@GoldenOmber
However, if someone genuinely doesn't understand why covid and cancer have been addressed differently they might be better reading more about the subjects than having someone on a message board try to explain paragraph by paragraph.
Everyone does understand that. Everyone knows cancer isn’t the same as covid. Nobody’s suggesting chemotherapy for covid. And I think you do know this.
The point being made was on the morality of preventing deaths. If the justification for severe restrictions is “it will prevent severe illnesses and deaths”, then why is that justified for covid but not cancer? Or COPD, or HIV, or various other causes of death. We could put measures in place, now, today, which would prevent many of those deaths. We could. We don’t, though. But why shouldn’t we, if the moral justification for doing it for covid at this point post-vaccines is “it’ll save lives”?
That’s the argument being made, and if you think “read some public health” is a counter to it then it comes across as if you’re not that familiar with some public health fundamentals yourself.
Many different arguments were being made, some of them jumbled up together.
@TheKeatingFive seemed very keen to make the comparison with cancer in a number of different ways, to be honest, (though I don't remember chemotherapy in there. Funnily enough, methotrexate, which can be used for chemo, is considered a possible treatment for covid you know)
One issue with pandemics is that rapid action can prevent a very large number of deaths in a short period of time. It's a classic epidemiological tactic. www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus
Another issue is how quickly we come out of restrictions - too quickly and there can be another spike and the point of the first lot of restrictions is lost.
Another issue is that the situation with a relatively new pathogen is quite unstable. So we were in a crisis affecting all of society in March 2020 - and ended up in lockdown and we were in crisis again in January 2021. It's certainly possible that there will be a further crisis this winter. We don't entirely know, of course, but it's possible. The not knowing is a big part of the problem.
Cancer is a terrible disease, but it takes a long time to develop, there is a more predictable pattern of new cases coming forwards, so the demand on and effect on services is more predictable, even if it is hard for services to manage right now for other reasons.
The winter demand of the combination of covid/ flu/ RSV is likely to be very high and surging through the worst of the winter months.
Even if we would like to ignore covid and crack on with treating all the other illnesses, it would be hard to do so, because the cancer patients, for example, may well be immunosuppressed, either because of their illness, or because of their treatment, or both, and the more poorly they are the more susceptible they might be to covid. We might want to ignore covid, but covid will not ignore vulnerable patients. We can't just run other medical services ignoring the need to isolate the covid patients, for example, so we need different treatment areas, more space, masks more resources to do the same job.
Another issue, regarding restrictions, is that with an infection, we can identify the agent and then try to avoid people getting infected. We have a mechanism and a rationale that comes from that (and you don't always have that in medicine)
With cancer, there are often all sorts of factors in place for example
- ethnicity
- genetic inheritance
- passive and active exposure to smoking
- diet (dairy/ meat/ lack of vegetables and fibre)
- breast feeding/ having been breast fed as a baby
- pollution, yes
- exercise
- exposure to the sun
- alcohol or other drugs
- exposure to infection
- exposure to chemicals
and so on (not in any particular order), varying according to the different sorts of cancer.
It would be a real challenge to winkle these out, and changes would affect all of our lives, potentially even more than the covid restrictions do. Believe me, someone who is told for example that they cannot drive for medical reasons is likely to be extremely upset/ annoyed about it, removing motorised transport even on a personal level is likely to raise strong objections. It is really hard also to change habits around diet, exercise etc as we all know, though you are all quite right that we need to do this (and public health medicine encourages people to do this). It is a thorny issue and not one that is easy to address. If you take some of these things out of people's lives, what do you give them instead as a means of transport/ way of accessing work/ pleasures in life.
So the response to covid has been different to the response to cancer partly because it has been an acute situation and partly because infection control measures have a medical logic to them (avoid vulnerable people getting infected, vaccination etc).
I think that's long enough (though not perfect) very happy to discuss further. As I tried to suggest, there's quite a bit you could unpack.