I agree, but it's also not hard to see that the knock-on from covid full hospitals is going to be deterioration and early deaths from people denied other care, like cancer treatment etc. I don't know what the answer is really, except brace yourself for the deaths to come, and try and get the country functioning again in the meantime. This fence is uncomfortable
It is a balancing act....there is no perfect answer. Life has to restart...accompanied by swift action when there is a local outbreak. Until modern times, people operated with disease constantly present....maybe we have to start doing that. However, that is depressing...more likely is that treatment becomes refined....accompanied possibly by a vaccine, so that COVID remains present, but not so deadly. Interestingly, the incidence of antibodies in the blood is no greater in Sweden (who went for the herd immunity approach) than in other countries, including us.
Sorry but that is trivialising the crisis. You’re right about not staying in lockdown for ever, but it was never enforced enough. Our borders were never closed, for example. As for bodies piling up in the street, the nature of the pandemic can clearly be seen that it has never been uniform across the world, or across individual countries. As our major city, London and the surrounding area were hit first and hardest, followed by outbreaks in other population centres across the country. Look at this interactive map from the ONS: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...athsinvolvingcovid19interactivemap/2020-06-12 The one lesson from that map seems to be, if you don’t want to catch the virus, stay away from large groups of people. I intend to do just that for the foreseeable future, thank you very much.
You carry on doing what you think is right. I’ve been working, in London, with large groups of people on public transport all through the lockdown (while taking all reasonable precautions), and I’ll carry on doing that, thank you very much.
Sorry if it came across as having a go at you Archers, I really wasn’t. Also, I speak as someone in a rural area which has seen precisely 1 COVID-related death within a 10 mile radius of my home, so I am in absolutely no position to preach at people who live or work in cities. The important thing, as you say, is to carry on taking whatever precautions are practical, given the situation.
It is a proper thorny problem though, because if you prioritise people over the economy, you end up with a population that survives, but a smashed economy meaning that tax revenue can't be generated, health care and education can't be provided and we'd end up like those countries that economic migrants come from rather than a destination for them. That's hyperbole of course, but you can exactly see why the herd immunity, suck it up attitude was looked upon favourably by certain politicians. Chilco is right too though. I agree that the scale of the deaths and disruption caused by Covid was worsened by the slow action to shut things down, lack of clear, enforceable laws and a plan to deal with it on an ongoing basis after the outbreak was controlled. We had none of that clear direction, didn't save any lives, and still had the lockdown which could cripple the economy. It left us with one of the worst of all possible scenarios which was multiple deaths AND a broken economy
I was reading, this morning, that in some hospitals (it might be all) organised surgical operations won’t be carried out, if the patient hasn’t self isolated for 14 days. This is causing problems because when a patient breaches the rules, the hospital cannot do the operation and can’t slot in another patient because they wouldn’t have been self isolating in readiness, so a further backlog is created. Meanwhile I am waiting for an ambulance to collect Mrs B, who is suffering quite badly from the side effects of her recent radiotherapy treatment. She was warned that there was a 5% chance of it impacting on her spinal cord and affecting her walking, which were decent odds. In the 3 weeks since the treatment ended I have noticed her walking becoming more erratic and yesterday her legs just gave out and she dropped to the floor. Having monitored and supported her walking this morning, I phoned the Acute Oncolgy Support line, asked a few questions, they spoke to my wife and the decision was taken to bring her in to be checked. Hopefully it will just be because of fatigue and the heat, and a couple of days of maybe being on a drip to increase her hydration, if it is low, will sort her out. I don’t yet know if I can accompany her.
No problem mate, I probably did sound a little flippant, though I didn't intend to be. It's all about striking a balance, as others have said. I have also seen at first hand through members of my family, the effect lockdown can have on people's mental as well as physical health; I think the impact this has still been massively underestimated. We are social creatures, and we are not meant to be isolated from each other. I confess too, that while this government gets very little credit from me, even less so after the Cummings debacle, I am generally grateful for the consensual rather than authoritarian approach our country has taken to lockdown. My girlfriend is French, where the authorities are forever issuing dictats to the populace, who more often than not end up taking to the streets from which they are then swept away with water cannon. At the height of their lockdown, the gendarmes were stopping people on the streets and arresting anyone more than 5km from their home without a permit. Don't fancy that much, thanks. And while they may have had less deaths than us, their health system coped considerably less well than did the NHS (surprisingly robust after a decade of Tory cuts).
She didn’t yesterday, when she hit the floor. Thanks. She is in overnight and due to have 2 scans tomorrow to look for obvious issues. She doesn’t like hospital, especially as she is dependent on very busy nurses to help her to and from a toilet. She’s too frail to lift herself onto one of those cardboard things they hand out.
I've not noticed any difference except that I couldn't go to football. WFH, and always get my food delivered. Only go out to walk the dogs. Lockdown? Have I missed something?
You remember those letters that were being sent out to the most vulnerable people when all this was kicking off? My Dad received his today... Brilliant. Of course we didn’t need a letter to know to be extra cautious with him, but even so, that is comically late!
I went into town today. Social distancing wasn't a problem. It never is, people go out of their way to avoid me. I never thought that flatulence could one day save my life.
Good luck with Mrs B, St.B I really wish her all the best and as you say, a couple of days under hospital supervision strengthens her up. thinking of you both
We aren't meant to have severe, enduring health issues either, and that's one of the things that gets missed in focusing solely on deaths. We know that lasting pulmonary problems are common. We know that heart conditions and memory problems are not rare. Strokes and aneurysms, even in younger people, occur at a troubling rate. We don't yet know whether these things are permanent, but we know that five months out, there are a lot of people who are in the 'recovered' category who still have an awful lot of recovering to do. So just as the effects of lockdown are perhaps understated, so too are the effects of COVID reduced to a pass/fail.
