SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
The ridiculous thing is people choosing not to send their chidren back to school because they're 'in fear of the virus' but then seeing families of 5 or 6, not adhering to social distancing or having control of their children when they're going to shopping centres etc. and treating it as if it's the summer holidays.
Oh there's been plenty of bigger sacrifices of course but it isn't relevant.
You can't demand a year long Lockdown because WW2 was worse. You need to deal with this crisis on its merits. There is not a country on the planet who are doing a year long lockdown. A Lockdown can only exist as long as the public want it to and that support has understandably been fraying for many weeks now.
Why should we take part in a bizarre race to the bottom because this crisis hasn't been the worst in living memory?
Depends what you mean. I'm actually looking forward to the 4th July because I can visit my brother and sister and friends. I can easily live with that style of lockdown for as long as it takes. Even take pubs back out of the equation and it's hardly abject misery. Much more of the previous 2 months and I'm fairly sure I'd have gone completely mad.
But it's a lot more complex than that when we are going to have literally millions of people without a source of income or self sufficiency. A frankly unprecedented mental health crisis. Backlogs of things like cancer screening etc. The overall picture is pretty rubbish for a lot of people.
The staggering thing I've found with this lockdown is how unwilling so many people in this country are to understand that other people's circumstances and mental state are not necessarily the same as their own. It's hit me that the reason we have a government of twats is because we have literally half a country of them. Which isn't going to be great going forwards. I'd give it three months before the mantra is "why are my wages paying for someone else to claim universal credit as if it's an alternative to furlough" or some shite like that.
I didn't suggest anything.
I was responding to someone downplaying the severity of the UK Lockdown by pointing out that a generation of kids are not getting a proper education.
So when would you open schools? Would you open you schools this side of a vaccine?
I'm thinking Texas could be a turning point. A republican governor getting attacked by people in his own party for not opening up quickly enough, even with rising cases, might demonstrate that no matter what you do you'll never satisfy them. Might be more to gain from showing that you take the health of your citizens seriously.
I don't think the economic figures are really going in their favour either. Different data tell different stories but I think there are some clear signs that if states are re-opening while the virus threat is still clear, a lot of people are still holding back on spending. Might just be throwing some restaurants and similar to the wolves.
It's hard to tell what most folks in those states actually want from their governors though. The town hall in Florida naturally attracted a bunch of loons but it is easy to believe that they are reflecting a general feeling in the state, even if they're particularly extreme versions of it.
What's your take? Do you think the politicians in the places struggling now are giving most people what they want?
It's relevant in so far as that was my main point. It's literally the only point you quoted. Society has the capacity to make much larger sacrifices than what you're talking about now. The idea that it's completely unthinkable that people would have to put up with such inhumane treatment is at the very least very dismissive of what people have sacrificed in the past, in service of the wider population. I would say it's much worse than that.
I wasn't demanding lockdown for a year, nor was I saying that the UK lockdown wasn't a sacrifice already. That kind of sacrifice needs to be weighed up against the benefits that come out at the end of it. In the same way they would have to in going to war, for example. You'll find many cases where people will think that the sacrifices made weren't justified, because it involves a lot of complicated questions about the value of a human life in different contexts. You're incredibly cavalier on that. You're very conscious of the sacrifice you, and your generation, are making right now, but you aren't even trying to contextualise that against what the greater sacrifices other people your age have made in the past, or the sacrifices of people older than you are having to make now because of the virus.
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Nice.
So would you enforce social distancing then?
The Police force cannot force people to stay 2 meters apart all the time. It does not have the numbers to do so.
There have been mass gatherings all across the country and the Police have been unable to disperse them, there is currently a mass gathering in Liverpool and as of yet the Police have not dispersed it.
You have to accept that a 'Lockdown' depends completely on public compliance and that compliance has been slipping and slipping.
FYI: I was replying to @Pexbo who just quoted me twice but didn't add any text of his own. For whatever reason...
