Moral relativism regarding Covid

[Notanotherteenmovie1]

Just been thinking about this. The whole blame culture around Covid, that it's 'selfish idiots' who get it.
That we must 'do our bit', 'for the greater good' and "protect the NHS".

So people saying this, do you also :

Not drink or smoke anything?
Never drive a car which will put you at risk of an accident?
No junk food?

Or, do you give money to charity to save people dying of malaria or cancer for example?
Do charity work?

The car driving one is very similar, the difference you make not driving is almost nil, the overall impact is such that millions die. It's much the same with spreading a virus, indeed from a strict perspective you're actually better off contracting the virus and isolating thus preventing spread entirely than you are from continuing to drive.

In a context where up to 1 in 30 people have had the virus at any one time the chances of you having the virus and spreading it inadvertently are far from trivial.

More people were reported to have died from covid yesterday than die on the roads in a whole year.

It is on a totally different scale.

@Cornettoninja the part of your point that I disagree with is that lifting of restrictions would put me/my household at more immediate risk than financial consequences. The likelihood of having a very poor outcome from covid, or needing medical care during the time when the NHS is overwhelmed, is far lower than the likelihood of suffering life-changing consequences from financial hardship.

So it's back to that pesky altruism, and the question of why it's okay to ask, or indeed demand it from some for some causes, but perfectly fine to make self-interested choices in other cases.

What you seem to be saying it comes down to is if there's something in it for the person in question. Threatened with the collapse of their healthcare system, they'll act. Threatened with the death of millions of small children annualy through poverty (I'm not exagerating, that's the figures) well that doesn't affect us, they're far away and brown.

[quote MaxNormal]@Cornettoninja the part of your point that I disagree with is that lifting of restrictions would put me/my household at more immediate risk than financial consequences. The likelihood of having a very poor outcome from covid, or needing medical care during the time when the NHS is overwhelmed, is far lower than the likelihood of suffering life-changing consequences from financial hardship.

So it's back to that pesky altruism, and the question of why it's okay to ask, or indeed demand it from some for some causes, but perfectly fine to make self-interested choices in other cases.

What you seem to be saying it comes down to is if there's something in it for the person in question. Threatened with the collapse of their healthcare system, they'll act. Threatened with the death of millions of small children annualy through poverty (I'm not exagerating, that's the figures) well that doesn't affect us, they're far away and brown.[/quote]
We’ll have to agree to disagree on your first point but I don’t disagree that altruism isn’t the motivation for supporting the NHS line.

I freely admit my concerns are based on the impact on myself (and dd if I’m affected directly or indirectly). I have two specific people who are normally at a higher chance of needing emergency NHS expertise at any given time. If something happens to them the consequences to me are of high stakes, and not just death but long term care requirements or earning capabilities. I can easily identify a chain of events made impossible in a situation the NHS is truly overwhelmed without even working through the possibility of covid been the reason the NHS is needed. I’m concerned about life changing consequences.

Been/being - always gets me...

I maybe in my 50's but i'm definately not old or vulnerable.

I get OP's points.
The perfect people remind me of this joke:

Old man is bragging in the nursing home:
"I'm 99 yrs old because I never smoked, never drank, never took risks at all!"

Old lady leans over to say "Since you took all the fun out of your life, why did you bother to live so long?"

I get the OP’s points, I just think that they’ve set very narrow parameters for judging whether someone is justified in caring about something. It applies to anything - not just covid.

More people were reported to have died from covid yesterday than die on the roads in a whole year

Air pollution - which is heaily from cars - contributes to the deaths of tens of thousand people every year, including a high percentage of those covid deaths. But yes, there you are minimising the damage caused by someone being too lazy to walk to church, the shops etc. but talking up the damage done by two teenagers meeting for a chat.

I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s not acknowledged that this is very hard

This is exactly the sort of minimising I'm talking about, you use the word "hard", words people use for running 10km or a maths a-level, things which aren't easy, but equally aren't bad if you don't do them.

But the reality is people are being asked to cause themselves harm, for some people serious harm - loss of support networks etc. But even for the average person, social isolation increases the risk of death maybe 50% ( e.g. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3871270/ ) For anyone under about 60, that's lower than the risk from actually catching covid. Lack of exercise opportunities (closed swimming pools, gyms, groups, as the CMO says in his current advice swimming and training with others is important) increases your risk of death 76% And that's just failing to meet the CMO's guidelines.

There are good reasons for a lockdown, there are good reasons to stopping covid, but portraying the harm those not at risk are taking as nonexistent and just "hard" does no-one any service.

We currently don't vaccinate kids against chicken pox, there's probably a good reason and we acknowledge that killing off half a dozen of so kids a year is an acceptable price to pay to protect the over 80's where no working vaccine for shingles exists. The discussion is there, it's done with careful public discussion of the benefits and harms. That same benefit and harms approach is never discussed with covid - part of that of course is the numbers are much larger on who is at risk and actually scaring people was part of the controlling mechanism to limit overload, but that has lead to people not realising that lockdown itself harms people significantly.

Of course it harms a lot of the people it's most meaning to help too, the vulnerable are even more at risk of not being able to exercise and being isolated.

Air pollution - which is heaily from cars - contributes to the deaths of tens of thousand people every year, including a high percentage of those covid deaths. But yes, there you are minimising the damage caused by someone being too lazy to walk to church, the shops etc. but talking up the damage done by two teenagers meeting for a chat.

These aren’t either/or. I can be as annoyed by the people who drive their kids less than a mile to school every day when they’re perfectly capable of walking as I am by the people casually wandering round in big multi-household groups in the park during lockdown. Both examples of self-centred behaviour that don’t consider the impact their having on society.

@sirfredfredgeorge, I’m trying to be as polite as I can but I really don’t need to be lectured on MH and social isolation statistics. This isn’t the x-factor so I’m not going to give you personal accounts but you have no idea what background is influencing my stance nor the language I use in a sentence targeted generally and not a specific example.

I’m not minimising anything but I’m not going to chided into using emotive language because you don’t deem my tone sufficiently alarmed for one particular circumstance; especially on a thread that’s been started specifically highlighting the view that others are over reacting.