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Was This The Right Attitude During The Initial Phase Of Covid?
Old people will die anyway, so why tank the economy for them (from B Johnson - allegedly)
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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.
god I wish people wd stop writing this stuff - no it isnt but it was in Covid ( jesus - Spanish flu ( killed squaddies) and polio ( paralysed squaddies) are the two great counter examples. so no it is NOT a general principle but observed in various other diseases. It was reasonable to take lessons from other diseases such as SARS
which leads me to....
my main point - which is the Covid inquiry ( today) is discussing chaos over plans which - wdnt work anyway.....
lock down wd not and did not work - R only went below 1 when vaccination started and then it plummeted. ( lock down nichty nochty workie in Ab speak)
Dom in evidence, didnt like SAGE so set up Downing St scientific doo-dah ctee. No one at the inquiry realised, Dom didnt like SAGE 1 and set up SAGE 2 which he also didnt like . A reasonable conclusion is that it wasnt the ctee he abhorred ( yes reader abhorred !) but their advice.
Not too rich a post for Ab is it?
"covid inquiry doesnt understand the science even tho it isnt that hard"
Yes it was the right attitude.
In the early days of Covid it quickly became apparent this was a killer of the old and/or the vulnerable, although the vast majority of the old and/or vulnerable who caught Covid survived (it always irriated me during Covid where a person would pipe up and say "Ah, but I knew a healthy 30 year who succumbed" or similar, as though this were proof it was a killer of all - such were the lack of deaths in young healthy people that when young healthy people died it often made news in the national papers).
Of course the old and/or vulnerable should have been looked after as far as it was possible to do so (although they had an equal, if not greater, responsibility to look after themselves), but the more robust of us, both pyhsically robust and mentally robust, should have been allowed to go about our business.
To ride roughshod over our prepared pandemic plan, to lockdown, to pay people to sit on their backsides and to throw money around like confetti, and in doing so well and truly ruining the economy, was an absolute disgrace and I will never forgive the TINO Government for doing so.
From day one on here I was saying the remedy was worse than the disease, it would ruin the economy and we'd be paying for the utter folly for years to come, and in turn was routinely called a Covidiot, a Covid denier, selfish and a granny killer.
I, and others with the same view, have been proven correct.
The Government allowed the two doom-goblins to dictate policy, both of whom weren't just glass half-empty they were there isn't a drop left in the glass. I can remember Vallance saying in November 2020 (from memory) that a "scenario" was that 50,000 people could die a month. Another scenario of course is that only a tiny fraction of this amount may die, and this proved to be much much nearer the truth.
The way we mishandled Covid in foolishly locking down still makes me angry.
The hospital which Mrs Z works at had 15 wards given over to Covid patients. Had lockdown not happened there was a severe risk that ta great deal more, maybe the entire hospital, would have ben taken over with Covid patients. This would have had the knock-on effect of delaying treatments and operations.
To say lockdown was a bad idea is ignorant of the effect on the NHS.
This would have had the knock-on effect of delaying treatments and operations.
All that lockdown did in that respect was to delay the delay you refer to. The NHS is in the worst state it has ever been in since its inception. Much (though not all) of this has been caused by two years where conditions needing urgent diagnosis and treatment were largely kicked into touch. As well as that, conditions requiring what are quaintly termed "elective" treatments (as if anybody would choose to have a hip replacement like they would choose to have botox injections) became out of the question. It had the added side effect of slaughtering the economy for probably two generations, crippled young people's education for two years and caused many people mental health problems (which, like most other medical conditions, the NHS is now unable to deal with in anything like a timely manner).
People were told to comply with lockdowns "to protect the NHS". Well they didn't achieve that because the NHS is now fatally wounded and in need of euthanasia, and in any case I always thought the NHS existed to protect its patients. All they did was to build into the NHS huge waiting lists that are unlikely to be cleared in a decade.
This country had a perfectly sound plan to deal with a pandemic and it was unceremoniously ditched in a panic of muddled thinking. The politicians who presided over this were bamboozled by all manner of "experts" forecasting apolcalytic scenarios that were never likely to transpire. Their reaction was to unnecessarily introduce some of the harshest restrictions on civil liberties ever seen in this country.