Something a lot of people seem to miss is that a second (and maybe even third?) hard lockdown might end up being completely unavoidable. If everything goes really badly south, ICUs fill up, oxygen and essential meds supplies run low, people start dying without getting the necessary medical care etc etc etc then there WILL be a hard lockdown. And by hard lockdown, I mean Spanish/Italian style. Paperwork to leave your home. So, in a way, us arguing the toss about what we’d like to happen is irrelevant.
Obviously, we all hope that can be avoided. My personal opinion is that the only way to avoid this is if the general public behave a hell of a lot more responsibly then we’ve seen in recent weeks. We could be lucky and have a steady stream of cases at about the current rate for the next year or two. That’s the best case scenario. But it is quite hard to imagine this happening if the restrictions continue to ease and people get more and more relaxed about the virus. I’ve a horrible feeling that the second lockdown will be needed to teach everyone a lesson about personal responsibility.
Obviously, we all hope that can be avoided. My personal opinion is that the only way to avoid this is if the general public behave a hell of a lot more responsibly then we’ve seen in recent weeks. We could be lucky and have a steady stream of cases at about the current rate for the next year or two. That’s the best case scenario. But it is quite hard to imagine this happening if the restrictions continue to ease and people get more and more relaxed about the virus. I’ve a horrible feeling that the second lockdown will be needed to teach everyone a lesson about personal responsibility.
Not until it is far far more suppressed than it is now.
Ballpark when daily infections are under 100, deaths have virtually stopped and proper testing and tracing is enacted. The UK needs what it should have had much earlier in the year. A proper lock-down, stop all international flights, enforced 14 day quarantine on anyone returning from overseas would be needed.
Heading that way in the US and they haven't even got over the first wave in most places.
Okay,
But if you do a cost-benefit analysis you can see quite clearly how terrible it is for a society to shut down the education system.
There is a balance here.
I wasn’t inferring you had suggested something, just wondering what you’d suggest?
I can see my kids are missing out but the risks of entering them back into school at this point in time are, in our view, huge.
I’m 45, not in bad nick really, but I do have, and always have had, a weak chest and a history of asthma. Any cold I get usually ends up on my chest and I have already had pneumonia. It wasn’t nice and I don’t want to get the fecker again in a hurry.
On top of that, I have literally watched two people gasp their last breaths with double pneumonia’s. I tell you now it is a ghastly way to go. I do not want that end.
In my mind, I see no guarantees that I wouldn’t be a victim of this virus. I may not be of course, but I may. That ‘may’ means I would literally do almost anything to avoid catching this thing or seeing my Mrs catch it or any of our friends or relatives. I want to keep it away from my family.
I don’t see lockdown as some massive sacrifice, some authoritarian punishment or something that has to be endured or fought against. It’s just something we have to do at this point in time.
Yes, but because they’ve been so poorly led and informed it is not what they need. If they had never been allowed to develop a religious aversion to masks and had social distancing drilled into them, it is possible we could’ve opened up the economy to some success as they have in some other places.
Instead our collective arrogance will lead to many more difficulties and actually be counter-productive for the economy.
First of all I have no opinion on the decisions you take regarding your own family. That's up to you and you should be free to exercise you own judgement.
I think that Schools should be open in September, offering a full curriculum so that parents who wish to send their kids to school are free to do so.
We could have sent ours back last week but we’ve chose not to at this point.
We are aiming for September, I agree with you in that sense but what I don’t agree with is an arbitrary date for opening in September come what may.
What if the ROI is still high? What if with all the mass gatherings of the last week cause a second wave? Should schools still be open in September?
Maybe, just maybe we should be looking at other ways of schooling. Actually preparing for the schools not to be open would probably be a good thing.
Like I said, I can see the effect this is having and what kids are missing out on but the damage isn’t irreparable in my view and kids should not be sent back regardless of ROI.
Personally, I think education is so important and the risk to children is so low that it's worth sticking our neck out on this one and making a commitment to open schools in September, unless we are at Level 5.
