Are we sacrificing the young to save the elderly?

[RubyandBen]

Reading another thread where someone was accusing the OP of wanting to sacrifice the elderly re CV. But the longer this goes on the more education and the economy are screwed is it actually the other way round?

Yes

@SheepandCow

You keep spouting this line that if only we have another strict lockdown, COVID will disappear and everything will go back to normal. It’s just nonsense.

We had a 3 month lockdown with compliance much higher than expected and thousands of businesses closed that were never meant to. Look where we are now.

Spain had one of the strictest lockdowns in the world and they have also had w bad second wave.

You can point to New Zealand but New Zealand is frankly in the middle of nowhere geographically. We are located in the heart of Europe and we are reliant on importing many of our needs.

Ecosse - s Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore. I think even the isle of man in U.K.

A lot of these places have high population density, dependence on imports and travel hubs.

I think the places with good control will have better economic outcomes in the long term

Yes.

I don't want to live in a society that doesn't protect the elderly and vulnerable.
I also don't want to live in a society that doesn't acknowledge and recompense the enormous cost of protecting the old and vulnerable on the young.

My parents, who bought detached and lovely house for £9000 when I was a teenager, and haven't worked for a total of 70+ years between them, are living, and have lived a life that their grandchildren will not have a hope of achieving. Nor are they suffering. They are just distancing while cleaner, gardener, food deliveries arrive.

And they agree with the OP. This is not fair.

@Namenic

Ecosse - s Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore. I think even the isle of man in U.K.

A lot of these places have high population density, dependence on imports and travel hubs.

This.

@ecosse You keep quoting my posts out of context. You ignore that we didn't have a proper lockdown (unlike Spain). You also ignore that Spain's lockdown did work - until they opened their borders (it was probably us who brought it back over there...)

A proper lockdown with closed borders except essential travel like food imports (and proper quarantine where required) would work - and because it would properly work to contain Covid, it would ultimately be shorter.

We'd certainly get back to mostly normal much quicker than continuing as we have done for the past 8-9 months - dragging it all out for another year.

I said on another thread. I think the Anti Containment measures lot actually want to drag it out. They don't want to go back to a normal life. They prefer this dragged out half life.

I said on another thread. I think the Anti Containment measures lot actually want to drag it out. They don't want to go back to a normal life. They prefer this dragged out half life.

Why would they, whoever they might be, want his to be dragging out?

So they can chip us with a vaccine??

Yes

Www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/17/coronavirus-1-million-young-britons-face-jobs-crisis-within-weeks

Maybe the answer is in other ideas that are more 'radical'. - such as the Universal Basic Income or offering free higher education with student grants (I'd extend this to any age group if people were retraining in jobs in certain areas/sectors).

There are other ways to mitigate the knock on effects of being in a worldwide pandemic, we just need to actually get through this/try to establish some level of control first.

How would another hard lockdown work exactly?

Lockdown fatigue = less compliance this time

Asymptomatic cases = 40,50,60 %

Can’t fully close our borders = UK is a net importer of food

Some key worker movements still required even if we went full Wuhan

[quote MarriedtoDaveGrohl]**@mrshoho* We had unemplyment of 12% back in 1984. I was 14 and the prospects for school leavers was not exactly rosy. Unemployment now is around 5% and yes I know will rise but this is temporary. In the 80's university and that whole experience wasn't on the radar for the majority of that generation. It was 2 years on a YTS schem for £30 per week and no guarantee of a job at the end.*

Spot on. I dug onions up, picked apples, worked in an apple processing place, and did a 3 month deeply boring placement in a civil service office (dad pulled strings but I was useless). And was unemployed. In the end I started selling door to door just to earn money. I lived. It got better. I moved out at 17 and life didn't end, in fact I got on better with my parents.

And here's another fun fact or two for those thinking that the past was so easy and kids are fucked. At that time we made fuck all money. NO ONE lived alone or in a couple. It was grotty flat shares until you were at least 30. Becoming less grotty but still flat shares. I didn't buy my first flat till my early-mid thirties as I was on my own.

NO ONE had decent stuff or expensive tech. NO ONE had designer clothing or nice makeup. Or takeaway coffee or posh nights out. No one had their parents spend hundreds at their birthday or Christmas. NO ONE had cosmetic treatments. Because NO ONE could fucking afford it.

Seriously the young have got their whole pampered fucking lives ahead of them. A rough year isn't the end for them. It might even be the making of them.[/quote]
This. Not to mention living through other recessions and the fear of nuclear Armageddon.

