Is life never going back to normal?

[JuneMoonstone]

I feel incredibly lucky that I've lived 44 years of a normal life. I am heartbroken at the way life has become. Like so many others, I feel like I am existing, not living. I don't see any point in making plans, I don't feel any hope for the future. I was feeling quite positive about the progress made in the UK with vaccines and seeing the infection rates and death rates lower. However with the news about the rest of Europe going into lockdown due to escalating infection rates, I can't help but feel that we are never going to get out of this bloody mess. I cannot help but believe that we will have to live our lives under constant restrictions forever now because of this virus. Is life really going to be shit from now on? Will I ever be able to, for example, go into a busy pub on a Friday night and watch a live band and have a bloody good time again? Will we have to wear face masks permanently in public places from now on? I get a very strong feeling that this will be the case. It's my daughter I feel for the most. She's just 5 years old. What kind of a life is she going to have?

Comparable deaths to flu which we will except

Accept

To add to my previous comment, regarding “It will always be Covid” being wrong-Covid is the name of the disease the virus causes, not the actual virus. So with time the virus may mutate so much that it causes negligible symptoms in the majority making it hardly discernible as Covid anymore.

People keep talking about pre vaccine death rates.

For what happens next look at post

@BonnieDundee

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56475807

I hope this isnt the case

I think this person, like a lot of these much quoted experts, may indeed be highly qualified in her field, but has little understanding of the broader issues.

For example.

"Dr Ramsay said lower-level restrictions such as face coverings in crowded places and social distancing had become accepted by many and still allowed the economy to function.

She said "people have got used to those lower level restrictions now, and people can live with them, and the economy can still go on with those less severe restrictions in place".

The economy is 'functioning'? Is she mad? Billions are being paid out in furlough and whole swathes of the economy are shut and can never profitably reopen while 'social distancing' is in place. Mask wearing and social distancing may be 'lower level restrictions' for someone with a guaranteed income like her, but they are certainly not for the millions who work in hospitality, leisure, retail etc.

And I doubt people really 'accept' these restrictions in the sense that they'd be happy to put up with them indefinitely. Sounds like more ivory tower stuff.

Boomers, largely control our government, therefore they are currently serving that generations interests mainly.

No. Johnson might just catch the tail end of the baby boom generation but Raab, Sunak, Patel and Hancock are all in their 40s. It's a matter of opinion, but they don't seem to be serving their generation all that well.

I mean, we don’t call Coronavirus-caused Common Colds ‘Covid’ diseases do we? Even though they are technically Coronavirus diseases, they are mild and insignificant enough for us to not need a name for them for the general public to understand. When Covid mutates with time as viruses do to become as mild as the common cold, are we still going to be calling it Covid?

I am talking a few years into the future by the way, I’m not a Covid downplayer. But with time, Covid absolutely should fade into insignificance and become indistinguishable to the general population from a common cold. It’s not going to be like Ebola where the virus goes dormant and then comes back randomly with lethal outbreaks within a small area.

When Covid mutates with time as viruses do to become as mild as the common cold, are we still going to be calling it Covid?

This is an interesting question but I think a lot of people are just thinking about the next few years and in that sense the word 'when' at the start of your sentence seems over-optimistic.

The variants seen at the moment haven't made it milder in many cases, and I think we just do not know what with any certainty what the next phase is going to be.

[quote ChameleonClara]People have to die of something same as they already die of all sorts of things. We don’t close down the world to stop all of those.

This makes no sense - it is like the whole last year has passed some people by! We haven't shut down before because we haven't had anything as threatening as Covid during the post-war medical era.

Do some people still not understand how very threatening Covid is in terms of societal damage? It was very prefectly pitched - not too deadly, very easy to transmit, highly unpredictable...

Look at Brazil now - they didn't shut down, their health care system has collapsed. Young people are dying as there are no ICU beds. Doctors are begging vets for medicine. twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1373501475805102082[/quote]
I’m not talking about right now. Clearly we had to take these measures when Covid was such a threat to people and healthcare systems. But it won’t always be running at this kind of level.

I have hope that even if the government try to keep the restrictions going that people have had enough, can see it's a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and will no longer accept them.

I've seen lots about the Spanish flu on this thread. It's an interesting comparison as there were no lockdowns and no restrictions on freedom or mixing with others. Children were banned from theatres and schools in some parts of the country were closed for a few weeks here and there. But Christmas went ahead and, during the December 1918 General Election (which wasn't cancelled either), millions of women crammed themselves into polling stations to place their first ever vote won that year with the Representation of the People Act 1918.

1918 was the end of a war and a terrible flu pandemic and yet life went on. People would never have accepted the curtailment of freedoms we are accepting now back then because disease was (and is) a part of life.