However, I also believe it should be up to individual families and if you decide it's not safe to send your kids to school then you shouldn't have to and there should be a provision in place to support you from home.
Australia and NZ did a good job - handing out big fines like confetti - you can't stop shit behaviour but you can try. Anti-vax and white supremacists help meeting well in some main cities. Police dispersed them and arrested the organisers.
Not that easy once you start unlocking of course. Australia had big BLM rallies but they were pretty good with distancing and masks. Plus tha virus is close to elimination in all but Victoria. And that is seemingly largely due to a lack of compliance with family meeting size limits.
I think education is important. As a former and still qualified/certified high school teacher. But a year of remote learning won't have much effect. Schooling is getting increasingly poor as we increasingly value rote learning and standardised testing. The biggest losses for most students, bar those doing A levels, will be social.
Don't get me wrong. I know helping schools teach remotely is tough on parents and also is more disadvantageous for those in lower socio-economic groupings. I just think letting people die needlessly for economic or educational reasons can't be justified.
I find it disgraceful how Liverpool fans gather at anfield without masks during a pandemic.
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Definitely possible. It's not unreasonable to think that the most likely outcome is somewhere in between the two, and along the lines of what was being talked about in early March. Once things are at manageable levels, however they're defined, then effective contact tracing will allow for spikes to be dealt with at a local level, so things can veer off temporarily from that steady stream but be brought back under control. Germany are the recent example and Korea have been the example a few weeks earlier, but in those early stages China was essentially the only model they had. The differences between China and elsewhere have been pointed out but at the simplest level they have gone on to show that the lockdown can be relaxed and local outbreaks can be contained very successfully without nationwide disruption*.
There's plenty of reasons to doubt some countries' capabilities in executing that strategy at this point, but it is a plausible goal to aim for. It will still have very severe consequences across the spectrum of health, social and economic impacts - it's not the complete eradication of negative health consequences that @Wibble demands, nor the celebration of economic freedom that @JMack1234 thinks is owed to us - but it isn't quite the catastrophe of another nationwide lockdown. Not quite the best case scenario but quite a bit better than the worst, I think.
*With the notable caveat that they haven't had to deal with the problem of this layered on top of the normal flu season, where things are naturally a bit more uncertain
Yeah I'd been thinking the same. At the end of the day I think the pandemic has been a reminder of how quickly people can adapt to a new reality, even if it is begrudgingly. It may take a tragic event to change the course of things but I wouldn't resign myself to the idea that this rejection of masks and similar can't be undone. But America is a special place...
With the deaths of mainly old people on one side of the scale. And of course we always ignore the economic costs to the economy of people dying even if that is less for old people.
But do you accept that we will need to accept some risk from now to a vaccine. Will you also accept that education isn't just about passing exams and learning your times tables? It's about learning to how work within a team, learning how to interact with authority, learning how to understand people who come from different backgrounds to you etc etc
No offence, but you seem to think that anybody who advocates a more pragmatic approach to this pandemic is cavalier about the lives of older people. This isn't the case.
There are many risks that need to balanced. I'm not advocating a return to the world we were in at the start of the year, but we need to find a way to keep the economy going and educate our children during this pandemic.
I know. I said in my posts that the social impact was greater than the rote learning. But it is a small price in comparison to the alternative. For a country that likes to imagine they embody the Churchillian spirit of WW2 it is odd that we can't steel ourselves to not go out much for a few months. It's not nothing but WW2 it aint.
Yes. 100%. It is valuing inconvenience and an economic hit over people's lives.
Sadly the utter feck up the government have made puts the UK in a terrible situation. That they didn't totally lock down hard and early has costs 10's of thousands of lives. Like it or not easing restrictions when we need a full proper lock down to get things under control now is deciding to kill many more. Of course it isn't going to happen. Modern Britain isn't capable of such bold but necessary decisions it would seem.