The current "the old are living in luxury and throwing the young under the bus" narrative is a perfect example of divide and rule. While we all bicker amongst ourselves the real problem goes unchallenged. Maybe have look at something like www.equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk

Good post above (and I’m from that generation myself) but the big difference between then & now is we have more older people and a insufficient tax base to pay for it as birth rates went down after the booms.

Agree the proliferation of hospitality will probably have to be pruned & indeed it’s happening. We need more Care Assistants, Bricklayers etc. Less young people doing nonsense degrees at Uni & more shoulders to the wheel.

As someone who grew up in 1980s I totally agree. I had sooo many grotty jobs. House, and then flat, shared until my mid 30s. Bought when I got married. Had to use credit cards to survive so I could work as an intern to then get onto professional training. No spare money for much at all. Went to hairdresser for first time in my mid twenties. No beauty treatments until 30s - all DIY at home. Eating out was a massive and very rare treat - special occasions only. Tesco basic range the norm.

They young are having an awful time though and I do feel for them. It’s an awful time of life to be distanced from friends. And with Covid and Brexit many have hard years to come. With climate change too... well I have DC so a bit scared to even think too much about that.

But, the fact of the matter is that there is a novel virus spreading throughout the world that can require hospitalisation, critical care/ICU. This will have an impact on everyone, including the young.

Those wards are filling up (critical care beds in Wales are full) and as hospitals then implement plans to expand this kind of care, other services struggle. Immediately life threatening needs always have to be prioritised over less urgent care. Things like planned surgery will be postponed. Other impacts too. Things like ambulances responding to Covid means there will be slower response times. Anyone can be in an accident - a trip down the stairs when drunk, a car accident, a falling tree branch... including the young and their loved ones. I could go on with the ramifications of what the impact of Covid becoming out of control means for NHS provision but you get the jist.

Lockdowns are hard for us all. They truly are. Economic catastrophe is hard for many but the privileged few. Covid is hard if you get it badly, lose a loved one, experience long term health problems, are traumatised from the experiences. It’s all bloody hard. Awful. And we all wish it would just go away.

But it won’t, so we ALL have to do what we can to slow the spread so that we ALL can continue to enjoy the peace of mind that comes from knowing our fundamental physical safety needs will be met. We all need to know that should we need emergency care it’s there in a timely way, young and old alike.

Take care of yourselves and each other.

OP, I agree. The youngest are the most vulnerable in society and they have been disregarded throughout this.

The issue is not teenagers losing socialising, holidays, luxuries etc, but rather children losing education and life chances, and emerging into a far more difficult world.

They will have to deal with shrunken job opportunities and limited public services as the NHS contracts and public spending declines. On top of that their tax will rise to pay for the huge coronavirus debt. Brutally unfair.

So much hysteria. How about a bit of pragmatism and teaching young people what it means to be part of a whole society rather than looking after their own needs above all else? Sure, my teens are fed up and I can see their lives are different to mine. But my 16 year old is working and is at college, albeit online sometimes. He has made new friends and they chat online regularly. If I were to constantly tell him it’s unfair and he’s missing out and his whole future is being sacrificed for a few old people who’ve loved their lives anyway, maybe he would be more frustrated? But as it is, he accepts the situation, follows the politics and gets on with life as best he can. We discuss how we think a global recession may impact him going forwards and we think about what we can do to improve his chances in the workplace.

Personally, I would rather a young person able to see the bigger picture, ready to adapt to whatever comes next, with some compassion for the elderly and vulnerable than some of the adult-sized, feel stamping toddlers some of you seem to be rearing if these threads are anything to go by. The world has changed. Use your knowledge to,prepare your teens, not make them demanding and resentful.

enough well let’s hope your son isn’t quietly very sad about his life chances but afraid to talk to you about it for fear of being called hysterical.

Comment plucked from the local paper on students

I’ve defended the pending plight of the young vociferously on here, but the poster does make some fair points imo.

‘They are taking £9,250 a year from hard-working tax-payers, for 3 or 4 years, so they can do sod all, other than to relieve themselves of any need to work for their living and pay taxes for a few years. At most of the glorified colleges, nowadays called "universities", the vast majority will never earn anything near enough to require them to pay back the tax-payer for the money they've taken - "degrees" in Integrated Basket Weaving and Raffia Work; or Victimhood, Grievance and Discrimination Studies; or Golf Course Management, don't actually lead to high-paying jobs. If there's one good thing that may come out of this crisis is that universities will return to being the preserve of intelligent and academically gifted young people only, and those from good, morally upright homes and families. The party thugs and criminal drug users can stay away and kick-off their life-long careers flipping burgers at age 18 instead of 21 and the man responsible for these very average people on a three year sabbatical while we import people to do the jobs they should be doing , is the war criminal Blair.

