To think we have gone collectively insane in our response to covid

[PlumsAreNotTheOnlyFruit]

This is something I have thought for a while. I feel like we are in the grip of insanity when it comes to our response to covid.

We seem to be prepared to destroy our economy, get into massive debt, surrender our freedom and mess up our children's education over covid.

It's a virus which can and will spread, and now seems more virulent than ever. Unless you have a total eradication policy, which is impossible for the UK to implement now anyway, then only mitigation is possible.

All of Europe whatever their policies have been now have many cases. Why do we have to suffer covid AND watch our businesses go under with a potential decade of economic misery.

How many lives have been saved by our policies? Has anyone even done an analysis? We reject cancer drugs because we say they are too expensive for the number of years of life saved. We allow polluting diesel vehicles to drive in urban areas despite the 40,000 who die each year from the effects of air pollution. Why is covid different?

I am cross that we haven't thrown everything at expanding health care capacity since March and instead have spent our money paying people not to work after closing things down.

Right now I feel that the virus will continue to spread whatever we do and that that our focus should be on shielding the most vulnerable until they can be vaccinated. I realise that isn't likely to be 100% effective but neither are our present policies.

Prepare to be flamed OP but I agree with you

Everything that has been done was done half arsed hence we are in the position we are now in.

Lockdown just kicked the can down the road. I'm not advocating herd immunity as that would cause disaster deaths wise. But there is no simple answer at this point
Frankly, this new strain sounds to me like an excuse for Boris to cover up how bad Brexit is going to be. We already have carnage at Dover and beyond.
Whilst scientists have said there "might" be a strain that's easier to catch, they said the virus is doing what every virus does and mutating. It's already mutated a huge number of times. And the mutation isn't more deadly than the old one. Scientists not linked to Boris and co have been asking for full and Frank figures and been denied.
It's smoke and mirrors at this stage. Pubs being closed when they're responsible for the lowest numbers of infections says it all. Schools remain open despite being responsible for most transmission. Then hospitals where lots of people are catching it due to a lack of forward thinking on decent cleaning standards from agency staff who slop a dirty mop round.

I think you make some very good points.

Lockdown needed to be swifter and tougher to get things under control in the first place.

Going forward need to stop the NHS from being overwhelmed by having short tough local lockdowns - but other than that I agree we absolute need to get back to as normal life as possible - taking sensible actions to limit spread like encouraging mixed home-office working, avoiding big crowd gatherings and yes avoiding Christmas travel.

YANBU OP, I couldn't agree more. Its madness!

I completely agree too Op.

YANBU. it's insane. I am sincerely worried for our civil liberties.

We should have a police state and then we might respect the rules of lockdown. Everyone in isolation should wear tags which are applied and then released by the police. People arriving at airports should be tested properly and isolated properly. Wuhan is back to normal. Our half arsed liberalism has ruined this country.

Read the threads about people breaking lockdown on this site. Is it alright to have a party on the street and let the children play together? No it friggin isn’t.

I agree with you OP. We have gone quite crazy. People are suggesting leaving children at home alone so that they can get their shopping done. Lonely elderly people who's last Christmas it may be are left to fend for themselves. It's just all become ridiculous. Children used to playing daily with friends have been kept indoors for months. And don't get me started on the curtain twitching "I'm going to report you" nazis.

People keep saying blame the government, don’t blame people for breaking the rules. But it’s an indisputable fact that countries with a high compliance rate such as South Korea and Japan have managed to suppress this much better than we have. You can’t get away from that. It is also the government, they have been weak at every stage. No forward thinking, just fire fighting. Stupid ideas like eat out to help out. Testing & tracing has worked in other places and a lot of money and focus should have gone into that in the first lockdown. But the government act as though that ship has sailed and now we just wait for the vaccine. Again just sitting back and waiting instead of being proactive. Of course people are tired of sitting back and waiting, many have lost livelihoods from that approach. But people saying well MPs have broken the rules so I will too, is not helpful.

Everything is destroyed now, the economy, people’s mental health and the risk of covid is now greater than it was back in March. It’s been a complete fuck up.

I don't disagree with your broader point, but what do you mean by expand healthcare capacity? We could order more tests etc but other than that, we built hospitals and then had noone to operate them. We can buy more ventilators and again not have the staff to monitor them. Expanding health capacity means years of training new doctors, nurses and allied professionals to run whatever new buildings and equipment you put in place, it simply can't be done in a year.

@PlumsAreNotTheOnlyFruit you are spot on. It's madness, complete and utter madness. It's like setting yourself on fire to cure hiccups 😫

Completely agree with you!

@Ocsetldil but we don't have a police state like China do we? Our borders are very porous despite us being an island. We are very close to mainland Europe and have had huge amounts of freight and people going in and out each day which we are dependent on for food supplies. So we would have found it very hard to do what you suggest even if we had wanted to.

