Learn to live with it?

[shitonitbambinos]

What does this mean?

It seems to be on every post alongside 'no one is following the rules' etc. But what does it mean as no one ever says!

Is it...

1. Our current life - rolling in and out of restrictions
2. Revert to completely normal life and forget it exists
3. Something else?

I think they mean "protect lock up the vulnerable and let everyone else have a crack at it.

They want life to resemble pre Covid as much as possible.

I once (3 months ago) put up a post about shielding for the over 60s and was shot down in flames!
No one supported it at all.

....and i can see why, you are effectively asking millions of people to lock themselves in their homes for months even years until a vaccine but what if there isn't?

If we had a better NHS we could possible work out something but we haven't, ours is shite, its full during winter without Covid 7 has had to halt all elective surgery before...so we will now have to shut it down again to all but emergencies.

The lockdown fanatics who do not think it’s fair to enable the vulnerable to stay at home temporarily for their own safety can never explain why it’s fairer to lock everyone up and shut down the economy instead.

Err we were never locked up.
Lockdown was a totally different scenario to shielding. Dh never left the house for 4 months Granted towards the end he was allowed out for daily exercise. Yes it was not mandatory but ecv were strongly encouraged to do it to save the NHS and protect themself. Some ECV were also encouraged to sign DNRs.
Also if it is left to rip through how protected are the 15% of ECV with kids going to be? The school were quite clear that fines would be issued for non attendance.
There is no social distancing in schools and the bubbles are massive.

@Ecosse

The lockdown fanatics who do not think it’s fair to enable the vulnerable to stay at home temporarily for their own safety can never explain why it’s fairer to lock everyone up and shut down the economy instead.

So what was shielding then? My DH has rarely left the house since March, and didn't at all during lockdown. Our biggest risk right now is our DS who has to attend school. Your prime minister and his people will not allow ECV people to work flexibly with schools. You're asking families to choose between reducing risk for my ECV family members, or DC's school place. Is it DC's fault that they have ECV parents and the gov don't want them to be offered flexibility? Not to mention the ECV who are actually teaching right now.

Or do you not care because situations like these do not affect you or your kids?

It means accepting that the truth is:

• we cannot eradicate the virus;
• there won’t be a return to pre-COVID lifestyle;
• the vaccine may never be found or it may have very little immunization rate;
• we cannot save every single life and it is not reasonable to expect us to;
• we need to change our ways and learn to live with the virus that is endemic;
• this is a serious disease but notapocalyptic like you are reading in your social media;
• focus more on living than the virus, is not healthy for your minds, the virus is here to stay irrespective of your mental health;
• get a grip and go to work being sensible with trying to minimise infection;

get a grip and go to work being sensible with trying to minimise infection;

Pray tell me how my dh can minimise the risk of infection when you have 3 kids at school in bubbles of up to 250 kids.
Maybe we need to sociially distance in the home again. Yes because it was really fun telling our 7 year old child that she couldn't hug Daddy.

Open everything up.

Focus testing on those younger people that come into contact with the elderly until a vaccine is available to them (hopefully Spring).

The pandemic is largely over anyway. We can expect deaths this winter, but much more akin to a typical winter flu season than the initial steep wave

It means the virus isn’t going away so everyone needs to get on with their lives with the knowledge the virus is around. We can’t continue to all stay at home forever. There are always diseases that people are vulnerable to. Those that want to be extra careful can be (like others have to do for other diseases) and everyone else gets on with their life normally.

@Ecosse

The lockdown fanatics who do not think it’s fair to enable the vulnerable to stay at home temporarily for their own safety can never explain why it’s fairer to lock everyone up and shut down the economy instead.

Bollocks I was in favour of fully locking down earlier than we did, and getting a decent system of testing and contact tracing up and running before a gradual re-opening. I believe social distancing, good hygeine, the wearing of masks and as much being done outside as possible alongside a quick, efficient and readily available system of testing, contact tracing and isolating where everyone abides by the rules....should have and would have made a huge difference whilst we wait for a vaccine, to the spread of the virus, the support of the health service and the economy. The government fucked up on this on a mammoth scale...leaving us in the shite we are in now.

I think herd immunity, focused protections, Great Barrington Declarations or 'enabling the vulnerable to stay at home' is a nice lie to tell ourselves that it is possible for 'most if us' to get back to some sort of normality, whilst segregating those who have been deemed vulnerable. It is a completely flawed concept.

The huge flaws in this are

• no one can agree onwhothe vulnerable are
• the highest numbers of deaths in the 'first wave' were the moderately vulnerable..not the extremely clinically vulnerable
• 'the vulnerable' are part of society, and live and work with everyone else, go to school, go to hospital, maintain the economy...are us.
• death isnt the only negative outcome of Covid - we need to learn more about the myriad ways it affects people long term from PIMS to the various consequences being seen in long covid.

When you say to lock everyone up and shut down the economy instead
What, how and who do you mean?
When you say enable the vulnerable to stay at home temporarily
What, how and who do you mean?

@Northernsoulgirl45

get a grip and go to work being sensible with trying to minimise infection;

Pray tell me how my dh can minimise the risk of infection when you have 3 kids at school in bubbles of up to 250 kids.
Maybe we need to sociially distance in the home again. Yes because it was really fun telling our 7 year old child that she couldn't hug Daddy.

Why would you tell your child not to hug their dad?

Lockdown fanatics

This means people who listen to epidemiologists, who have explained over and over again that shielding will not work.

