Was This The Right Attitude During The Initial Phase Of Covid?

[sp1814]

Old people will die anyway, so why tank the economy for them (from B Johnson - allegedly)

https://www.itv.com/news/2023-10-30/covid-inquiry-disappearing-messages-turned-on-in-whatsapp-group-with-johnson

[Hopkirk]

How do we know he wasn't playing devil's advocate, looking at different viewpoints during a discussion?

[sp1814]

Hopkirk - because we all saw what happened in the care homes.

[youngmafbog]

Yes, he was right.

[sp1814]

youngmafbog

 

Let the elderly die????

[youngmafbog]

Yes. That is what I said.

The reality is that most who died would have anyway, what should have been done is to advise (and support) the elderly and vunerable to stay in and let the rest get on with it.

I stated this right at the start.  You will find the posts if you search (I am sure some sado will).

[youngmafbog]

BTW, this was also the thought of my Mother who was 90 at the time.  But then people of that generation have more common sense, bottle and are able to think and look out for themselves.

[ladybirder]

Better than the youngsters losing their lives.  I stayed in.

[sp1814]

Just revealed:

The inquiry's lawyer shows some entries from Sir Patrick Vallance’s diaries from 2020.

In the first, Vallance says Boris Johnson is “obsessed with older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life and the economy going”.

Another entry says: “He says his party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just Nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them’.”

A third entry, from December 2020, reads: "Chief whip says 'I think we should let the old people get it and protect others’. PM says ‘a lot of my backbenchers think that and I must say I agree with them’."

Cain says the PM was concerned about society as a whole, but some of the language is not “what I would have used”.

 

[Peter Pedant]

evidence from today Dom Cummings

The Cobra system, as some people will know, is what is called a STRAP environment. That means that it is an environment where you don’t have phones. You cannot just take in laptops. It is kept in a certain way, so that the intelligence services know that Russia, China, North Korea or whoever cannot smuggle things in. That kind of system is completely hopeless for a pandemic.

dom was warned off discussion of STRAP and COBRA by the fella in the wig

thought you would be interested

Note to Mods - strap is NOT part of a sado-masochistic set up. Sozza reader not having a good deletion day

[Peter Pedant]

Old people will die anyway, so why tank the economy for them (from B Johnson - allegedly)

bit Japanese if you please ( kamikaze - the young give up their lives) -Boris is a classicist for chrissakes

and we  elected him knowing that

[Old_Geezer]

Close to being right, but it isn't an age related thing. No ill person should have been sent back to a care home almost certainly to infect others.

 

Yes the thrust should have been to allow the herd immunity thing to build up, but use subtle control to manage the rate of hospital admissions.

 

This was clearly thought the right option right at the start, when it was then abandoned in favour of ignoring the science and checking whether the the hoi polloi would tolerate the taking of basic rights from them; only to find, after the event, they'd deliberately screwed the economy while nations with a lighter touch did as well and better regarding the pandemic and retained their economy.

 

Government probably gave to much credence to, and took advice from, those who had no idea, rather than using their own common sense.

[dave50]

Absolutely spot on. The lives of the young are more important than the lives of the old and infirm. To argue that all lives are of equal value is just emotional rubbish. 

[sandyRoe]

Had I known that's what he wanted I would have gone out onto the side of our nearest mountain, laid down and waited for the cold to take me.

We older people need to step aside and let the youth have its fling.

[Ellipsis]

> Old people will die anyway, so why tank the economy for them

The reason why we bother allowing sick people into hospital and dispense expensive drugs to them, even though it costs money ...  whether they're old or not.

[Canary42]

The Nazis took that view too.

[New Judge]

I stated this right at the start.  You will find the posts if you search (I am sure some sado will).

I said likewise (and my posts are probably around somewhere). I advocated “targeted protection” of the vulnerable. Meanwhile everybody else would crack on whilst taking sensible precautions (which did not include ineffective face coverings).

The average age of those who died from Covid was actually greater than the average age of those who died from everything else. It is a disease that has serious consequences predominantly – though not exclusively, so please don’t cite the cases of the relatively few younger people for whom it presented problems - for the elderly. But the problem was that vast swathes of the population had been conditioned into believing – and expecting – that the government would protect them from everything. They expected “something to be done”. Unfortunately very little can be done to prevent the spread of airborne respiratory viruses. 

But instead of emphasising this simple fact, the government misled the population into believing the virus could be either eradicated or prevented from spreading and the measures they imposed in a foolish effort to demonstrate this was similar to burning a house down to deal with a wasps’ nest.

Had I known that's what he wanted I would have gone out onto the side of our nearest mountain, laid down and waited for the cold to take me.

There was no need for that, Sandy, because the vast majority of older people who contracted the virus survived. The statements mentioned at the enquiry should not be greeted with hysteria. It is a sad but inevitable fact of life that older people are far more susceptible  to serious consequences from diseases that are the young. Covid is no different in this respect and it was inevitable that casualties would be higher among the old than the young. The mistake the government made was to lead people to believe that Covid was different in that respect from any other respiratory virus. It is unfair to criticise the particular government that was in office at the time because no other would have acted any differently because:

Government probably gave to much credence to, and took advice from, those who had no idea, rather than using their own common sense.

And no government of any different political persuasion or makeup would have done anything substantially different.

[Old_Geezer]

Oh  I don't know about that. The Swedish government didn't seem to do that badly.

[Old_Geezer]

Numerous African nations seemed to be ok too, although possibly because they hadn't the resources to mess things up.

[New Judge]

Oh  I don't know about that. The Swedish government didn't seem to do that badly.

Quite right, OG. Unfortunately I didn't make it clear. In my final paragraph I was referring to UK governments only.

[Togo]

Old people die? Who knew? I wish someone had told me then I wouldn't have got old. There is no way yet devised to protect the willfully, mentally fragile. That doesn't mean that we all must join them.