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.

@lljkk

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.

We need to keep transmission low so that the NHS can catch up and start to resume normal services though. So the quicker we get back to normal, the quicker the infection rates will rise and then we're back to where we were months ago with treatments once again delayed. How can powple not see this ? Burying your head in the sand and keep banging the 'can't keep people locked up' drum will just add to to your frustration. Expectation vs reality comes to mind

@GoldenOmber if you read my earlier posts you’ll see that I don’t have any problem in continuing with certain precautions such as mask wearing etc. but the reason people are unemployed is because we’re shutting things down! We wouldn’t need to subsidise so many if they were allowed to work and many people do want to work but aren’t able to because of the lockdown restrictions.

We now know that people that are considered BAME are at an increased risk, do they just stay home just so you can have more than 6 people at your house and stamp your feet about other restrictions in place for the safety of all ? No one is locked up, very bizarre to use this to describe the restrictions repeatedly.

@Votesforpedro I’m not burying my head in the sand. I’m looking at the figures and no, just because infection rates are rising does not mean we’re going to be back where we were - as long as complications remain low (as they currently seem to be doing - even with the increase we’ve seen and accounting for the delay)

It's worth trying to slow transmission of the virus, to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed, which would cause greater loss of lives.

If you're in any doubt about why we need to do this, I would suggest that you find some footage about what's happening in Bolivia. Their health system has been overwhelmed, they don't have enough beds or ventilators, and there are so many dead that undertakers and crematoriums can't cope. Bodies are left in the street for collection, then they are piled into shipping containers for storage. That horror could unfold here if the virus rampages around, unchecked.

I know many people in the UK are suffering due to isolation, job uncertainty and money worries (I've been on furlough for months myself and think I am probably going to be made redundant soon), but a damaged economy is better than the alternative. No government has all the answers, every country is in a learning curve, and it won't be possible to judge which countries have handled the pandemic better until we have the final death figures, when it's all over.

I'm not angry at our government, but I'm angry at the people who triggered the start of this pandemic, through their cruel and insanitary practices in live meat markets. But if I say any more this thread will get pulled, because apparently we can't criticise anyone's cultural practices now, no matter how barbaric they are.

Complications and deaths are low because the virus is moving amongst younger and less vulnerable people. That will change if it is left unchecked.

‘GoldenOmber if you read my earlier posts you’ll see that I don’t have any problem in continuing with certain precautions such as mask wearing etc. but the reason people are unemployed is because we’re shutting things down! We wouldn’t need to subsidise so many if they were allowed to work and many people do want to work but aren’t able to because of the lockdown restrictions.’

They are shutting things down because people couldn’t be arsed to follow the less restrictive rules and we are now paying the price for dickheads who continued to have parties and not wear masks. And the more people stamp their feet and ignore the rules, the tighter the restrictions become.

We need to keep transmission low so that the NHS can catch up and start to resume normal services though.
The NHS is struggling because
10 years of Tory Austerity has left it critically underfunded
The impact of the Tory Lansley reforms has left it fractured and dysfunctional
4 years of Brexit stress and the hostil environment has led to tens of thousands of nursing and medical staff vacancies
and the deliberate exclusion of local Public Health teams by Hancock and Johnson has stopped councils and GPs taking pressure off

The NHS was in trouble LONG before COVID

Hell no. Apparently there are 30,000 excess deaths from cancer currently undiagnosed. And how many more lives are going to be destroyed or fucked up because of suicide, unemployment, domestic violence etc? And for some fucking phoney war that will take decades to pay back. It's lunacy and hysteria, fed by the media who know that bad news sell.

@paranoidnamechanger

Hell no. Apparently there are 30,000 excess deaths from cancer currently undiagnosed. And how many more lives are going to be destroyed or fucked up because of suicide, unemployment, domestic violence etc? And for some fucking phoney war that will take decades to pay back. It's lunacy and hysteria, fed by the media who know that bad news sell.

There will be a far greater number than that dead if this virus rips through the population.

and there's the rub - of course we cant let the virus rip through the population but at the same time we cant shut everything down. Neither can we manage to do both.

So what is the solution? Because I am not sure anyone knows. Yes we can figure out how to suppress the virus (not eliminate because no one has managed that) but at what cost and is it worth the cost?

It has to be a middle ground. But sadly that will mean deaths coming from both sides.

[quote bumbleymummy]@GoldenOmber if you read my earlier posts you’ll see that I don’t have any problem in continuing with certain precautions such as mask wearing etc. but the reason people are unemployed is because we’re shutting things down! We wouldn’t need to subsidise so many if they were allowed to work and many people do want to work but aren’t able to because of the lockdown restrictions.[/quote]
It’s not about whether or not people want to work, people generally do. It’s about what happens to the economy when people aren’t as comfortable spending money in the way they used to. The government can choose what it allows to open and how but it has limited influence over people’s spending behaviour. That’s why Sweden, which went for voluntary suggested measures rather than Government-imposed ones, took a massive economic hit anyway.