Right so,
1) I agree that this isn't WW2 but I don't agree WW2 should be a bench mark for what is acceptable. No country is going to lockdown from until a vaccine,. I've always felt that WW2 is a very unhelpful red herring when discussing COVID. The vast majority of people in the UK were born after WW2 so it's inevitable we don't have the same attitude.
2) I think characterisation that those of us who want a more pragmatic approach are cavalier about the lives of the elderly is unfair, untrue and drags debate about this topic into the gutter.
3) I don't hold any candle for the UK government. Personally, I think they had one shot at getting a Lockdown right and made a total mess of it and now they've no choice but to follow the public out of Lockdown. The reality of the ground is that the people in the UK have had enough of Lockdown and are starting to ignore the guidance. I'm not defending that, but you need to deal with the world as it is.
I wasn't proposing anything, just pointing out the irony of a country that just leaving the EU largely based on this sort of ludicrous rhetoric being so undisciplined and whatever the opposite of stoic is.
And NZ and Australia are likely to lock down to some degree and almost totally from outside despite virtually eradicating the virus until at least 2021 and/or until there is a vaccine.
It is a simple statement of fact. Just like Sweden have taken the decision to trade old people's life for economic gain.
If the UK had a real leader like say NZ they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place and have/had widespread support for a full lockdown. But we have Boris.
Even Australia who have a cardboard cutout for a PM have been led better and have been largely compliant with a lockdown.
went for work yesterday, outside campus the only people wearing masks were delivery drivers.
Thats not a fact. Thats what you think.
Again, the people who runs the way Sweden handle this are not politicians.
You might argue that Sweden has made the decision to trade old peoples life for the for the kids future health and education(i would not btw), but not for economic gain.
So why did they decide not to properly protect the population and old people specifically? Please don't say herd immunity.
They did not decide that. They decided to trust the public and specially the people working in elderlyhomes, and it went wrong.
I am not sayin i agree or not with the route they went for, just so you know.
I am simply saying they did not decide to sacrifice the elders for economic gain, as you claimed as a fact. The FHM are visibly upset whenever confronted with the deathrates at carehomes, and they changed their aproach so that now the spread in those places and in the older population in general is more under control.
Really? Do they still have a job?
So if they didn't make a choice that leave epic scale incompetence, which is almost worse. And given that a change of direction hasn't occurred when it is so obviously a failure I'm not sure I believe that it wasn't a choice.
Yes they do.
They made the choice, and i dont know if it was right or wrong yet. Probably wrong when you look at the number of deaths.
That choice may have came from incompetence, ignorance or miscalculation, but not from. "putting the ecnomics over the life of the elders" as you claim as a fact. That is all i am arguing.
But those children have to go home ...
Although if there weren't economic implications I suspect everyone would have locked down tighter than [inset "tight as" similie].
This is my instinct
They may not have thought that specifically, but it is still what they decided to do.
Amazing how many people fail to make that simple connection. Also the fact that they most often have to be dropped off at school, and have to be taught by adults.
Well you can think that, absolutly.
What they say is that they did not lock down harder
thinking about the public health, not the economy itself.Anyway, im just tired of seeing people say that Sweden are run by some monsters who went for the money on behalf of its elderly population when that is not the case.
They. might be incompetent and horrible at their job(i dont know), but its at least not a fact that they chosed money over people.
It might be a consequense of the strategy failing, but not the motivation of the strategy itself. Not even a consequense of the strategy if it would have been successful.
They were hoping, and planing for, to keep the virus away from the carehomes. It just did not work.
Some possible great news from Norway.
A man who was critically ill on day 31, was given blood plasma with antibodies, with immediate effect. The next day he tested negative on the virus and his fever was gone.
(Article in norwegian)
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks...syk-pasient-bedre-etter-behandling-med-plasma
A man who was critically ill on day 31, was given blood plasma with antibodies, with immediate effect. The next day he tested negative on the virus and his fever was gone.
(Article in norwegian)
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks...syk-pasient-bedre-etter-behandling-med-plasma