I don't want to live in a police state either.

It's been half cocked and resulted in a huge mess.
I have been aghast at the lack of preparation and response to many things, but the situation in schools has just left me reeling.

At the beginning when they closed the schools to most, I genuinely thought there'd be a plan. I saw the huge wads thrown at Eat out to Help Out and assumed the same level. of attention would be applied to schools. I don't know why, I work in education and know how little it is prioritised and with BJ at the helm, I don't know why I thought there'd be anything but chaos.

We need to save the nhs. If we let the virus run wild the nhs will be overwhelmed and hospitals will be unable to treat people with and without Covid. Although most people that die are elderly lots of the hospitalisations are younger 40/50. I don't want my relatives to die of Covid. I also don't want my relatives to die from a different condition that couldn't be treated because hospitals are full.

@Ocsetldil

We should have a police state and then we might respect the rules of lockdown. Everyone in isolation should wear tags which are applied and then released by the police. People arriving at airports should be tested properly and isolated properly. Wuhan is back to normal. Our half arsed liberalism has ruined this country.

Read the threads about people breaking lockdown on this site. Is it alright to have a party on the street and let the children play together? No it friggin isn’t.

Are you on glue? Please tell me you're joking?

How many lives have been saved by our policies?

Given how infectious it is, without action, nearly everyone would eventually get it.

The population size is about 67 million. The death rate from those who get it is about 1%. That means about 670 thousand will die if we let everyone get it. Roughly 67 thousand have died so far.

So far our policies have kept alive about 90% of those it might kill.

I agree with a lot of what you say OP, but saying it in real life gets you accused of being a murderer. The point re cancer drugs is particularly pertinent - I’ve seen on here many time people saying ‘the economy doesn’t matter, it’s about saving lives, you can earn money in the future, peo0e aren’t worth less just because they’re old’, but we don’t take that attitude to literally ANY other disease. Many drugs which could extend life are turned down for use by the NHS as they’re too expensive. The attitude then isn’t ‘save lives at all costs’ (perhaps it should be, but it isn’t). As drugs go, lockdown is hugely costly!

@Ocsetldil

We should have a police state and then we might respect the rules of lockdown. Everyone in isolation should wear tags which are applied and then released by the police. People arriving at airports should be tested properly and isolated properly. Wuhan is back to normal. Our half arsed liberalism has ruined this country.

Read the threads about people breaking lockdown on this site. Is it alright to have a party on the street and let the children play together? No it friggin isn’t.

Ever been to China?

I agree we need some sort sharp properly applied measures, but the fact we haven’t doesn’t mean we need to ditch all civil liberties, just have effective government.

It’s not worth giving up civil liberties long term to cure covid.

I completely agree with you OP but it won’t be popular on here.

I suppose my question to add would be; if the sole focus of the country is on stopping the NHS becoming overwhelmed, what happens when the majority of us have lost our jobs, kids haven’t had any formal schooling (so have no way of gaining qualifications and making a life for themselves) and we’re all on Universal Credit (or whatever it might be by then). How will the NHS continue to function and provide a service if the vast majority are unable to contribute anything in tax to keep it running?
WHAT’S THE POINT??

Yeah it’s nuts

But it’s also nuts how crazy it’s sent everyone. The current thread which is running from someone in tier 2 driving to tier 4 to drop off some presents on a doorstep and they’re being told they’re selfish, to go and stand in a post office (with loads of others and at great expense) to post them. Do people think covid moves in a large cloud around someone’s car? People have totally lost perspective

YANBU. I'm so fed up. The responses feel very disproportionate now. Maybe not to start with but now, I can't comprehend their will to fuck the whole country up for what is a very treatable infection and where most people that get it, recover quite quickly

I completely agree. People seem to have gone mad too - banning their mum from Christmas for having her hair done, ringing the police on neighbours, apparently bellowing at people in supermarkets. Just utter utter madness.

@Pukkatea you are right. There are limits to how far capacity can be increased in nine months. I suppose we could have trained up more health care assistants, employed more admin staff to take the burden off clinical staff, launched a bonus and retraining program to encourage former nurses to come back. A recruitment program for health care staff from abroad might also have helped, but might be ethically unsound.

I would like to see an acknowledgement that the NHS doesn't have enough beds or spare capacity. An admission that this is a very costly mistake if we plan to shut down our economy every time it runs out of beds and a medium to long term plan to sort it out properly.

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

There we go that sums it up. The whole "save the NHS" bullshit annoys me too. (And I've worked in it for 20 years and am the biggest fan of free and the point of use healthcare you'll meet).
It was NOTHING to do with saving the NHS and more to do with the government not having pictures of elderly dying in corridors ( which by the way still happens every year when you run at 95 % capacity year round because of cuts). It's all about how things look and not the best thing for the whole country. We have a populist government so what can you expect?