The WhatsApp message leak

[Mycatsgoldtooth]

So, we’ve had the FBI saying it was a lab leak, the leaked messages showing many of the restrictions were for show, stats on the reality of masks being mostly useless unless N95s. Where are all the people that were so upset about anyone saying anything against the government now.

It’s almost as if no one care where the virus came from and how the government reacted. If I’d spent years being terrified and washing my shopping I’d be really pissed off.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/01/untruth-untruth-peddled-justify-great-lockdown-disaster/

@MinkyGreen Yep- got to see it all. One thing I will say though is peoples attitudes are I think different in scandi land- it's very much about what's best for 'society' as a whole - and people adhere to that. Most Older people don't seem to begrudge paying pretty high tax for instance because they know their grandkids get very cheap and good childcare , so most couples work, and they get good pensions , no council tax and there's lots of good social housing and good public transport. It's less about 'your' individual circumstances and I saw very little feral behaviour apart from the odd dodgy area . I do know sweden has a few issues in Malmo but a friend if ours lives there and says it tends to be between gangs in a very specific area that you just don't go to. Malmo centre is lovely. They on the whole trust that the gvt are doing what's best for everyone. It's not perfect and wouldn't suit everyone, someone described it as a bit like a giant Waitrose, quite homogenous and I kind of know what they meant. Certain standards are the norm and expected I felt and it's not an easy place to strike up random friendships . That's my personal take on it anyway. I like it- feels calm and ordered.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11866947/Norwich-City-coach-jailed-hitting-man-head-pole-Covid-mask-row.html

Covid was not a tornado. Covid was/is 'infected people'. The more people are out and about, the stronger the 'storm' because the more 'infected people' are out and about.

So someone working in a supermarket is actually safer in a pandemic if they are only preparing online deliveries, than if thousands of members of the public are also in the store with them. The more different people you had to mix with, the more at risk you were.

That's not to say that the people lucky enough to be able to work from home weren't safest of all. They were. Their jobs made them lucky at that point. And they weren't at home out of nobility. But the fact is that all the people working outside the home (in factories, in shops, in hospitals - including very well paid doctors) would not have been safer if all of those wfh people had been out and about as well. They would have been even more at risk.

If we had a disease where we had no choice but to lockdown again, we'd need to really work on making all workplaces that forced people to mix much, much safer. That should have happened this time too.

There are far too many generalisations in that post @frothytoffee.

One feature of the pandemic is that people who were being 'protected' by restrictions didn't necessarily experience it as protection. They were not a monolith. That's as true for work as it is for any other aspect of life.

I love wfh, but being forced into it doesn't make a person lucky. Not does it make them safer: safer from covid and safer per se are not the same thing. Sometimes they're in direct opposition to each other.

The single parent at low risk from covid who was legally obliged to do her job at home whilst simultaneously looking after a toddler could quite reasonably consider herself to be less lucky and safe than a person whose job was still expected to be done outside the home and could access childcare on that basis. A home worker whose previous respite from an abusive partner was their job outside the home was neither lucky nor protected by wfh. The supermarket cashier whose contacts were vastly reduced but who lived alone and was denied the ability to see the people they loved and relied on for their happiness might not think they were being protected. And all of those people get to make those value judgements for themselves.

This is why it's so important not to generalise. And it's telling that we didn't ever hear much from people who were working outside the home but being 'protected' by the general reduction of contacts, especially if they weren't working in the NHS. We couldn't have had that length of lockdown with broad compliance without a small army of Amazon and Deliveroo drivers, but their voices and experiences were never at the forefront of policy, politics or media.

I was responding to a massive generalisation that the people working from home wanted other people put at risk so that they could do that. Within that I acknowledged that from the point of view of covid protection, they were lucky. Of course they're not a monolith. Lots hated lockdown and some broke it (incidentally increasing the risks to the people working outside the home and the army of delivery drivers). Nor are the people working outside the home a monolith. Some will have had their lives saved by lockdown and never know it; I know some felt much safer that way; and some will think it was all unnecessary.

Just for the record - am I meant to care about the delivery drivers only when they are apparently being cruelly put at risk of covid to service the people who wfh, or can I also care about them when they are put at risk of covid by poor or broken precautions? I mean which is it? Is covid something they deserve to be protected from, or not?

And the people wfh - if they suffered and were unhappy and stressed by lockdown, which many were, then how can they also function as the convenient scapegoat whose selfish desire to be safe at home required an army of delivery drivers? And what about the (relatively safe) delivery drivers who ate food from factories that were relatively unsafe places to work? Are they goodies or baddies in this scenario?

It's that lazy scapegoating that my post was about, btw. I know as humans we often want someone to feel angry with, when we've suffered, but these disdainful soundbites about the 'laptop-owning classes' are a generalisation too (and one that must be great for the government and its supporters to read, as it focuses blame conveniently away from them).

Well, you didn't actually specify from the point of view of covid protection. Which is the problem.

You aren't wrong about some of the other points you make, but that's why we shouldn't be generalising, and you did do that in the post I replied to. You're also doing it again here when you talk about how people breaking lockdown increased the risk to those working outside the home, as though some lockdown breaches didn't function as support for those workers.

I would agree the post you were replying to was citing a generalisation, though the poster concerned is correct that it was a point that got made, whether one agrees with it or not. And I'm a laptop worker who suffered because of lockdown, so I obviously know how much more to it there is.

