Locking down to protect the well off

[IheartNiles]

Lockdowns protect the well off middle classes who can work from home in safe jobs. Lockdowns throw the working classes under the bus. The latter either take all the risk in public facing jobs, commuting on public transport, while their kids are left at home to educate selves. Or lose their jobs and income altogether.

It’s really depressing to hear women agitating for schools to shut. The repercussions of doing so are that WOMEN lose their jobs to perform childcare.

A high proportion of people who use this site need to pull their heads out of their overpriveged arses and take a look around. All the fucking shops and services you rely on are going to be decimated. No money will be forthcoming for the NHS without taxes. The NHS was cut to the bone after the last recession, the magic money tree that wasn’t there to increase nurses pay and might have helped mitigate against the current 40,000 and rising vacancies has shook bloody long and hard to pay for the consequences. Tell me how we are going to make this good because I can’t fucking see anything but misery ahead for the poorest among us.

@Volcanicorange I've got family, friends and acquaintances who are a mixture of hospital doctors and GPs. They are doing a mixture of WFH and work at surgery/hospital.

@PostItJoyWeek it is a novel virus - so it's new and no-one knows the long term effects of people catching it. We know short term that some people need hospitalisation and a minority of people die from it.

A hidden agenda here I feel.

All posts from OP are always at odds wth all other NHS people I know. OP has in the past written some awful posts deriding their NHS colleagues.

All your faux outrage for working class people is really not believable.

Are you maybe more concerned about your personal circumstances - investments, house purchase, That's understandable but best not to disguise it under your concern for the poor.

I'll preface this by saying that I do not support the current strategies nor a lockdown.

It is rank stupidity to assume that people who can work from home are all middle class; or that people who have managed to work hard and get a decent living are not "working class". I would have thought that, if nothing else, the last six months would have demonstrated that nobody is immune to the virus or to the adverse economic impacts.

Your arguments are ridiculous.

If the NHS collapses it won't be the rich with private health insurance who are going to suffer.

Completely agree with you OP. Many of self-employed have been completely shafted too.

Op
So when we don’t lock down and the virus spreads like mad......
who do you think will cop it first? Who do you think will be forced to go and work in supermarkets etc day after day ?

I don’t think anybody WANTS a lockdown.... in many ways, In terms of the economy, I think we’ll be in the same position with it without one to be totally honest.

Fewer dead though.
That’s the point.

Lockdowns protect the well off middle classes who can work from home in safe jobs.

I'm working from home, my job is far from safe, buggered if I know if I'm middle class or not!

And actually when the virus is in the community in high levels it is the working classes that are more at risk than in a lock down! The key worker roles are face to face and can't be done from home. Lockdowns will protect them. There are no bus drivers, care workers, shop workers, police, fire, ambulance, bin collectors working from home in a lockdown fgs. Their jobs at not at risk from a lockdown. But their health is without controlled levels.

I agree with you OP. Emily Maitlis was right about this. We are very definitely not all in this together.

I think it's complicated. I understand the OPs point, there's been an awful lot of posters who want to appear to lockdown their families forever but have no problem with the fact that in order to do that other people need to put themselves at risk.

Another poster made a good point about the intergenerational inequality. I'm so glad I'm not 15 or 21.

If there was a credible exit strategy it wouldn’t be so outrageous. Are we going to just keep doing this forevermore?

All those middle class people with regular incomes who ‘can’t believe how much they are saving’ etc. Another national lockdown is crazy stuff.

A lady from the WHO said that lockdowns don't work. It was on a bbc news debate one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago , but I don't recall her name. The other scientist on there from Oxford was saying the same thing too , only much more vocally.
People like my own ds2 can wfh ( he isn't at all 'middle class' or well off but his job is computer based) my other son has to go out to work and has done the entire time in the thick of it!
I'm sure many families are the same and many shops I would consider as non essential will still be allowed to trade. Those people still have to work.
Schools are a tricky one : some people can home school successfully, but many people can't. Keeping them open will only make people not abide by the rules.
It's an Impossible situation and another lockdown will wreck the economy even more leading to even more deaths.
Our government may be following the science here but it's still a nightmare all round. I know all the arguments but assuming it's only going to protect the middle classes isn't entirely true at all.
These type of arguments just end up going round in circles. Even having private healthcare might not save you as many private hospitals have also stopped operations and so on I read somewhere too. I doubt they are functioning as they were last year. They were given money by the government to free up some of their beds back in March and April.

I'm a TA (is that middle class?). I feel scared. I am in school as I have been throughout- schools never closed they were always open for vulnerable children and key worker children.
I am in an overcrowded, poorly ventilated room. No social distancing (I am sat right next to children hearing them read, doing interventions etc), no PPE, I do first aid with no PPE, I comfort children, I help them get changed after toilet accidents, I clear away their plates/cutlery after lunches. I clean toilets after out pods toilet time. All without PPE.
We wash hands a lot but as children do their little fingers are up little noses or in their mouths all the time.
I am a TA but I am also a living breathing human with a life and family of my own - all of which I am putting at risk.
What annoys me most is the hatred and vitriol against school staff who are calling for the same safety precautions that everyone else in the whole country gets.

And no you can't compare waiters or shop workers to school staff - they aren't prolonged close contact for the whole day, they get to wear masks or be behind screens and social distance, they don't wipe noses etc.

Why should school staff be cannon fodder? Why are our lives not important?

"Lockdowns protect the well off middle classes who can work from home in safe jobs. Lockdowns throw the working classes under the bus. The latter either take all the risk in public facing jobs, commuting on public transport, while their kids are left at home to educate selves. Or lose their jobs and income altogether.

