BBC1 news tonight

[Pomegranatespompom]

Did anyone watch the poverty and covid report? It was incredibly sad, people living in absolutely awful circumstances. There was no SD/mask wearing,. An utterly depressing watch.

@TheDailyCarbuncle - if you work with models (different from being a modeller, I guess?), then why is your argument on here so poor? I think everyone can agree that this Government has been particularly poor in its responses, as it acts behind the times at every opportunity, but that is not the same thing as arguing that once you’ve let things almost spiral out of control, you should just say “fuck it, we might as well just let it rip through the population now, then.” So why are you arguing that? And if you aren’t, then you are arguing for some type of “lockdown” on certain activities, given that “lockdown” in this country has never meant ceasing all economic activity.

@KayakingOnDown some people will die because of the lockdowns but actually relatively few compared to the alternative. Not 60k fi.

Another particularly atrocious part of your argument, @TheDailyCarbuncle, is where you compare this country with less developed economies with younger populations where there has never been an expectation that their citizens should have access to the degree of healthcare expected here. I don’t live in a country that affords its citizens the low level of healthcare offered to the majority of people in Africa or India, or South America, so why would I want to be told that’s what I should expect now?

[quote Walkaround]**@TheDailyCarbuncle* - if you work with models (different from being a modeller, I guess?), then why is your argument on here so poor? I think everyone can agree that this Government has been particularly poor in its responses, as it acts behind the times at every opportunity, but that is not the same thing as arguing that once you’ve let things almost spiral out of control, you should just say “fuck it, we might as well just let it rip through the population now, then.” So why are you arguing that? And if you aren’t, then you are arguing for some type of “lockdown” on certain activities, given that “lockdown” in this country has never* meant ceasing all economic activity.[/quote]
If this is what you believe I'm saying, I can see why you think my argument is poor. It's not what I'm saying. I thought I was being clear but obviously not. Maybe you should try reading what I've written rather than fabricating some nonsense about me thinking covid should 'rip' through the population (why why why why the fuck why is it always always RIP? Where the fuck has that word come from? Viruses DON'T RIP!!!)

@Walkaround

Another particularly atrocious part of your argument, *@TheDailyCarbuncle*, is where you compare this country with less developed economies with younger populations where there has never been an expectation that their citizens should have access to the degree of healthcare expected here. I don’t live in a country that affords its citizens the low level of healthcare offered to the majority of people in Africa or India, or South America, so why would I want to be told that’s what I should expect now?

I have genuinely no idea what this means.

Anyway, I'm definitely out now.

@TheDailyCarbuncle - yes, out before you have said what you mean. Because you don’t seem to have a solution that doesn’t involve locking someone down, given that you are so critical about the number of unnecessary deaths in care homes.

[quote Walkaround]@TheDailyCarbuncle - yes, out before you have said what you mean. Because you don’t seem to have a solution that doesn’t involve locking someone down, given that you are so critical about the number of unnecessary deaths in care homes.[/quote]
Very much against my better judgement I will explain. I thought I already had but it wasn't clear enough for you.

Lockdown was the solution for care homes - based on a model, it was decided that the best thing to do was to prevent elderly, vulnerable people from having contact with the people who loved them, for their own good.

Two things happened: firstly the model was utter horseshit, and the way in which care was organised, based on that model meant that infections increased rather than decreased. So from that point of view lockdown, as dictated by the model, killed people.

In addition, denying elderly, vulnerable people access to their loved ones meant that a very significant number of them rapidly deteriorated and many died as a direct result of lockdown. So the lockdown that was for their own good, meant to protect them, killed them.

Now any idiot could have predicted that plunging elderly people into loneliness and despair wouldn't do them any good. At the same time, it wouldn't be too much to expect the people building the model that would dictate the success of infection control in care homes would find out even a little bit about how care homes function, but they didn't. All in all, a crashing failure.

At least now it is recognised that preventing human contact for elderly people is a stupid move, so efforts are made to ensure families can get tested and then visit. That should have happened right from the start - there should never been a point at which lockdown was a thing for people for whom not seeing family would be a massive and often deadly blow. The change is good, but it's way too late for the many who died in despair.

I could explain how the same principle applies to other vulnerable people - people with mental health issues, people who are on the edge of poverty and starvation - but I don't really feel like it. It seems mad to me that I have to explain why isolating people and increase their vulnerability and suffering is a bad thing.