But it does also touch on an important and unpalatable truth that we didn't talk nearly enough about. That is, the way in which restrictions offered protection from covid was asymmetric, and inherently required the government to say to a cohort of frequently poorly paid people that it was ok for them to take the greater risk of being outside the home to do the things that were needed to keep others covid safer than them, but not for them to be outside the home for things they considered beneficial to themselves. That matters, as does the fact that this group still don't have much of a platform.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/17/covid-19-inquiry-government-seven-years-150-lawyers-pandemic/

"You're also doing it again here when you talk about how people breaking lockdown increased the risk to those working outside the home, as though some lockdown breaches didn't function as support for those workers."

But those two things aren't mutually exclusive. Both can be true at the same time.

Which you didn't say. You wrote that lockdown breaking increased the risk to those working outside the home, which is not the same thing. If what you meant was that lockdown breaches increased the risk of covid for those workers but not the risk as a whole because that goes wider than one disease, I agree, but let's say that.

I agree that there was asymmetry, of course there was, but that applies across many divides. People outside the home will have had more human contact. People wfh who didn't have family members working outside will have had less covid risk. People who lived alone were very isolated but very safe from covid. People working outside the home were safer than they would have been otherwise because of the people who did comply, and more at risk because of those who didn't, regardless of how good people's reasons for non compliance were. (I mean doctors were more at risk of covid because ill people and pregnant women went to hospitals - that's just a fact, it doesn't mean those people should have stayed at home!)

I suspect lockdown noncompliance happened for a range of reasons some of which we'd be in agreement were good enough and some of we might both think weren't. The reasons are all separate from the effect on covid rates though, which itself is separate from the effects on mental health, education and so on.

If someone is claiming that lockdown only served the middle classes while putting the working class at risk of covid, then the effect on covid risk is more relevant to that claim than the other effects such as mental health benefits. That's not a pro-lockdown argument so much as an anti lazy scapegoating and anti blame diversion argument.

But the whole context for what I said is the covid risk. Right from the first thing I said and the post I was replying to.

This is what I said:

"Covid was not a tornado. Covid was/is 'infected people'. The more people are out and about, the stronger the 'storm' because the more 'infected people' are out and about."

"So someone working in a supermarket is actually safer in a pandemic if they are only preparing online deliveries, than if thousands of members of the public are also in the store with them. The more different people you had to mix with, the more at risk you were."

It isn't. The risk of covid was only ever one part of the context we were in during the period in which this thread and the leaks cover. The fact that some of the things we did to mitigate covid increased other risks and that some of the things people did to mitigate the other risks increased the covid risk is utterly fundamental. It is impossible to have a proper analysis if this isn't right at the centre of it.

In terms of lockdown noncompliance, I actually don't attach any legitimacy to people who think they get to decide whether people's reasons were good enough. My response to that level of arrogance is to tell the people engaging in it to pipe the fuck down. If you think differently then we don't agree at all.

I don't believe that type of saintly nonjudgmentalism exists, not really. We all have opinions, whether or not we express them.

I feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall here, but I was replying to one message, not the whole thread - I wasn't trying to sum up the whole of covid or give an overall opinion on lockdown. It is a hugely complex issue as you quite rightly say. But you don't necessarily need to sum up the full complexities of an issue in order to show that one particular argument has a fatal flaw (in this case the lazy trope that the lockdown only harmed the people working outside the home, and didn't also help them by reducing infection risk). For that, their covid risk was relevant and their (or everyone's) mental health and a myriad of other issues (which I completely acknowledge are important in the overall picture) weren't.

It isn't remotely non-judgemental! The exact opposite, in fact. I am quite explicitly passing judgement.

As for your second paragraph, we just completely disagree.

@frothytoffee, I think what you're saying is that (in terms of covid risk only) for those that had to go out to work etc, lockdown also helped them in that there were less opportunities for the virus to spread. They had more protection from covid than they would have had if more people were mixing through work, shopping etc. If I've got the gist right, then yes, in terms of covid risk, I agree.

Oh, yes, hahahaha. And all the face muzzlers with their face nappies...

Why are you mocking people for taking reasonable precautions, as seemed fit with the facts of that early stage of information, during a pandemic of a novel coronavirus?

You are going to be in for one hell of a nasty surprise when (not if, according to experts) the next pandemic occurs. Just have to hope it is not hemorrhagic in nature, or in your case not, say, the Nipah virus - with a 40-75% fatality rate - which is best protected against by washing fruits and fruit products.

@surrenderdorothy the only one using the words muzzlers and nappies on this thread is you

Indeed. I seem to recall you were rather fond of an AD thread back in the day. Home of those opposed to face muzzlers and face nappies. Home of mockery of anyone aware enough to wish to protect their own health and that of others.

What i wasnt fond of was the emotional blackmail and the using of disabled people (like DH) to bully berate and emotionally blackmail others to follow nonsensical rules. When they couldnt care less about disabled people the rest of the time. I dont like users.

Like the ones who advised others to cover their faces in Hibiscrub if they had a skin condition so that they could don a face mask.
The disgusting comments towards those who suffered with trigeminal neuralgia and rape survivors.

Indeed. I seem to recall you were rather fond of an AD thread back in the day

So was I. And?

Well, it's not like I plucked those terms out of my arse, is it? Those were terms used on those threads. Do try to keep up.

You have no evidence that anyone on this thread used them though.

Logic not your strong suit.

They are terms of derision and mockery used by Covid deniers and downplayers, which is the demographic of the AD threads.

Anyway, this is quite enough of a derail.