So when the vulnerable are vaccinated the lockdown experiment ends right?

[orientalknife]

Because life cannot go on like this and we are ruining kid's future

I have 2 nurse friends who allow their kids to go on play dates and has kids to hers. We also have lots of mutual friends, an I know for a fact there's a group of about 8 friends all mingle and gonin plays dates at each others houses and sleepovers.
No bubbles or nothing.

We need to get death rates down. Our ITU is full and we are in crisis. Four out of five of our admissions this weekend was related to COVID.

Like it or not, these restrictions will be in place until the case numbers drop sufficiently. You can either be part of the problem and help to spread the disease or part of the solution and avoid socialising wherever you can.

@ChloeCrocodile

Like it or not, these restrictions will be in place until the case numbers drop sufficiently. You can either be part of the problem and help to spread the disease or part of the solution and avoid socialising wherever you can.

A friend did projection on this.

He thinks with the rate as high as it is, that it will be 50 - 60 days before cases have dropped enough and its getting anywhere near a managable level and no longer 'out of control'. And thats based off cases having peaked last week (which i dont believe is the case nationally. The Liverpool City Region certainly hasn't).

Thats putting us mid March at the earliest. A month after where the government are aiming for.

@hopsalong

If the vaccine doesn't work properly to provide sterilising immunity, or even to protect people from the ravages of disease, if the NHS keeps being overrun, etc etc.

Then we will have to accept that human power over mortality is limited, the death rate being 100% and all that. We would like all Covid deaths to be preventable. Hell, we would like all death to be preventable! It isn't. We'll have to grow up and find the consolations we can in the amount of life that we're given.

Yes I think we all realise that human power over mortality is limited. This isn't about overly delicate sensibilities regarding death, this is about practicalities - not getting to a position where critically ill people with any condition (other acute illness, after accidents etc) can't access critical care because its choc a bloc full. We carried on with minimal restrictions over the summer accepting that some (far fewer) people were still dying of Covid in hospitals - so that doesn't point to being overly precious about our own mortality. I think the lockdown sceptics are the ones who are not being realistic

My guess is we are stuck as we are now until at least Easter. And summer will still be full of restrictions.
I look forward to the '3rd summer of love' predicted for 2022 when large gatherings are permitted and organised again. It's going to be one hell of a party.

Ugh, just noticed a typo, meant to say I think it is the lockdown sceptics who are now being unrealistic

@LimitIsUp

But there is no need for the NHS to be overwhelmed with elderly Covid patients to the point of being unable to provide services for children and young people. It would be ideal if we had better treatments and faster recovery times (shorter bed occupancy) for Covid patients, as we wait for the vaccines to prove their worth. But how long do we wait? A month of no school for primary-aged children is one thing; a year is a social experiment on an alarming scale.

The NHS could, for example, not provide hospital treatment to anyone over the average age of death. This would be very shit, and it's not what I want to see at all! But I don't think it would be unfair, in the sense of removing resources from one person to give them to another.

It is, however, unfair effectively to shunt the Covid train down a different terrace, depriving children of education, health care, and human relationships and, in some cases, food and safety, to protect expensive hospital care to people older than most of us can hope ever to be.

The Elementary Education Act of 1870 gave all children the right to an education. The average life expectancy then was about 40. The average life expectancy for those who survived infancy was 50. Education is a more important and fundamental right, and a more important benefit bestowed by civil society, than living into extreme old age.

@hopsalong I don’t think my DS’s mental health would be good if he knew that he was going back to school on the basis that his grandparents were going to be left to die if they got ill.

@Puzzledandpissedoff
I've been saying the same thing since the beginning too. I feel increasingly, well, puzzled and pissed off by the lack of any careful political and ethical thinking around these questions.

Recently I've been starting to wonder whether being brought up as a Catholic (even though I no longer practice) has made me less convinced than other people by the idea that saving lives is always the most important goal. For me there has to be something beyond merely eking out the years. Unfortunately, at the moment, there isn't, because my life like my children's and everyone else's is almost entirely bereft of anything traditionally considered conducive to the Good Life.

Turns out that eudaimonia with toddlers doesn't happen. Who knew, Aristotle?

But even more urgently, many people are suffering very active and immediate harm from the lockdown: hunger, homelessness, poverty, death from treatable illnesses in the prime of life, no education, addiction.

But it is the critical care beds specifically that are overwhelmed, and it's not the very elderly who are in them (since they are not expected to be able to tolerate intubation) - it's younger covid patients who are filling ICU, the 40/50/60 year olds. So even supposing your dystopian nightmare where those above the average age of death are not treated at all, critical care would still be overwhelmed without lockdown measures to try and contain rising infection rates

Sorry that was to hopsalong

Play dates - purleese! I grew up in the 80s when there was no such thing as play dates. I literally cannot imagine my mother sidling up to another mother and making ‘a date for the kids to play’.

When I write it out I realise how absolutely lame the whole thing is. I had friends, I played with my friends, I met up with them in the neighbourhood and I didn’t even own a mobile phone. Kids will find a way to amuse themselves without their parents interference.

My sons haven’t met up with their friends in the last few weeks. Big fucking deal. They’ll be fine. They’ve got WiFi, books, boards games, blah blah blah. I don’t need my kids to meet up with Karen to justify their existence.

I really worry about the mental health of posters who are worried that their kids can’t have a play date. Do you have a breakdown when your lash extensions fall out? A broken nail throws you over the edge? Can’t get the perfect insta pic?

