We cannot cancel life, to preserve every life

[Slytherin]

I actually find myself agreeing with a Tory for once...we’ve given up so much and the goalposts keep moving, yes it’s an unpredictable situation, but it’s also unsustainable long term. The idea that this summer will be possibly worse than last summer makes zero sense, when we have a vaccine roll out that far exceeds any other nation (except Israel) currently.
First it was let’s get the elderly and vulnerable vaccinated, then it was let’s get the over 50s vaccinated, now we’ve got members of SAGE suggesting restrictions have to continue until everyone, including children are vaccinated and beyond, because of the possibility of new variants. Professor John Edmunds said some would have to stay “forever” last night on Peston.

We must at some point live with an element of risk. I’m in no way suggesting we lift lockdown yet, but suggesting that things won’t have much improved by the summer, is, in my opinion encroaching into dangerous territory.

The government were over promising before, now they’re under promising. There’s got to be a middle ground, people’s mental health cannot sustain this level of pessimism and not having a single thing to look forward to. Everything gets dangled like a carrot, then taken away at the last minute. It’s beyond cruel.

Then it’s the mixed messages, Matt Hancock telling us he’s going on a summer holiday to Cornwall and he’s all booked up and Grant Shapps then telling nobody to even consider booking a holiday abroad or domestically this summer.

Yes, I support restrictions to save lives and support the NHS, but I don’t support the way the government are handling this once again. And I don’t support these restrictions indefinitely, especially when the majority of the at risk groups have been vaccinated.

www.channel4.com/news/we-cannot-cancel-life-to-preserve-every-life-tory-mp-sir-charles-walker-on-lockdown?fbclid=IwAR2RnQNKwJoQ4FSBxT9oTbwbFOCTWcIU9wD9WdYkTEA2sVlJ1posWZAfmsU

[quote devildeepbluesea]@mrsmercedes it's a new virus. Like thousands of others it can cause post viral symptoms. Like flu does, like glandular fever and many others. Yes it's another risk. Is that sufficient to keep everyone locked up in their homes, not earning, not living? I don't think so.[/quote]
Exactly. I've had CFS/ME for over a decade as a result of a horrible viral infection. I got Covid last year and it made me extremely ill, for many months, as it caused a replase in this (long Covid).

Nobody suggested locking up everyone else for this previously and nor should they now. It is horrific, but so is the impact of many infectious diseases. This type of prolonged illness can be caused (because of immune system malfunction) as PP said after flu, glandular fever. There were many cases among those who got SARS and MERS and Ebola also.

But not a sufficient number to keep kids out of school (I don't have school age children btw so no vested interested) or halt life or stop families and friends seeing each other.

Yes we have to protect those obviously vulnerable, but once that is done, it is enough to balance the risks to reopen. There really isn't much other option at this point. I would have preferred our Government to take a "zero covid" eradication approach last Jan/ Feb by closing borders with proper quarantines etc but they have let it become endemic so that horse has bolted, despite us being a nation of islands, except the NI border! We could have had no foreign travel but normal life here pretty much like Australia - no masks, sports, theatres, schools, everything. But Boris was on holiday with his pregnant mistress so....

Tens of thousands die per year from all kinds of viruses in the UK. Obviously this was new and infectious but once the vulnerable are vaccinated, life must continue. Nobody gave a shit about CFS/ME before in the UK. Perhaps now with many more people suffering from it as a result of long-Covid infection, it'll get proper research and treatment funding finally. And all the dodgy doctors who a decade ago tried to convince sufferers that it was a psychological condition will be struck off. One can only hope. But it isn't a large enough number of people on a public health scale to allow this economic devastation to continue.

