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.

I’d live in a police state for 6 months to get on top of it.

We need to look to countries that are eradicating it and follow their lead. Or just sit around waiting for vaccines for ever.

I don’t think we should let it rip through society, l think suspension of some civil liberties for 6 months to nail it would be the best option. I’m tired of living like this.

There was something about South Korea where they tracked someone via credit card useage. This is what l mean. I don’t mean China nailing people into houses.

Proper paid quarantine
Data tracking
Enforced mask wearing

I agree with you OP

Notice how there's been no mention of flu rates this year
The new strain isn't more deadly. If anything, this is like small pox and how the cure was found by people getting cow pox and being immune.
But a less deadly virus doesn't work for Boris and his covid as excuse/distraction policy

I completely agree with you OP. It's a relief to know other's on here think this. When I try to tell people about the importance of our liberties and freedoms, the way people's mental health is suffering from all this, the economic effect, the government debt, education etc. They reply with you don't have the right to spread the virus or greedy capitalist only thinking about money. Its maddening people have gone insane other this.

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. responses like this terrify me more than any virus. I don't want to live in a police state.

I agree. It is insanity. It is looking like all Western countries will have a normal yearly mortality rate. The Who have admitted the PCR test is over amplified.

I agree with most of the posts here. The normally vociferous civil liberties brigade have remained silent (reminiscent of the silence of the RSPCA during the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, when lambs were drowning in mud because they couldn't be moved from their fields) while our ancient freedoms have been torn away from us. The hair salon I frequent had around 1500 appointments between the two lockdowns and not a single call from Test&Trace; as PPs have said, pubs and restaurants have been similarly shown not to pass on the virus. We must protect those who need it and want it, but let the rest of us wash our hands, wear our masks, keep our distance and have whomever we like in our own houses.

I agree but I don’t see all this in real life. People mostly getting on with their day.
I find it helps to hide particularly silly threads so they don’t keep popping up in active!

Absolutely, many many doctors, immunologists and scientists are saying this and have been for sometime but not on MSM.

The BBC just voice a very one sided government opinion with their daily scaremongering reporting.

They report COVID deaths ( roughly500 a day at the moment), they don’t report that there are on average 1700 deaths a day always. They say cases are increasing, hospital occupied beds are increasing but this is entirely normal at this time of year,

There have not been many excess deaths this year over 2018 (2019 was a light death flu year and so deaths a bit lower that year) . The population has increased 10% over the last 5 years and so you would expect deaths to increase. Do the BBC or any other MSM put all the ‘data’ into context.

How many excess deaths will there be from the millions of cancelled hospital appointments, lack of GP care, lack of cancer tests, mental health impacts, suicides and the effects on the economy that will filter down through the coming years on people’s health.

We have adversely affected children’s education, wrecked university education, last years graduates are largely sitting at home all day getting depressed with no jobs.

What has boris done, all for saving a few tgat can’t be quantified. We lost lots of people in care homes who should have been much better protected but we don’t need to lock down the entire country to protect the vulnerable.

I havnt seen my mum since last Feb and she won’t come out until she has the vaccine, what the rest of us are doing, her children and grandchildren makes no difference to her.

You also can’t stop a virus and the govt is crazy in thinking you can. The WHO advises on their web site that lockdowns do not work and are not advised.

The government keep talking about the holy grail of vaccines but they have vaccinated 135,000 in 2 weeks, we have 1.8m over 80’s, how many months will it take to vaccinate all the vulnerable let alone the rest of the population, meanwhile they’re not sure how effective the Oxford vaccine is, they don’t know if it will stop people passing the virus on, they don’t know how long the vaccine will provide immunity for and the virus like all virus will continue to mutate.

By the time the govt have vaccinated everyone the virus will have mutated again and we’ll no doubt need another vaccine just like flu.

We need to learn to live with this virus sensibly whilst protecting the most vulnerable as much as possible.

Ps I am on the governments critically vulnerable list but I am a grown up adult and can choose to protect myself as much or as little as I choose, I do not want my children’s lives and the economy destroyed in the process and moreover none of the government policies have worked yet they keep doing more of the same.

They are talking about more tier 4 areas until Easter but then what at Easter, the release lockdowns, the numbers will go up, they’ll be more measures. Summer will come the respiratory virus will disappear, we’ll all live a little then next October it will all start over again.

Where are our opposition politicians, we are turning into a dictatorship with neighbours being advised to snitch on each other, does this remind you of another country?

I think we live in a country where keeping everyone alive at all costs trumps everything else. We have forgotten that death is the natural order. We keep people alive with very severe dementia. We have people clinging to live my the fingertips regardless of the quality of that life.
Then along comes a virus that will tip those very vulnerable over the edge, it will mean not enough beds to care for all of these people let alone the rest of the population.

So we shut down society, business and schools. Other things suffer but they matter not.....everything is about covid abs covid alone.

Obsession with covid. Yes we are insane.

The problem with have with just letting the virus crack on, is that the hospitals will be so overwhelmed no one will be able to get treated for anything else. I have a friend who’s urgent cancer treatment has just been postponed due to covid. Her survival prospects are potentially being materially affected because of Covid (even though she doesn’t have it!)