Now I'm properly out.

@TheDailyCarbuncle - there wasn’t availability of testing at the beginning, though, was there? And staff worked in more than one care home - there weren’t enough staff to do otherwise. So what do you actually think you are suggesting should have happened at the beginning? That people still visit their relatives in care homes, because they were going to die of covid anyway? In which case, why are you so critical about the number of covid deaths that happened in the first wave?

I would have more respect for your argument, @TheDailyCarbuncle, if you admitted you think it is better to die of covid than to die of loneliness, rather than pretending the death toll would not be that bothersome.

• No, I'm someone who works with models like the ones used in the pandemic. I am in no way a conspiracy theorist - I find it very telling that people who believe in lockdowns jump straight to that accusation before thinking 'hang on a minute, perhaps destroying the entire economy wasn't the most sensible move.' What I'm saying isn't even that complicated - if you want proof of any of it you only have to look at any figures from the Office of National Statistics. It's all there to be seen, plain as day. Hell, you don't even need to go to ONS, just ask anyone you know about the state of the industry they work in. Ask how many are struggling financially, how many have bee made redundant. 'Saving lives' by reducing everyone's chances of having a healthy life is so arse about face in terms of a solution I really can't believe any sane person considers it to be a sensible option.

Anyway, I've made my point and I've had enough. At some point I will start a thread about models, feel free to join that one and I'll explain in excruciating detail why everything I'm saying is based on cold hard facts. Maybe you'll remember me saying these things when there's are big, sad discussions about how 'we couldn't have known this would be the outcome.' They could have known and they do know. It's all there in the data. Just remember that much.*

I agree with you. The number of people that will die as a result of missed cancer screenings/ delayed cancer treatments alone is far, far greater than the number of Covid deaths. Then you add on the poverty, redundancies etc that all reduce life expectancy, poor childhood nutrition, homelessness, increased domestic and childhood abuse, other medical procedures delayed/ missed etc.... as with Brexit, nobody will realise the damage until too late. At the moment furlough is masking a fair bit of it but when people finally understand what the worst recession in 300 years means - and the impact that this will have on living standards and the funding of public services for a generation - it will indeed be too late to change it.

Places that control the virus have less economic damage than those that dont - including Sweden suffering more economic damage than its neighbours. We have greater economic damage than needed thanks to an incompetent government but the faster we control this the faster we will get the rebound that will come with it.

But the UK Government is NOT trying to suppress the virus so that we can live like Australians or New Zealanders etc. They have let it become endemic and publicly said that it will not be eradicated, despite the vaccine. The countries that did well preventing it from becoming endemic. Locking down repeatedly after you have let it become endemic is the worst of both worlds, hence us heading for the worst recession out of any country in the developed world and having one of the highest death rates per capita in the world.

How can anybody seriously defend Government policy at this point given those facts?

@PolkadotGiraffe - but the latest lockdown was to enable the NHS to continue with cancer treatments, etc, and still cope with covid admissions, not to stop cancer treatments again like last time, so your argument on that doesn’t stack up. You could argue we should just let lots of people die of cancer and covid and everything else for a while so as to keep businesses open and enable everyone to socialise as normal, but you seem to want your cake and eat it by arguing we can keep treating cancer and covid at the same time and keep life running as usual (which would be nice, but doesn’t seem realistic).

@PolkadotGiraffe - I don’t see anyone defending government policy. I also don’t see how you can simultaneously argue lockdowns are bad and that they are good. What you actually appear to mean is that this country has never locked down at all.

Or do you think New Zealand’s lockdown and Australia’s lockdown were mistaken? Because they were lockdowns!

At the moment cancer services are running, but we are risk of no HDU/ ITU availability- which cancer patients often require.

[quote Walkaround]@PolkadotGiraffe - but the latest lockdown was to enable the NHS to continue with cancer treatments, etc, and still cope with covid admissions, not to stop cancer treatments again like last time, so your argument on that doesn’t stack up. You could argue we should just let lots of people die of cancer and covid and everything else for a while so as to keep businesses open and enable everyone to socialise as normal, but you seem to want your cake and eat it by arguing we can keep treating cancer and covid at the same time and keep life running as usual (which would be nice, but doesn’t seem realistic).[/quote]
Why then is the BMJ reporting that 40k to 50k of people will die because they haven't received treatment or diagnosis for cancer, heart and other life threatening diseases, with a further 100k over the next few years, as a result of lockdown? You are not considering the wider impacts or how this could have been handled better to prevent unnecessary damage to people for non-Covid reasons. Surely these people's lives matter as well? And that is just a snapshot of one small issue, leaving aside the damage to abused women, people forced into poverty and losing jobs and homes and businesses, children whose education has been damaged irreperably, mental health problems, suicides, increased abuse of women and children, etc.