The full force of that, and the pandemic of mental health problems and untreated physical health problems, when they are felt, will be a shock to many people I think. All the stats show this is WAY worse that the great depression of the 1920s. The "financial crisis" in 2008 was a sneeze compared to what's coming. In 300 years of economic records there has never once been a recession as large as what has already happened last year, we're just not feeling the full force of it yet because the Government has been splashing the cash (our cash, that has to be paid back sometime...). It really is quite frightening and I don't think most people get it, what the impact will be. I am worried what will happen when the penny drops. You can't tax and tax base that isn't there. Sure you can keep "printing money" to pay for the NHS etc, but that devalues the pound and we are dependent on imports for necessities like food, fuel etc, which will then become inafforable. Economics isn't an abstract idea. These are things which will affect everyone's daily life.

Don't get me wrong, some basic public health courtesies should remain. Like not going to work or on public transport when you are sneezing and coughing all over people who may be immunocompromised. All the dickish people who used to do that have hopefully got it into their heads now that if you're sick you stay at home, and that you should in general stay at least a metre from strangers just to be polite in any public space. But locking down the whole public indefinitely isn't a sensible answer.

People like you really do make me despair. What can you not understand about controlling a virus so that it does not overwhelm our health system, our food chain/supply etc

Would you be happy when there’s bodies out in the street awaiting collection?

You do realise this is a pandemic. Pan = worldwide.

Now there are a number of variants spreading. Have you actually read/watched the news, read up in the virus? Selfish, selfish, selfish.

@walksen

"I do t get this obsession with documented proof for any situations."

Ok, then.

Clearly we have a very different attitude to life.

" Where's you evidence for that"

Sorry I don't understand this post?

Nobody I know in RL wants this lockdown to end until we have better figures, more vaccinated etc.

Sure, of course. We need more people to be vaccinated and we need cases to be lower.

But that’s different from saying ‘even when all the vulnerable and everyone over 50 is vaccinated, and cases are back to where they were last summer, we still need to keep these restrictions in place.’

Most people support lockdown while we roll out vaccines. Most people don’t support it continuing indefinitely.

@SaltyTootsieToes

People like you really do make me despair. What can you not understand about controlling a virus so that it does not overwhelm our health system, our food chain/supply etc

Would you be happy when there’s bodies out in the street awaiting collection?

You do realise this is a pandemic. Pan = worldwide.

Now there are a number of variants spreading. Have you actually read/watched the news, read up in the virus? Selfish, selfish, selfish.

I hope you're not speaking to me?

Btw there were roughly 20,000 variants of SARS-COV-2 by the time the Kent variant was identified. Viruses will mutate the more they are allowed to spread. Hence why my position was always to go for zero Covid here until we had solid vaccines, but our Government let that ship sail.

Sorry I don't understand this post?

I don't understand why you needed to change a discussion about evidence etc into a personal comment either.

Particularly as I would not know anywhere near enough about you, nor be presumptuous enough to make comments about your "attitude to life". Maybe that is another difference between us

@HermioneWeasley

Agree. The average age of people who’ve died from Covid is older than average life expectancy. Death is part of life. People have to die of something.

This, a million times over.

We seem to have lost contact with the full circle of life. Everybody has to die at some point.

We're also hugely overpopulated- perhaps it's Mother Nature correcting an imbalance.

@SaltyTootsieToes

People like you really do make me despair. What can you not understand about controlling a virus so that it does not overwhelm our health system, our food chain/supply etc

Would you be happy when there’s bodies out in the street awaiting collection?

You do realise this is a pandemic. Pan = worldwide.

Now there are a number of variants spreading. Have you actually read/watched the news, read up in the virus? Selfish, selfish, selfish.

Can you explain - without repeating ‘selfish, selfish, selfish’ - why you imagine there will be bodies in the street and food supply chains breaking down, once people have been vaccinated?

Because we’re not talking about throwing out lockdown now. We’re talking about things like the Times cover story today, saying that social distancing may be kept in place until the end of the year.

@walksen

"I do t get this obsession with documented proof for any situations. "

This is your comment which uses the word "I" which I think indicates it's your personal opinion? So I was responding to that.

