[quote Watermelon999]@TheDailyCarbuncle
“People have not been allowed to care for vulnerable relatives in care homes - some people in care homes have barely seen a loved one for months and months, 'for their own good.' Research has shown that over lockdown a significant proportion of care home residents died, not from covid, but from the effects of isolation and despair. Many simply stopped drinking and died of dehydration. How is that a positive outcome? That's a genuine, honest-to-god question. How is it beneficial to prevent a person having human contact 'for their own good' resulting in that person's death? How? I am so angry asking that question I can't tell you.
'Protecting the vulnerable' means focusing on the politically hot issue, protecting politician's reputations. It doesn't mean actually protecting vulnerable people, because if it did 'vulnerable' would include care home residents who need family contact to continue living, people who need jobs to be able to eat, people with mental health issues who need face to face treatment to avoid deteriorating, and the many many other people who are vulnerable to abuse and despair made worse by lockdown.
“If your 'vulnerable' only includes one group of people, and the needs of those people are prioritised to the extent that it actually causes the death of other vulnerable people then you have to really ask do you actually care about vulnerable people? Or are do you have fatal tunnel-vision where fear has made you focus on one thing?”
Of course it’s difficult to argue against any of these points because they are completely true.
And the trouble is, whichever way the government had chosen to handle things, the net result would be that people would suffer. Usually the ones who are already disadvantaged in some way.
You do remind me a little of a member of a political party that is not in power, speaking with passion about looking after the disadvantaged, and of all the things that should be done to improve society and make a difference. Great ideas, which would be fantastic but no explanation as to how to make them happen or available funding.
I do appreciate that you are looking at the wider picture though which our leaders should be doing, and that you speak with conviction, which many of those in charge do not.[/quote]
I agree to an extent that 'whichever way the government had chosen to handle things, the net result would be that people would suffer.' But I would point out that never before have people been given the expectation that they will be protected indefinitely, to the extreme detriment of others, from an illness. Never before have people been prevented, by law, from seeing their own families 'for their own good.' Suffering caused by a virus is essentially natural disaster territory - not caused by any one person, difficult if not impossible to control. It is what it is. Selling the notion that that one threat can be controlled by destroying other areas of life makes such little sense that I'm really baffled by people's acceptance of it. The virus causes a certain amount of suffering, but the aim seems to be to extend that suffering to absolutely everyone. Therefore, it doesn't matter if you get covid or not, you will definitely suffer - you will lose your job, relatives will die (of many different causes) before you can see them, your mental health will suffer, industries you rely on will collapse. You could get a virus, it could affect you. It's largely a matter of luck, as it has always been with every virus throughout history. But there's no escaping the fallout of the response to the virus, that's going to get you no matter what. It's also going to get your kids and potentially their kids. Because a virus isn't enough of a problem, we must create a thousand other problems to go with it.