You ain’t from my generation. We had landlines, cassettes, Madonna and a few weeks off schools actually bolster our mental health ‘cause our mams weren’t fannies!

Brilliant

@ineedaholidaynow

Are you sure you aren't projecting? Do you want your son to die (if we have to use this inflated rhetoric) in middle age of poor health after a lifetime of poverty? What about the risk to him of missing a year or more of his childhood? Isolation, constant screen-time, parental anxiety are short-term risks to his mental health; diminished educational opportunities, lack of social skills and obesity /poor cardiovascular health are long term general health risks.

My children are three and five. Because we've been following the rules they haven't seen their grandparents since before lockdown. To be honest, they don't really know who they are any more and I'm not sure that either party would recognise the other in the street. However they would have felt about their grandparents dying last year, when they saw them every couple of months, it would be different now, because the relationship has evaporated into Zoom. For older children this would of course be different. But, to be honest, I don't really remember my grandparents who died before I was 10. At the time I think I was fairly close to them and saw them more regularly than every couple of months. But I was just too young.

It was completely different with my granddad who died when I was in my 20s and my nan who died when I was 30. That was real grief.

In addition, please remember that if your sons' grandparents were to catch Covid they are unlikely to die of it and more likely than not to recover without hospital treatment. But, more importantly, it's neither helpful nor kind to make small children terrified of 'killing granny'. Transmitting a virus unintentionally is not murdering someone and that kind of guilt-tripping is very damaging to children's mental health.

And playing is a basic need and right of children.
It might be a need, it isn't a right.

Your post, your hole.....jesus.

@turnthebiglightoff

I agree with the OP. Kids need to play. I've been in playgrounds with my nearly 2 year old where he is desperate to play with others but parents pull their kids away. Btw don't take your kids to playgrounds if you want to keep your kids socially distanced from others. Ridiculous. It's a bit heart breaking if I'm honest; can't teach my little one about playing nicely or sharing. His vocabulary is incredible though because of how much tv he's watched.......

They are right to pull their dc away, and they probably bring them to the playground to play on the equipment, or run around because they don't have a garden, or many other reasons but they sure as shit don't bring them to the playground in order to please your dc or help you teach him about sharing. That's heartbreaking, with everything that's going on in the world? Ffs.

@orientalknife

Save the NHS sure

But what about saving the children who will be damaged by this?

Are their lives worth less than the vulnerable to covid and NHS staff?

And yes I get that over run hospitals are a risk to children too but perhaps you have to prioritise a bed for an 8 year old over a bed for a 90 year old. And I would be aghast if as a 90 year old my life was put before a child's.

I really don’t think you understand

in areas where this has gone badly ambulances and emergency care haven’t been able to go out to anyone, calls simply went unanswered, people including children are at risk

And that’s during restrictions. Without them you don’t have a hope

I'm unable to understand why anyone would compare a year of no education or social interaction to losing a hair extension. Do you just not give a shit about your kids' development?

My son is in year one. One child in his class was back in nappies at the beginning of the year, having regressed during the six-month lockdown. 70% of his classmates don't speak English at home. Unsurprisingly, speaking no English for months at a time has meant that a lot of the teaching (so the class teacher told me) is pre-reception level. The school isn't worrying about reading, they're worrying about basic communication. In the playground, a lot of the children stand alone in their 'square' (they were given a 'square' in reception, when they went back in the summer; this changed in September) and make no effort to play with other children. Many are spending 12+ hours a day on a screen in small inner London flats. (One child is a survivor of Grenfell, with its whole 'stay put' policy.) Teenagers and dealers have taken over the only local playground. Maybe for rich people who live insulated lives in the countryside all of this is hard to imagine. In central London, the visible poverty and suffering among young people is astounding.

Go for it.

I bet you'll be the first to complain when your mum or dad gets covid from all the mixing you've been letting your kids do with other children of moronic parents or if you crashed your car and the passenger died because the ambulance was busy with covid.

Big complaint to the nhs then.. but go for it. Organise your March..

@hopsalong DS is 15. If the Government said tomorrow schools are going back as normal, and we can do this because we are going to manage the NHS situation by not treating anyone over a certain age, he would know that he would be potentially sacrificing his grandparents just so he could be in school and see his friends. He wouldn’t want that.

@LimitisUp. I've seen the graphs. I can understand the presentation of data. In fact, I'm even capable of accepting (maybe it's that PhD!) that two people can both interpret data correctly, while drawing different political or moral conclusions from it.

Very little NHS care takes place in an ICU. Those patients are both the least likely to survive and the most draining of collective resources. If resources are straitened, basic ethics demands that they be allocated as fairly as possible, with no one having the right to more medical care or more expensive treatment than anyone else.

I visited my father many times in a critical care unit and have the highest level of admiration for the staff and the care provided. But he was a very sick man in his 60s. Six months later he was dead from a different cause. He would have hated to think that he received round the clock nursing while a younger, healthier person with a much simpler problem (an accident, needing a vaccination, appendicitis) was given nothing. If the hospitals are overrun then they need to be more selective about admissions, so that everyone in the country has a shot at getting at least a few hours of medical care, if not many weeks of careful nursing.

On children: no, no one is intending to harm them. But that isn't a very compelling argument. One doesn't have to have malign intentions to injure someone. Car accidents don't usually happen because the driver decided to run someone over for the fun of it.