It is abudantly clear now that the strategy was fundamentally flawed because it only considered one aspect of the situation - the need (apparently) to protect the NHS. The economy was sacrificed in a flurry of violent spending, social interaction was withdrawn at will as if it was a luxury that could be simply dispensed with rather than an intrinsic feature of human life. The politicians responsible for this mess should never be forgiven for that and the country should ensure that such a scandalous state of affairs never occurs again.
The NHS survived, albeit in a worse state than pre COVID. Had it collapsed, there would either have had to have been a great deal more borrowing to try and resurect it, or we would now be in a situation where people had to pay for healthcare through insurance or tax. We weren't the only country to experience financial harm but we're currently the 5th strongest world economy.
" Their reaction was to unnecessarily introduce some of the harshest restrictions on civil liberties ever seen in this country"
I normally agree with your thinking but I have to say that's rubbish. If anything the enquiry will conclude we did too little too late. What was done in UK was lax not harsh compared to other countries. In some European countries like Spain the police would stop you for not wearing a mask in garden; in China and South Korea there were curfews and test and trace systems that wouldn't have been tolerated here; in Australia/NZ lockdowns were more closely enforced/adhered to; even USA was similar to here.
Maybe you're saying all major governments got it wrong. I doubt any will conclude their measures were too harsh
I think what people forget that unlike the epidemics we have experienced in the past this was a new type. They had modelled the flu, haemorhagic, and pox type viruses for years, they had plans for these, but covid didn't behave in the same way. No one had immunity because it hadnt been around before, the initial strain was so variable in effect and there were no established effective treatment options. We didn't have a quick test method, and didn't therefore get accurate population incidence figures everyone was flying blind.
I said early on that there was an argument for allowing here immunity to develop but back then it would have been at the cost of even more horrendous death rates and would have required decisions on who could be treated in hospital that no government would have dared to make. To do it would have meant no admissions for anyone in the groups at high risk. When it appeared to be shown that certain ethnic groups were more likely to succumb the possibility of that route was closed off. No one cared if the obese, those suffering from pre existing medical condition ( especially those with lifestyle connections), fell victim, they could be blamed. The death of so many elderly and severely disabled people could eventually be an economic benefit with the saving in long term care costs, and the potential to put carers back in the workforce. But you couldnt discriminate on racial grounds.
We were lucky, not just because we did get a vaccine very very early on, But because the virus mutated quickly with less virulent strains becoming dominant but the final issue that No one could have predicted was long covid. Had we gone down the herd immunity route with the earlier strains the percentage of the population who would go on to develop this would have been many times higher. So many People who developed this in those early phases of the pandemic are still profoundly affected, and there is even some suggestion that it had the ability to trigger dormant auto immune conditions.
So my feeling is there were things we did well, there were things we did badly, and while many of the politicians struggled with a fast changing crisis not just here but abroad the scientists and also local communities mostly came out far better.
The severity of My Johnson's illness was downplayed. BBC news last night said the same.
//Only a small circle in No10 and Buckingham Palace, including Ms MacNamara, the Cabinet Secretary, principal private secretary Martin Reynolds, the Queen and her PPS, and Mr Johnson’s communications chief Lee Cain knew the seriousness of Johnson’s condition before he was admitted to hospital on Sunday 5 April.//
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Of course the virus was new. Many which cause pandemics often are. But Covid 19 is the fifth novel respiratory virus which had caused a pandemic to be reliably documented in the last 100 years. There was no reason to believe it would behave substantially any differently to those in the past. And the question that must be asked is this: if lockdowns were not even considered as a way to deal with those in the past (and I know they were not as I have endured two of those five and the problems were barely mentioned in Parliament), why were they implemented this time?
There seems too much of a glib attitude towards these measures. They were imposed, relaxed and reimposed at will as if they didn't really matter. They did matter - very much so as evidence is now confirming - and I believe there is no prsopect whatosever of them being introduced in the future to combat a pandemic. The country cannot afford it and even if it could, there is no justification for it.
This current enquiry will benefit nobody bar M'Learned Friends who will make a very comfortable sum from it as it drags on and on. But one thing is becoming ever more abundantly clear than it already was: many senior politicians and their advisors had no intention whatsoever of complying with the regulations that they had introduced. They clearly thought that either they were unnecessary or that they would have little effect (or both). This is scarcely surprising when you consider that they had managed to fool much of the population into believing that an infectious respiratory virus could be prevented from spreading by wearing a knotted handkerchief round your face.
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