And then you use "any situations" so I infer from that further information about your opinions. Maybe I've misunderstood?

Well my view is that sometimes you have to act before evidence is available. We approved az for all ages on that basis and we entered lockdown without "we evidence will work". This is because we had to infer what is likely to happen

On Mumsnet, where is your evidence is used to shut down debate.

Where is your evidence that lockdown works.
Where is the evidence that tiers work
"Where is your evidence people can catch it again".

I knew people who had in november, and there were plenty more people at work who know more and so did plenty of posters on here. The retort was" this can't be true as there is only evidence of 28 worldwide so it is vanishingly rare."

If this were true the likelihood that I would know anyone it happened to would be pratically zero. This is because it takes time to collect evidence.

You still haven't explained why you decided to get personal.

I think we are now one of the most locked down countries globally. The damage to mental health and our economy is escalating, thousands of deaths are now attributed to this way of life, people not getting the right medical care for non Covid matters

I fully support staying locked down until all over fifties vaccinated, but it needs to stop there. There has to be a balance.

@Bluntness100

I think we are now one of the most locked down countries globally. The damage to mental health and our economy is escalating, thousands of deaths are now attributed to this way of life, people not getting the right medical care for non Covid matters

I fully support staying locked down until all over fifties vaccinated, but it needs to stop there. There has to be a balance.

Exactly. There were two opportunities to go for zero Covid here. In Jan/ Feb last year, or last summer when cases were less than 0.5%. The Government did not learn the lesson the first time so declined the second opportunity too. It is now endemic so we have no choice but to live with it, with annual hit and miss best guess type vaccines like we do with flu, and resume life.

My friend is a GP and in 2019 she had a 6 year old patient die from flu. Absolutely tragic. It still makes me sad thinking about it. But on a national level, life cannot be free from all risk so we need to use vaccines to reduce it to an acceptable level and sadly because the Government let Covid become endemic here people will die from it every winter just like flu. But hopefully, with treatments and vaccines, nowhere near as many as we've seen in this first year since it took us by surprise.

One of the only sensible comments on here is from @purplebagladylovesgin

@frumpety

Not sure why you posted all that drivel about homeschooling and holidays

Because they are people just like you and me ( hundreds of them), just doing their best during a very difficult time.

But back to the But any way - why won’t they release how they are getting their findings? What is it that you don't think you can find out with a quick google ? What 'findings' do you believe they are hiding from you ?

They are not sharing what studies were done to get to their conclusion, scientific journalist do keep asking but keep getting rebuffed.

Didn’t you know? Or do you just see ‘important man on tv ..must believe...’

Pretty strange that Professor John Edward’s a prominent mouth piece for SAGE is now saying ‘coming out of lockdown earlier killed people and we need to go in to lockdown for the foreseeable’ and yet in March last year was advocating no lockdown and herd immunity.

Such contradictory advice of a prominent government advisor.

"coming out of lockdown earlier killed people and we need to go in to lockdown for the foreseeable’ and yet in March last year was advocating no lockdown and herd immunity"

It would be pretty silly of him not to change his mind now that we know immunity is only short term

@walksen I don't think I got overly personal? Just responding to your opinion. I think you do need evidence for these things. 🤷🏻‍♀️ There is plenty of evidence that lockdown works. There is plenty of (conflicting) evidence re reinfection. Which I see you have wanted to site evidence for.

In the specific case where you answering my question to a different poster, I specifically meant their comment about people being infected over and over again by Covid. And implying it would be an ordeal each time. I was trying to avoid using scaremongering in my question: but unless they provide some idea as to why they think that at the very least, if they can't point to scientific evidence, I can't see that it is much better than scaremongering.

@walksen

"coming out of lockdown earlier killed people and we need to go in to lockdown for the foreseeable’ and yet in March last year was advocating no lockdown and herd immunity"

It would be pretty silly of him not to change his mind now that we know immunity is only short term

Have you seen his credentials? This guy knew how viruses worked. The behaviour of viruses don’t change. This virus is not unique in its behaviour. There will be many many variants of the virus because that’s what viruses do. This is nothing new.