We can’t treat health and the economy as two separate clashing things. Tanking the economy will have disastrous effects on health, but tanking public health by letting the virus spread will have disastrous effects on the economy, as it already has across the globe.

@paranoidnamechanger do you have a source for the 30 000 excess deaths? Genuinely interested as figures are mentioned out of context such a lot.

It’s like all the suicides that are mentioned. There is no evidence they have increased. We do know however there were almost twice the number of deaths when covid was at its peak. So not really a phoney war.

I think Quartz2208 has it right. Has to be a middle way. No UK govt will risk bodies piling up.

True @Hyperfish101.
I think people genuinely (and not because they want to distort the truth) actually believe urban myths like the suicide rate. The ONS has published data showing that this year, up to the end of June suicides in the UK were at an all time low since 2001.

Someone will trot along now to say that's because they were all given death certificates saying they died of Covid I expect. As that's the usual trope. Debunked as another myth by the scientists, the ONS and the govt. And no, I believe very little of what Boris says, but not even he'd be daft enough to up the stats so far not in his favour!

"I think Quartz2208 has it right. Has to be a middle way. No UK govt will risk bodies piling up."

@Hyperfish101 Yes, Quartz2208 nailed it.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cancer-care-backlog-may-cost-30-000-lives-boris-johnson-told-2ttvw330l

Where is the evidence that lockdown worked and prevented deaths?

@Quartz2208

and there's the rub - of course we cant let the virus rip through the population but at the same time we cant shut everything down. Neither can we manage to do both.

So what is the solution? Because I am not sure anyone knows. Yes we can figure out how to suppress the virus (not eliminate because no one has managed that) but at what cost and is it worth the cost?

It has to be a middle ground. But sadly that will mean deaths coming from both sides.

Robust and effective track and trace, easily available and plentiful testing and financial and job protection for those that need to take themselves out of circulation for a couple of weeks.

Not actually as hard as it it would appear. I believe that this second wave has been accelerated by the testing fiasco that could have been easily anticipated and managed with the return to schools and guidance that they were going to be following.

I’m still kind of hoping that the side effect of education settings insisting on tests earlier on will have uncovered some cases that would have otherwise gone unnoticed and this will give us a slight head start on the winter figures.

@paranoidnamechanger

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cancer-care-backlog-may-cost-30-000-lives-boris-johnson-told-2ttvw330l

Where is the evidence that lockdown worked and prevented deaths?

That 30,000 figure comes from "NHS is the last bastion of communism" Sikora, who claimed that Covid-19 would be over by June September and also tweeted a claim that there would less than 7,000 Covid-19 deaths in the UK.
mobile.twitter.com/jamesrbuk/status/1272625988514562052

As well as falsely claiming to be a professor at Imperial and having to be told by them to stop making that claim and never mentioning his massive conflict of interest in private cancer healthcare.

So while oncology is at least his area of expertise, any predictions he comes up with need to be taken with a large pinch of sodium chloride.

That’s not evidence, it’s a suggestion of what might happen but I guess they won’t know the outcomes yet.

Where is the evidence that lockdown worked? Well the R rate came down for one thing. 🤷‍♀️ I’m not a lockdown zealot by any stretch bit I’m not a covid denier. I think some** measures are justified. SD and masks for example. What I come back to though is that restrictions will increase if people don’t bother to do the bare minimum.

"So that the NHS can catch up"

Is the NHS catching up... seriously. Covid Transmission was relatively low June-August. Did the NHS "catch up " over that period?

Here are stories about when NHS didn't catch up June-Aug.

www.itv.com/news/2020-09-10/hospital-waiting-times-at-record-high-with-215m-people-waiting-more-than-18-weeks-for-treatments

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53765260

www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/health/sixty-cent-youth-referrals-mental-health-services-lothians-still-waiting-lists-2959950

When will we know that the heavy suppression strategy meant that the NHS caught up rather than got far further behind than they would have been?

What we have to understand is that this is a pandemic. There is no winning solution, all options are shit.

Sorry, I just think that people think, if we do this, we will save lives, save the economy, have a good outcome. There may be a worse outcome, and a better outcome, but this far into the pandemic, having got past the point where test, trace and isolate might actually work, there are no good outcomes.

I think the best we can do is treat a fine line balancing health and economy.

There will be job losses and deaths but aim for economic activity and not overwhelming healthcare. And hopefully education.

Tread

That post sounded quite depressing. But really it’s just about striking a balance.

We're getting more restrictions because "we" confused learning to live with it, with pretending it had gone away. We could have some normality back if people continued working from home, if social distancing in pubs and restaurants had been taken seriously, if people hadn't gone on clubbing holidays etc. But we can't let the virus infect huge swathes of the population at once - that would be the worst of both worlds, tanking the economy, overwhelming the NHS and raising the death rate.

The few weeks of summer where people crowded into restaurants and hugged all their friends in bars (both of which happened frequently where I live) weren't worth it. The school run catch ups are not worth it.

We could have something like normality but we won't because we'll keep going too far and having to draw back.