It’s really depressing to hear women agitating for schools to shut. The repercussions of doing so are that WOMEN lose their jobs to perform childcare.

A high proportion of people who use this site need to pull their heads out of their overpriveged arses and take a look around. All the fucking shops and services you rely on are going to be decimated. No money will be forthcoming for the NHS without taxes. The NHS was cut to the bone after the last recession, the magic money tree that wasn’t there to increase nurses pay and might have helped mitigate against the current 40,000 and rising vacancies has shook bloody long and hard to pay for the consequences. Tell me how we are going to make this good because I can’t fucking see anything but misery ahead for the poorest among us."

• I hope there are protests, like in the rest of Europe. We need to wake up now.

I lost my business after the first lockdown. The second lockdown will mean my husband will be losing his business. The people here on mn who have been supporting lockdowns are the very same people who have secure jobs, homes or reliant on their DH's who are financially secured. The only disruption that will ever cause to these very same people is that they won't be able to take their darling children to swimming lessons or pony rides.

You're wrong because a lot of 'middle class' people are business owners who stand to lose everything and a lot of 'working class' people are working from home.

Anyway, Boris is speaking at 4pm so we'll find out then.

Why should school staff be cannon fodder? Why are our lives not important?

Has anyone said that?

From the ONS

From the working age population it's far more likely than men die. Occupation wise its those working as security guards.

Men and women working in social care, a group including care workers and home carers, both had significantly raised rates of death.

Because of the higher number of deaths among men, 17 specific occupations were found to have raised rates of death involving COVID-19, some of which included: taxi drivers and chauffeurs (65.3 deaths per 100,000; 134 deaths); bus and coach drivers (44.2 deaths per 100,000; 53 deaths); chefs (56.8 deaths per 100,000; 49 deaths); and sales and retail assistants (34.2 deaths per 100,000; 43 deaths).

@Dixiee

I lost my business after the first lockdown. The second lockdown will mean my husband will be losing his business. The people here on mn who have been supporting lockdowns are the very same people who have secure jobs, homes or reliant on their DH's who are financially secured. The only disruption that will ever cause to these very same people is that they won't be able to take their darling children to swimming lessons or pony rides.

This. My son's business only just survived the last lockdown and his mental health is in tatters. His business won't survive a second lockdown and I dread to think how that will affect him:

My daughter worked throughout lockdown and is pregnant. She'll work throughout it again at double hours no doubt, just to make sure all you who get food deliveries will be fed in your cosy nests.

And then there's the affect on education for my younger children. And let's not try and pretend that schools have fared well since they went back in September. They're trying hard for the most part but it's a losing battle.

Enough with the lockdowns.

It's the fact that we need another lockdown to protect the NHS that is an absolute joke. 6 months we have had at least, to get the NHS to be able to cope. The NHS has struggled every winter for years. Instead of spunking billions of quid on furlough and a track and trace system that doesn't fucking work, it should have been invested in the NHS. A fast track scheme to get medical and nursing students signed off, to get the care industry the training and support it needs, to be able to support carers to be able to self isolate so they can care for their patients without worrying about infecting them, full, hospital grade PPE for them.

Are Germany & France locking down to protect the NHS too? Allowing Covid to grow exponentially overwhelms any healthcare system, including the German one which has much more capacity than ours.

Are Germany & France locking down to protect the NHS too? Allowing Covid to grow exponentially overwhelms any healthcare system, including the German one which has much more capacity than ours.

This

@PeonyandDahlia totally agree with all you said. TA here too with a family xx

TA here. We are no more special that nurses, care workers, police and every other public sector worker out there. I deliver interventions and I have a mask/visor and screen. Is it perfect? Of course not, just like all the other public sector workers out there. Our rooms are ventilated, albeit chilly. Yes carers have PPA but wiping arses repeatedly throughout the day with a crap apron and flimsy mask is by no means classed as protected. I think you need to get over yourself a bit. We are no more at risk.

well Op the moment you said your hospital had 15 patients I stopped believing you. Also I know a number of doctors, not even the clinically vulnerable were sitting at home except when they had to isolate because they had covid or they couldnt get tests to show it was safe to go in. And mostly they will be working at Christmas.

Meanwhile - a lot of working class people have essential jobs and were working thoughout the pandemic, unless they also had covid or couldnt get tested.

What we are doing is transferring large amounts of public money to business owners to prop up their businesses. The banks will make a fortune from it, those with government contracts provided by their pals will laugh all the way to the bank. You are more likely to be one of them than you are to work in a hospital with 15 patients.

@Dixiee

I lost my business after the first lockdown. The second lockdown will mean my husband will be losing his business. The people here on mn who have been supporting lockdowns are the very same people who have secure jobs, homes or reliant on their DH's who are financially secured. The only disruption that will ever cause to these very same people is that they won't be able to take their darling children to swimming lessons or pony rides.

I'm very sorry about what's happened to you, truly I am. But making sweeping generalisations about people on the internet that you've never met is rather silly.

In a shitshow it is easy to turn on each other. To blame people for worrying about themselves and thier families - but this allows the real criminally incompetant to get away blame free.

The government are a bunch of useless, heads in the sand, greasy fingers in the pies, only out for themselves and their mates, idiots.

They have used this pandemic to enrich themselves and their associates. They have lied and lied and lied. They have given multiple millions of pounds to companies they have interests in, at the expense of more competant competitiors and outside of due process. They have hidden behind walls and leaked information rather than face us themseves. They have played and eaten and drunk at Chequares at our expense.

They should feel the full and total force of anger and fear and frustration. They are the ones who have failed us.