Why's it taken so long? And where are the riots here? I'm not going to start one, but I'd join one.
I can't think of any moral or ethical system that asserts that people should save other people's lives in profound contradiction of their own happiness, perhaps even their own life, without an ultimate value or principle being asserted. Sure, sign me up to save the basics of liberal democracy and prevent the atrocities of Nazi Germany. I can imagine sacrificing my own life (not that I would have been asked to, as a middle aged woman!) for that. I can even, just about, imagine killing other blameless, innocent people to defend the most important collective freedoms. But sacrificing things of immense value to an individual just to save the lives of a few people I don't know, with no underlying principle other than the repetitive, ever jingling 'save lives'? Why?
The idea that without restrictions everything would be worse is a non-sequitur; we could always, after all, decide that people deserved access to the same care as before and that Covid patients would only be offered treatment if there was spare capacity. Anything else, after all, is shunting the exemplary railroad car away from the group of people it was about to hit. Covid is a new disease. It's shit. But why should I have to worry that the hospital won't be able to treat my three year old if he gets meningitis, because it will be so busy treating an 85 year old with Covid? To me it seems fairer not to displace the (real, unexpected, grievous) harm away from those it affects and towards those that it doesn't. It is frankly immoral to do it to people under 18, who we're meant to be protecting, and who have had NO option to consent to the trade-off by displaying immense altruism.
Even as it is, the class and economic issues stink. My grandparents could be alive (in their 90s) to be covid patients. Two of them died before 1985, so I never really knew them. That's because they were working-class men. Of course some working-class men born in the 1920s are still alive, but people over 80 aren't a representative sample of their original age group. They're the privileged ones. Society hasn't stinted them. If resources are scarce, why should they get more, at the expense of small children who we've already fucked over for a year as far as education and social interaction goes, and whose goodwill and hard work we (middle-aged people) have now to rely on to have any healthcare at all in the final few decades of our own lives?
Isn't it partly that very few people under 60 are ever going to vote for the appalling Tories again? (I never have.) So the only way for them to cling on to power is by doing everything they can to appease and keep alive their comfortably-off Brexit-loving elderly voters? And fuck everyone else.
The amazing thing is how many people seem happy to be fucked over like this, for the short-term political gain of politicians they don't even like. Morality naturally dictates the opposite. Children first.