHS was overwhelmed based on the wider picture.

The percentage of positives of all tests done is being watched and this is rising. The model has always been to aim for a low percentage of all tests done to be positive. If you test 100 people and fifty of them are positive you have a wider spread of asymptomatic cases than if you test 100 and only 10 are positive. It’s an accepted indicator of a window as to what is going on in the wider population.

Small percentages translate into larger numbers than our health system and infrastructure is designed to cope with in the timeframes covid spreads and requires treatment for. We’d be coping better from the health system perspective if it killed people quicker tbh.

@SallySevenAt the start of the pandemic. Even then, our hospitals weren’t over run as originally feared. Lots of the nightingale hospitals weren’t even used.

Doctors and nurses (in some hospitals) absolutely were overrun and overwhelmed. The nightingale hospitals were great for extra capacity but I dont know where all the spare staff to actually run them were allegedly coming from.

How come the Nightingale Centres aren't overflowing with ill people?

How come the virus knows when its 10 pm, knows when you lower your mask to consume food and knows when relative number 7 rocks up?

Gosh, I'm reading the capacity of the Nightingale hospitals had total (national) capacity of 13,000. Except there were not enough qualified staff. So that capacity is dependent on employing unqualified staff.

From what I can tell, the N-gales are never meant to be used. Govt will move heaven & high water before they get deployed in more than a very very marginal way.

@lljkk

Gosh, I'm reading the capacity of the Nightingale hospitals had total (national) capacity of 13,000. Except there were not enough qualified staff. So that capacity is dependent on employing unqualified staff.

From what I can tell, the N-gales are never meant to be used. Govt will move heaven & high water before they get deployed in more than a very very marginal way.

I agree with this.

The nightingale hospitals, so obviously a front, the government were only pretending

But it is also important to realise that although the NHS wasn’t overwhelmed by Covid-19 cases (in relation to ward and critical care bed use) in the first wave – and this is something I’ve only appreciated recently – NHS services as a whole were overwhelmed.

The only way the NHS was able to cope was by shutting down many essential services which caused suffering and death for thousands – particularly cancer patients – and huge increases in waiting lists. Therefore, it is essential to keep Covid-19 cases / hospitalisations at a much lower level this time, so as to ensure that all essential NHS services keep running – or we again risk thousands of additional deaths.

Dr Raghib Ali, Honorary Consultant in Acute Medicine at the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and a Visiting Research Fellow of the Department of Population Health, University of Oxford.

Cornett, I was referring to capacity. I think worse was expected than what actually happened. It made sense to be prepared just in case things went the way of Italy but they didn’t and I don’t see justification for it this time given that hospitalisation figures are much lower, even with the increase in cases.

I’m aware that the proportion of positive cases is increasing. That in itself does not cause problems if the rate of complications stays low.

The economy needs a healthy population to thrive. Short term pain for long term gain, we can't afford to not lockdown. People are failing to see that the effects of not locking down would be truly catastrophic and without a proper and efficient test track trace and isolate system in place we have no option but to tighten up rules again.

No, actually. It needs people working and spending money. If we keep thousands of perfectly healthy people locked up while we subsidise their wages for months then the economy is going to be recovering for years.

I believe the long term pain = much diminished public services due to the heavy costs & burdens we are incurring today. These worse public services will hit whoever is vulnerable in future. Also, potentially poorer education, worse mental health & more social exclusion will result from the control measures taken today.

Sure hope I'm wrong.

oh... and we forget easily about the delayed presentation, less prevention for other types of chronic disease, delayed treatment and more chronic morbidity because covid response has taken priority over those types of problems.

@myhobbyisouting I too have been to a comedy club - my husband's club, in fact. And while we had a great time and it felt like something almost approaching normal, I know, because I have behind the scenes information, that they can only run at under a third of capacity because of social distancing restrictions - and they're lucky, because it's a large venue, unlike many comedy clubs. They were doing two shows a night (on the one night rather than the two they used to do), so pushing it up to two thirds capacity, but now that they have to close at 10pm, that won't be possible. This is what pays our mortgage...

And for the comedians, where they used to pay 10-12 acts across a weekend, now they can only use 3! So those 7-9 other comedians have lost a huge chunk, if not all, of their income.

But I guess live comedy's not a 'viable' industry, so fuck 'em 🤔 (and my family too!)

Not to mention that if and when the Arts come back, it will be dominated by those privileged enough to have financial support from parents/inheritances, and lose so much of its already dwindling diversity!

@bumbleymummy

No, actually. It needs people working and spending money. If we keep thousands of perfectly healthy people locked up while we subsidise their wages for months then the economy is going to be recovering for years.

Better to subsidise their wages for a few months than subsidise their living for a lot longer if they're unemployed.

People won't work and spend money in the same way if there's a virus like this running rampant through the population. They just won't. We know this, because a) it is blindingly obvious (people change their behaviour in response to what they see as threats to their family/health/future) and b) even if it wasn't obvious, we could go and look at e.g. Brazil and see that a national government approach of "we need to just face it" leads to economic damage.

It's no use saying "let's scrap social distancing/mask/whatever requirements in pubs and clubs, then they'll be financially viable!" if customers stop going. And you can't MAKE people get out there and spend their money, especially when they're worried they'll face unemployment.