Yes, Idiot Blair - lets send 50 % of ALL 18 year olds to uni even if they as thick as 2 short planks. Degrade A levels so everyone gets an A* 99.5 % pass rate for degrees at the sink uni's. Prizes For All.
Just to keep the kids off the dole for few years and make them think they are all Einsteins’

Should we be sending less of the young to Uni & concentrating on vocational qualifications?

Maybe that & a few less coffee shops may be an idea going forward?

Personally, I would rather a young person able to see the bigger picture, ready to adapt to whatever comes next, with some compassion for the elderly and vulnerable
I agree with you. Besides it will be good training for the next pandemic they'll more than likely see again in their lifetime.
Life is about society as a whole.
Is it any wonder respect is gone towards the elderly, as DC we would always offer our sit without prompting. I still carry bags or offer when I see someone vunerable struggling with a walking aid.

enough well let’s hope your son isn’t quietly very sad about his life chances but afraid to talk to you about it for fear of being called hysterical

Ah yes, slag off my parenting because you don’t agree with me. Classic MN.

My children are just fine and our relationship is solid, thanks. We talk about all sorts. Of course he is worried about what the future holds but we have at least addressed what needs to be done to improve those chances. Again, far better to address is rather than stamp our feet and say it’s not fair.

Nobody is being sacrificed. We are all in this together - we are all fellow human beings.

I just read this on the guardian
Doctors’ haste to mechanically ventilate patients at the start of the pandemic might have contributed to the higher rate of death in spring compared to now, a senior medic has said.

Dr Alison Pittard, the dean of the Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine in London, said doctors’ evolving understanding of the virus had dramatically upped the survival rate.

At the start of the pandemic, just 66% of people in hospital with the virus survived, compared to 84% in August. Dr Pittard told Sky News:

We used to put patients straight onto mechanical ventilation – so we would bring them to intensive care, sedate them and put them on ventilators. But we have slowly started to realise that perhaps we could manage some patients without doing that.

She said intensive care teams now use a variety of interventions to help patients breathe, and full mechanical ventilation is a last resort.

Pittard said there’s no evidence to suggest Covid-19 has become less dangerous despite falling death rates in the UK. She said that, although treatment is improving, social distancing is also having an impact on transmission and viral load.

It is still a very deadly virus, although the majority of people who still become infected will have a very, very minor illness or may not even know that they are ill at all. For those people that require hospital admission, for those that come to intensive care it’s still a very severe disease.

If you end up in critical care with Covid pneumonia you are almost twice as likely to die than somebody who’s admitted with a pneumonia not due to Covid - so it is still something to be worried about.

Keeping critical care facilities open to non-Covid patients will be vital to minimising the collateral damage of the next wave of the pandemic, Pittard added.

She said that minimising transmission within the community was the best way to prevent urgent care units becoming overburdened. Pittard said the focus of the next wave of the pandemic “isn’t going to be on Covid patients getting access to healthcare, it is going to be for those patients that don’t have Covid”.

If we can keep community transmission down it means we can treat everybody who needs healthcare and that is the great desire for everyone working in the NHS at the moment.

We are all in this together

We very obviously aren’t. That’s the problem.

*We are all in this together

A nice thought but no we aren't.

@MummyPop00

Comment plucked from the local paper on students

I’ve defended the pending plight of the young vociferously on here, but the poster does make some fair points imo.

‘They are taking £9,250 a year from hard-working tax-payers, for 3 or 4 years, so they can do sod all, other than to relieve themselves of any need to work for their living and pay taxes for a few years. At most of the glorified colleges, nowadays called "universities", the vast majority will never earn anything near enough to require them to pay back the tax-payer for the money they've taken - "degrees" in Integrated Basket Weaving and Raffia Work; or Victimhood, Grievance and Discrimination Studies; or Golf Course Management, don't actually lead to high-paying jobs. If there's one good thing that may come out of this crisis is that universities will return to being the preserve of intelligent and academically gifted young people only, and those from good, morally upright homes and families. The party thugs and criminal drug users can stay away and kick-off their life-long careers flipping burgers at age 18 instead of 21 and the man responsible for these very average people on a three year sabbatical while we import people to do the jobs they should be doing , is the war criminal Blair.

Yes, Idiot Blair - lets send 50 % of ALL 18 year olds to uni even if they as thick as 2 short planks. Degrade A levels so everyone gets an A* 99.5 % pass rate for degrees at the sink uni's. Prizes For All.
Just to keep the kids off the dole for few years and make them think they are all Einsteins’

Should we be sending less of the young to Uni & concentrating on vocational qualifications?

Maybe that & a few less coffee shops may be an idea going forward?

@MummyPop00

I think this raises lots of interesting points too...