Here is an excerpt from the interview

Edmunds: There’s two things, there’s two strategies, with a new virus, a new epidemic, there’s two strategies: one, you can stamp out every single case in the world, every single case in the world, and then the virus, then you’re free. You’ve stopped that epidemic without achieving herd immunity, but you must get every single case in the world. When the mild disease, that’s incredibly difficult. That’s the phase that we were in when we were trying to do containment and everybody else was trying to do containment, yeah? Trying to stamp out every single case in the world. It hasn’t worked, yeah? We haven’t managed to do that. The next phase, when the virus – the genie is out of the bottle, the virus is all around the world and spreading, the next phase, the only other way that the epidemic is going to come to a stop is ‘achieving herd immunity’, this is – and let me explain, there are different ways that you can… The natural way, that this will is happen, is the epidemic will run very fast, and the epidemic will come up and come down very fast, and the herd immunity threshold is reached not at the end of the epidemic, that’s what people sort of think, it’s not at the end of the epidemic, it’s at the peak of the epidemic. At that point there’s not enough susceptibles in the population to spread, and it’s very important to understand this one further point, because at the peak there’s so many infectious individuals that they all infect so many other individuals, and so if you can bring the number of infectious people down at the peak, then the epidemic doesn’t overshoot, you can manage the epidemic and reduce the total number of

Presenter: [Right.]

Edmunds: So you can achieve herd immunity and not have an epidemic overshooting

Presenter: But the trouble is, you know, this

Edmunds: You do that by aggressive measures

Presenter: This is a very important debate, and it’s happening right now in the scientific community, as we discover on air, but getting away from the abstracts, in practice what this means is there will be many many people, vulnerable people in this community, who may die as a result of what is essentially an experiment

Edmunds: But there’s no way out of it now

Presenter: There’s no way out of it?

Edmunds: No. There’s no way out of that

Presenter: Ok

Edmunds: So we’ve given up on the containment phase, that hasn’t worked

Full transcript here

twitter.com/ruthariop/status/1359951631765356544?s=21

"It would be pretty silly of him not to change his mind now that we know immunity is only short term"

We don't actually, definitively know that it is short term. There are different immune responses for different people for one thing.

@walksen

"coming out of lockdown earlier killed people and we need to go in to lockdown for the foreseeable’ and yet in March last year was advocating no lockdown and herd immunity"

It would be pretty silly of him not to change his mind now that we know immunity is only short term

We don't know that, at all. We know that the studies that have looked at it found it persisted for the duration of those studies (5 months) but obviously could not conclude on whether it persisted longer than that or offered protection for serious disease at least for longer than that because that was impossible to study at that point as none of the subject had been infected then recovered for more than 5 months previously! 🙄

And for a second thing, immunity is not just made up of antibodies.

X post

@Pyewhacket

There are still over 30,000 people in hospital suffering and dying. The age of people in serious condition is getting younger. The average age of my patients must be 45-55 and people are arresting a lot sooner too. I haven’t seen any reduction in admissions just the age of them. The rules need to stay in place until the vaccine starts to take effect otherwise this will just continue and we will be quarantined by the rest of the world as a health risk and nobody will be going anywhere.

There are 26,000 people in hospital who have a positive Covid test. Down 6,000 or so in a week. How many of those people are Covid patients? Unknown. Many were suffering and dying of something already. Like my sister saying (a nurse) that the infection went through her oncology ward.

Instead of being angry at those who we should be angry at (Government) it seems that we are increasingly getting angry at each other.

I actually think that this is exactly what those in power want.

Stable at killing more people.
Covid 4 %
Flu 0.1%
It is not "the flu"

@flaxmeadow Only it’s not 4% is it? It’s actually somewhere between 0.5 and 1%: fullfact.org/health/covid-ifr-more-01/