Deaded by the 'vid.
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Deaded by the 'vid.
Superbly, the Huffington Post has managed to report on this using a picture of leading scientist Lord Robert Winston. :hehe:
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Don't. I'm already despairing of my short break away in Ludlow I've booked for next month. :furious:
I do struggle with the logic of seeing a rise in infections that was merely postponed by the last lockdown and concluding that the best way to deal with it is with another lockdown that can only postpone another rise in infections.
Well you know my attitude to the whole thing. It's entirely down to the arrogance and egocentricity of the majority of the population. "Oh noooos I might die that would be so terrible! I'd best hide behind the sofa!" (Cf peoiple who are 'afraid of flying') It's just selfishness.
We are a nation of repellant, self-absorbed egomaniacs and I hate each and every one of us.
Whatever happened to living a dayt as a lion rather than years as a lamb, ffs?
Well medical science has created average life expectancies of 80-fúck+ and we haven't had a proper war in ages, so the concept of suffering an early death seems even more egregious and unfair to people now than it ever has before.
Stoicism is borne of hardship and we in the west have lived in a condition of ease for a long, long time. Put simply, you can't create a society that minimises risk to an unprecedented degree and then expect everyone to happily accept and embrace risk.
You do for yourself, which is fine. But of course your risk calculation is relatively simple by virtue of having (for instance) no living parents and no kids.
But others need to consider the risk not only to themselves, but to their vulnerable relatives, neighbours, etc. In other words, not everyone's risk calculation is the same or can be managed as easily.
Take my folks, for instance. They are (touch wood) very healthy; mentally acute; active and are very much enjoying their later years. Given which, they - not unreasonably - would prefer not to expose themselves unduly to the risk of catching a virus that would have a very good chance of killing them.
As a result, I tend to take a dim view of people who boldly assert that they just should strap on a pair and potentially shorten the lives they are very much enjoying because the rest of us are finding the whole thing a bit tiresome. Now you can take the view that their determination to cling to life is selfish in a societal sense if you like, but you probably need to accept that your view comes from an equally selfish place.
In which case they are free to take the decision to self-isolate. :shrug:
Or to decide for themselves which risks they are willing to take and to act accordingly.
Asking the rest of us to put our lives on hold, load our children down with debt and wreck the economy in order to minimise risk that they are fully capable of controlling strikes me as really, really stupid.
They are and they have - because they are fortunate enough to have the support network, technological skills and- let's face it - money to do so comfortably. Not everyone has. Equally, they are a couple and so issues of isolation and loneliness are less pressing to them than they are to single vulnerable people.
This 'oh, they should just lock themselves away so the rest of us can get on with it' attitude is profoundly callous, heartless and unthinking. These are actual people you're talking about here, not mere inconveniences.
I also worry about the factors you mention, but I think there's something deeply wrong with thinking the way you do about people.
Someone in the Tele the other day was considering these YouGov polls that show the large majority of the people support the current restrictions or think we should go farther. His point was that the questions are really loaded and geared towards that outcome.
The question he felt everyone should really be asked was, and I paraphrase 'are you prepared to significantly curtail the social aspect of your life, no longer travel abroad and add enormous amounts of debt in order to for a small reduction in the likelihood that you live into your 90s?'.
And he's right.
But I'm not suggesting we lock them or anyone else away, I'm suggesting we allow them to decide the risk they are prepared to take.
And your moral perspective excludes the issues faced by people in the non-vulnerable category. Why is it bad to think about people in the way you describe but it's ok to ignore the impact of lockdown on mental health, domestic abuse, cancer patients etc etc ?
My main issue with our approach to Covid is that we don't look at it holistically, we seem to care only about Covid statistics rather than the impact of lockdown generally.
Sure. I agree about the polls for what it's worth. And I think that to make those calculations regarding one's own personal risk are absolutely fine. But it's not just about the risk to yourself. You're also taking risks with other people's lives. And at that point your calculation of the risk to yourself ceases to be the only factor.
It doesn't exclude people in the non-vulnerable category at all, it simply takes the view that to present vulnerable people with the stark choice between significant risk of death from this virus or self-imposed isolation is pretty inhumane when it is within the power of the rest of us to do things to help mitigate that risk.
I'm not a lockdown fanatic, but neither am I of the opinion that it is feasible or reasonable simply to return to the status quo ante and let the more vulnerable members of our society face that choice. If you're talking about a holistic approach, you can't have one without a rather more sophisticated approach to the most vulnerable than you have outlined.
With Covid, the risk of death per 1000 in the 70-79 category is 8 (approx 10 for males). Now if your chances of dying whenever you got into an aeroplane were 1 in 100, you'd call that a pretty significant risk of death, wouldn't you? It'd probably make you pretty wary of flying, no?
So yes. 'Significant'.
Your analogy is mendacious. The risk isn't a 1 in ahundred chance of dying if you get in the aeroplane, your risk is 1 in a hundred of dying if the aeroplane crashes. As you well know, 1 in a 100 70-79 year olds haven't died because they left the house.
The risk is infinitesimal.
That's correct. Our hospitals customarily operate at or near capacity at all times.
The point is that if there is a significant spike in ICU admissions, then you get over 100% capacity in no time at all - which neans that people are no longer receiving adequate care and significant numbers of preventable deaths start occurring very quickly.
Of course. This is f@cking complicated stuff and literally nobody has 'got it right' because 'getting it right' in this context is a pipe dream. It's a constant weighing of negatives against one another while trying to retain basic humanitarian principles. I don't care what political perspective you come from, but I pity any government of any political shade that is faced with making these choices.
They also showed a video of an ICU ward. You would think you'd see lifeless bodies hooked up to machines,
Not really it was the usual peope who have other problems all sitting there talking away.
Also if there was a massive problem no doubt the papers/news would have jumped all over it if there where photos of people laying around in corridors on coffee tables like in Italy.
I am by far an expert but wouldn't make sense to put the covid fellas in the Knightingale hospitals and keep the regular hospitals free (as much as possible) of the Covid.
It's not mendacious. Millions of people in the UK are estimated to have already had the disease, so even if you consider the lower end of those estimates, that is already a significant proportion of the population. So given that, the risk of catching it is far from infinitesimal and, given that the death rates among males aged 70-79 are 1 in 100, there's nothing infinitesimal about those risks either.
That's the logic that was used, in part, to justify locking down Liverpool. And then the medical officer for Liverpool pointed out that it was complete *******s because they had contingency plans that would allow them to quickly increase ICU capacity if it was needed, they had put them in place during the first wave. Potential ICU capacity isn't even close to being maxed out, it's just more scare mongering and hyperbole from the cowards in government, the complicit media (I exclude the Tele from this who routinely write lockdown critical articles) and the introverted, anti-social, sub-normal retards in Sage who are for more concerned about not being wrong then they are about being right.
There are approximately 170,000 hospital beds in the UK (I think that does not include the Nightingale hospitals which are all currently empty) of which less than 10,000 were used for Covid patients as at last night. ICU's are running at normal capacity. Excess deaths (the metric which the 'experts' assured was the best way of measuring the impact of Covid) are more or less at the 5 year average.
And yet we're closing down part of our economy, compromising our children's education, massively increasing our national debt? Really? Your pony bothering mate is right, the world has gone mad.
As for your parents, if they are over 70 but not obese, don't smoke and have no underlying health conditions they can lead a more or less normal life with only a few sensible constraints i.e. don't attend a family gathering with 20+ people indoors and talk to everyone for 3-4 hours, with virtually no chance of catching the virus and dying from it.