My friends live in the USA and their lives are very normal, they eat out, stay at peoples houses, go on holiday etc. The only sign of the pandemic left is face masks, and they aren't enforced so it's around 60-70% compliant

I know, MInnie, and since borders don't matter to a virus they're not immune (in any sense) to variants either. However for all its faults the US has a proper Constitution that broadly works and a better concept of public freedoms, so the manic public measures we're seeing in the UK would never have been tolerated

@Puzzledandpissedoff

My friends live in the USA and their lives are very normal, they eat out, stay at peoples houses, go on holiday etc. The only sign of the pandemic left is face masks, and they aren't enforced so it's around 60-70% compliant

I know, MInnie, and since borders don't matter to a virus they're not immune (in any sense) to variants either. However for all its faults the US has a proper Constitution that broadly works and a better concept of public freedoms, so the manic public measures we're seeing in the UK would never have been tolerated

Imagine the disaster if we didn’t have those manic public measures in place in the UK. My god it doesn’t bear thinking about does it Puzz? We screwed it up with restrictions, we’d be an utter catastrophe without them 🤭

There were lockdowns and restrictions with the Spanish flu

The states that had the harshest restrictions had the healthiest economy when it was all over

@midgedude

There were lockdowns and restrictions with the Spanish flu

The states that had the harshest restrictions had the healthiest economy when it was all over

Not in England there were not. Unless you can provide evidence that I may have missed (unlikely).

What you forget about the Spanish flu comparison is that health care was not as sophisticated then as now. Hospitals were not treating cancer like now, intensive care units, operating theatres etc were totally different. People did just die of diseases that now can be easily treated in hospital. There were fewer car accidents for example. Dying in childbirth was relatively common- these days a few days in intensive care can cure childbirth problem that in those days would have killed.

So now if the NHS is overwhelmed it means doctors have to make a choice- do we chuck a covid patient out of ITU because a woman has haemorrhage during labour? Do we treat the heart attack victim ( who would have died in 1918) or the asthmatic who has Covid and can't breathe?

Protecting the NHS is about not having the whole system grind to a halt. Without those ITU beds there would have been many more deaths.

Strictly speaking, the Spanish flu hasn't exactly ended. It's mutated into the flu, as we know it today. It had an extremely high death rate, especially amongst children and wiped entire communities out

Actually children and the elderly were pretty much immune or it didn’t affect them that much. It was the adult population that it affected the most

And people didn’t go to hospital they died at home.

@EarringsandLipstick
But nothing you said doesn’t agree with what I said?

It is all a matter of chance. This pandemic could have happened 100 years ago, or it could have happened in 100 years time. There is no intelligent design to the pandemic. What you have said is 100% compatible with what I said.

www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/28/uk-government-must-increase-number-of-nhs-beds-hospital-bosses-warn

The UK government is acting as if the problem of increasing ICU is too big to handle!!

@lightand

www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/28/uk-government-must-increase-number-of-nhs-beds-hospital-bosses-warn

The UK government is acting as if the problem of increasing ICU is too big to handle!!

Obviously ICU bed numbers need to be reviewed, but it's a long term issue. They need qualified doctors/nurses and hospitals need to be extended/rebuilt to house them. That's not something you can do in a few months. It's part of the bigger issue of medical training. We've recently increased numbers of medical school places, but it takes years for the qualified staff to appear at the front line. Medical school places were far too low for far too long. There was even a time when the doctors "union" blocked an increase in numbers of trainee doctors. Today, we need to planning for more ICU beds etc in 5-10 years' time, to start, today, to plan new hospitals to include more ICU beds and start to plan remodelling/extensions etc of existing hospitals. Even if we do that, it won't help in the short term.

But I dont notice the government saying they will do any of it?

Plus I read somewhere that you promote and train nurses from the front so to speak. Takes only 1 year of extra training for a senior nurse to be trained up to ICU.

I think your post is quite defeatist.

Saying it cant be done in the short term - well the article has said that most or all hospitals increased ICU capacity this time around by 2 or 3 times, so it already has been done to a degree.

The article explains it all better than I can.

Why build the Nightingales if they already knew they couldn't man them or provide special care with them? They could have been used to house ICUs and COVID wards and kept ordinary hospitals COVID free.

But I dont notice the government saying they will do any of it?

I thought the Government had promised 20 new hospitals and 50,000 new nurses. But that was back in 2019 when they wanted to win an election.

@dividedwefall

Why build the Nightingales if they already knew they couldn't man them or provide special care with them? They could have been used to house ICUs and COVID wards and kept ordinary hospitals COVID free.

Better to have spare beds set up than several people to a hospital bed and people dying directly outside the hospitals on the pavement in front of the press cameras, as per scenes filmed in poorer countries. At least a “Nightingale Hospital” looks like you’re being proactive, however much it was a sticking plaster to cover a gaping hole in reality. They couldn’t even source enough basic PPE, so of course they weren’t really in a position to magic up the space, facilities and staff necessary to deal with covid and carry on as normal with everything else.