Public policy decisions are difficult and brutal and require facing up to cold, hard facts and numbers, weighing up overall benefits and loss and it is sickening but these are the types of public policy decisions that have to be made everywhere around the world every day. I suppose the difference is that most people were oblivious to it until this year.

NICE actually puts a value on each year of expected human life when evaluating what treatments they will or won't pay for. As does almost every healthcare system in the world. They will pay more to save a baby than someone my age and rightly so, as they have more years (statistically) to live. It's horrible but with limited resources, this is reality.

We all want to save everyone we can. I am vulnerable, I have relatives who are very vulnerable, but as a society the thing to do was to look for a strategy to do the least possible damage and save as many healthy life years as possible. This is definitely not what has happened in the UK, or what is happening now.

And I am really upset at how @TheDailyCarbuncle has been spoken to on this thread for trying to bring some scientific and statistical understanding to the situation. It is all very well moralising but if you shy away from horrible facts and then end up doing more harm than good, does it make you moral?

I did see it, it was sobering.

“All in this together” my arse. The poor will always suffer disproportionately more.

If you want people to engage with you, there are effective ways to communicate. Posting in a superior, rude, aggressive and patronising manner - or did you not see the responses?

@PolkadotGiraffe - please link to an article where the BMJ blames the latest lockdown for cancer deaths... I think you are confusing leaving it far too late to act and the NHS panicking in the first wave with lockdowns per se being always being a bad thing. This country certainly wins the prize for timing everything atrociously badly and being unco-ordinated and incompetent (not surprising after years of austerity weakening systems and public health to the point they were already functioning poorly before the pandemic even started), but that doesn’t mean that everything would be much rosier now if they had continued to let everything carry on as though there wasn’t a new virus spreading at a rapid rate around the world.

@Pomegranatespompom

If you want people to engage with you, there are effective ways to communicate. Posting in a superior, rude, aggressive and patronising manner - or did you not see the responses?

Rather than "patronising" I would say that the poster was frustrated at people's unwillingness to listen to facts and statistics and someone who actually specialises in the field which most people are using output from (which many in that specialist field now admit was flawed) to continue to justify damaging policy from Government,^^ when there were far better strategies available right from the start that were not rocket science or new, rather basic public health protocol: in January/ February borders needed to be closed, and local public health teams tracking and tracing. That's been WHO protocol for years! This isn't the first ever outbreak of an infectious disease. What worked and what didn't work was known. In fact the Government commissioned a report in 2016 telling it what it needed to do to prepare for a pandemic then ignored it because it was focussing on Brexit.

[quote Walkaround]@PolkadotGiraffe - please link to an article where the BMJ blames the latest lockdown for cancer deaths... I think you are confusing leaving it far too late to act and the NHS panicking in the first wave with lockdowns per se being always being a bad thing. This country certainly wins the prize for timing everything atrociously badly and being unco-ordinated and incompetent (not surprising after years of austerity weakening systems and public health to the point they were already functioning poorly before the pandemic even started), but that doesn’t mean that everything would be much rosier now if they had continued to let everything carry on as though there wasn’t a new virus spreading at a rapid rate around the world.[/quote]
I didn't say it was because of the latest lockdown, did I? I said it was as a result of how our Government has handled this entire crisis. I presume you can use google so in the words and you will find the articles and stats.

*type in

@PolkadotGiraffe you are absolutely right. Not to mention when it continues to be dire in the next few years due to the combined effect of Brexit and covid, the government will blame it all on covid.

This xmas we have decided rather than give gifts, we will use the money to do a massive shop for the food bank. I'd urge everyone who is comfortably off to do this. It is absolutely dire out there for the poor, much worse than usual

And as I said that is just ONE impact of these policies. Many, many more premature deaths will follow from the poverty etc inflicted. People really should direct their anger at the Government for creating this situation, not to those pointing out the damage they have caused.