For what its worth I live in another part of Europe, and have friends in France, Spain and Italy and in all those places people consider their government to be handling this the worst, and simultaneously people are decrying the collective madness in locking down, and insisting that they have not gone far enough and need to be more like (insert country with stronger covid response). SO, although I do think the UK goverment has handled it specifically badly no-one really knows what they are doing.
As far as letting the virus burn itself out though - in addition to the extra deaths thay would cause (and the burden on the health sevice) I think we would also have seen a lot more mutations like the one picked up recently. The more the virus spread uncontrollably, the more chance it would get to mutate into versions that are more contagious, god-forbid more deadly or worst of all immune to the vaccine. At least the most recent mutation is only more contagious and it looks like the vaccine will still work thank god. But if we let it carry on unrestricted scientists would be left playing catch-up.

You are fully right we should have extended hospital and healthcare capacity. And use some of those not currently working to help.
If at least we could have the vaccine!

@Nousernamesleftatall

I agree. It is insanity. It is looking like all Western countries will have a normal yearly mortality rate. The Who have admitted the PCR test is over amplified.

Is this really true....a normal year for mortality.... Oh my..... Meanwhile education, mental health, business for what

Completely agree with you OP, I’m astounded by this overblown reaction. The economic and societal damage is become truly terrifying. It’s like the emperors new clothes, I keep hoping and praying someone influential will break rank and call for this madness to stop!

@RandomLondoner I think we are all going to get it anyway, or many of us and that the restrictions are just making sure our economy is destroyed as well.

The death rate is lower than 1% as well especially among the younger population so as I said in my OP I think the priority should be to help the vulnerable until we can vaccinate them as soon as possible.

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety yes Benjamin Franklin. This sums up my opinion on the matter. Glad their are others who think this way to. It's a relief that everyone has not gone insane other this virus.

I absolutely agree with you OP.

Lockdowns are just a temporary halting mechanism, they don’t offer a long term solution, and create more problems in the long run (in terms of economics and mental health).

One of the main reasons the NHS is struggling is because it’s been chronically underfunded for decades. It’s nearly a year since Covid reached us. I wonder what could have been achieved in that time if the NHS had been given the furlough money? Admin staff could be quickly trained to do the crap that a lot of clinical staff do. Nurses and doctors who are still young enough to work but have quit early due to the state of the NHS could be tempted back. Nurses should be paid adequately to keep them in the job.

Limiting the activities of healthy working people is just madness.

I think lockdowns are a bit like crash diets. Yes you’ll lose weight while you do it, but you can’t starve like that for ever, and unless you have a long term plan then you’ll gain all the weight back as soon as the diet ends!

[quote PlumsAreNotTheOnlyFruit]@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.[/quote]
For me we should be limiting out population so we can be independent for food. That is the problem there. Through immigration control and birth control methods we certainly shouldn't be subsidizing anyone to have children. We should have locked down China style I now have great respect for the country along with Australia New Zealand and Vietnam they showed the world how to do it and stupid Western democracies didn't listen. I am now all together more relaxed if we do loose democracy because the actions of so many on here and the success of authoritarian governments shows you simply cannot trust the people to do the right thing.

How many lives have been saved by our policies? Has anyone even done an analysis?

Seriously? Do you really think there aren't whole teams of statisticians, economists, virologists doing research, advising government, talking to the news etc? Do you think we just forgot to check?

And even where the stats are clear on the economic cost vs life cost, it's not that simple - as a society we don't like to do cost benefit analysis on life, so even presented with the evidence, would err on the side of saving human life.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow such a naive post though, did you see the numbers over the summer virtually none. Australia posted no new cases for weeks but have it again now. You can’t get rid of a virus by locking down, you can stop transmission by keeping people apart but as soon as we mix again the transmission rates will go back up.

The virus is not going anywhere, no virus in the history of time has gone anywhere, you can immunise a population and the whole world with a mass widely taken up vaccine program that would take years. But where viruses mutate, as with the common cold virus and the flu virus then even that is not possible. It would appear that this virus does mutate and so pinning a nations hope on a vaccine that we don’t know anything about in the long term and locking up the nation until a vaccine is rolled out is just insanity.

I agree OP. It seems like utter hysteria and panic has taken hold, and does not seem to be warranted by any of what's actually happened or the scientific evidence. Meanwhile, jobs and businesses and families and communities are being destroyed, and we are looking at years of economic damage, massively increased taxes, huge unemployment and a big hit to education. It's also very clear that doing more of the same things we've been doing since March isn't actually working! I also agree with the idea of some limited protections being put in place for elderly or unwell individuals - let's shield the vulnerable as best we can and let the rest of us carry on.

It’s like the emperors new clothes yes this.

Government policies, innit?

@turnthebiglightoff: "Children used to playing daily with friends have been kept indoors for months."

Erm, where have you been these last few months? The children in my school have been outdoors playing together (in the rain/mud) every day this term. They've had a whale of a time.

Its BAU here for me. I'm an essential worker and thats what ive been doing from the get go. I've been applying protections as i feel appropriate ie hands,face,space. I went on holiday in September and essentially i will continue to travel as i like and as THE LAW permits.