They've explained it so thoroughly and clearly that even Johnson understands.

Anyone still pushing shielding is either incapable of understanding basic science or happy to accept deaths of fellow citizens.

‘Why would you tell your child not to hug their dad?’

Are you really that stupid or just pretending to be? If the government won’t protect their ECV dad by allowing the children to either have a more Covid secure school or allow them to learn from home then how else are they supposed to protect him? It’s the exact reason why my children can’t hug (or go near) their ECV grandparents

Effective test and trace system, to contain outbreaks to not overwhelm the NHS or have too many (key) workers off that essentials effectively shut anyway.

People need to be able to get tested and results the same day. Or nothing will improve.

Track and trace doesn't work except in highly specific circumstances.

Flu kills thousands of Brits every year yet we don't bother tracking and tracing influenza. Pre-covid we didn't even strongly discourage sick people from going to work, something I always thought was ridiculous.

@Racoonworld

It means the virus isn’t going away so everyone needs to get on with their lives with the knowledge the virus is around. We can’t continue to all stay at home forever. There are always diseases that people are vulnerable to. Those that want to be extra careful can be (like others have to do for other diseases) and everyone else gets on with their life normally.

Attitudes like this are the problem. Like so many others, I’m vulnerable, but I can’t just stay in my home forever, either. For me to go out safely, I have to socially distance, which I do. But if everyone else is getting on with their life “normally”, i.e., not bothering to distance or wear masks, this is very difficult if not impossible.

@Northernsoulgirl45

get a grip and go to work being sensible with trying to minimise infection;

Pray tell me how my dh can minimise the risk of infection when you have 3 kids at school in bubbles of up to 250 kids.
Maybe we need to sociially distance in the home again. Yes because it was really fun telling our 7 year old child that she couldn't hug Daddy.

But the rest of the country being in lockdown doesn't help your family situation long term though does it. As you say there could easily be help and processes put in place to support ECV families to learn at home if they wanted to without fines or de registering rather than lockdowns and restrictions that plunge many into poverty hunger and homelessness. The 2 situations don't need to be exclusive of each other. If more focus given too ECV families (and I mean actual help not shutting them away to rot) the wider community wouldn't need such strict restrictions and livelihoods would be protected. Theres medically vulnerable and socially vulnerable both need equal protection.

@justaminuet how long do you want these restrictions for though? If the virus is here to stay how long would you expect everyone to social distance, wear masks, isolate, send school bubbles home etc. for? 6 more months? 1 year? 5?

At some point the restrictions have to end, the difference is when it happens. It could happen now, when more businesses are able to survive, or it could happen later when covid will be dwarfed by the devastation created by the restrictions, when more people have died due to late diagnoses and mental health issues, when more children's lives are ruined by their families being thrown into poverty.

I don't really understand what people who are vulnerable to covid actually expect. The world can shut down for short periods to protect them but at some point that has to end. It just has to. There is a limit to how much anyone can be protected from any virus that's present in the entire population. I don't know what's achieved by extending and extending restrictions, other than the creation of more and more other problems, problems that they'll have to face along with their vulnerability to the virus in the long run.

People will shout 'vaccine' but even vaccines aren't going to be a guarantee - there is no guarantee. Everyone can do everything to protect you now, to their own serious detriment and you could still get covid next year or in 2025 or whenever. Meanwhile the world has to recover from being absolutely battered senseless with essentially futile restrictions. It makes no sense to me at all.

And all those who say 'protect the NHS' - I ask the same question - for how long?? How long do lives have to be curtailed to protect a system that's supposed to be there to protect us?

It strikes me that people are conveniently ignoring the fact that their simple “shielding the vulnerable” call in reality involves all the social distancing measures, lockdowns, event cancellations and not seeing extended family that we’ve been doing.

I also think some people forget that these restrictions and shielding aren’t actually about saving individual lives but about protecting the NHS. The NHS has been protected, yes there will be a rocky few months like usual in winter but as soon as that’s over the restrictions can go.

"Learning to live with it" simply does not work in a pandemic.

Quite why we don't look overseas to countries that have managed this is beyond me. Taiwan has managed to keep its cases down to 548, and only 7 people have died, thanks to massive fines and a really cohesive track and trace system. Similar in New Zealand. That means they can just get on with almost normal life, because the risk is so low and because anyone who gets it can immediately be isolated, and it then can't jump to others. South Africa has the largest testing programme in the world, and so many countries across the globe are keeping it at bay, which is properly 'living with it'. As opposed to dying with it.

That's the way to tackle this, really cracking down on how the virus spreads. Instead, this government has just let it spread. It's not a question of certain people isolating, because everyone's part of society, we all have family and so on. We've not seen our family since March, because they live too far away to visit. The more this spreads, the longer it'll go on, the more work gets disrupted by immediate cases of covid, or long-term health problems, by people losing relatives and friends and their network of support, by people missing out on medical treatment because staff are ill, or there is a risk of spreading it further.

If we ignore it and get on, it doesn't go away. It gets bigger. It's insanity keeping schools open without any distancing just for starters. I feel despairing, sometimes, when people start accepting what, in normal times, would be considered eugenics. We don't have to have all these cases or all these deaths.

@PuppyMonkeyyes so either everyone has to do it or just the vulnerable. Is it fair to make everyone do it?

We are living with it! So I dont know. People who think they're immune having parties with strangers? 🤷‍♀️

It means 'please stop your perpetual moaning you infuriating bore, and occupy your mind with something other than Covid'.

Or that's that I mean when I say it.