Covid-19 and the madness of crowds

I find this dichotomic approach of either the people OR the economy survive baffling.

OK, so if you decide to save a lot of people and have to rebuild for years or decades, that is one clear choice. But you will have the manpower to accomplish this.

But if you decide to save the economy that means that once this is over there will be hardly anyone left to support those parts of the economy that have survived, let alone rebuild. With this approach you have gained NOTHING, in fact you are considerably worse off.

Hardly anyone left? At the very worse, according to official figures, the mortality rate is some 3%, and these are universally derided. However, that does still leave some 97% to get on with it.

In reality, most UK scientists accept that the mortality rate is lower than 1%. Therefore, 99% of us get to live on. More than enough to be going on with, I would have thought.

This is precisely the sort of hysterical reporting that I rail against.

Come on now. I didn’t say it was “acceptable”. I most certainly have not accused any section of society of leeching off of me and others. My father is still alive, and doing well at 79 years old. I love him to pieces. I also socialise with many older people in my village, and my brother in law is also a vulnerable person, as he has emphysema.

I, unlike you, have not resorted to the hysterical in this debate.

What the good professor said, and I agree with him, was that those who are vulnerable should be the ones who are effectively quarantined, not the entire population. We would then do all that we could as a functioning society to ensure their health, wellbeing, and acquire immunity so that the virus had nowhere left to go.

To be very clear, I am NOT stating that vulnerable people should be left to die. I am making an argument for proportionate and sensible responses.

Please don’t be deliberately obtuse. It reflects on you negatively, not me.

It is, indeed, very complicated. I agree with you wholeheartedly, which is why measured responses are better, IMO.

I agree with you about herd immunity working better with a vaccine. That strikes me as being self evident.

I also absolutely agree with you about healthcare systems. Despite the constant, rightly, praise of our health service staff, the fact is that as a service, it is in a mess, as I found to my personal cost when I was admitted in an emergency last year. This is a political issue, and one which should feature strongly in the inevitable post-mortem.

No, it is not entirely the elderly who are hospitalised. Nobody has said that it is. But it is absolutely clear that they are the most vulnerable, and, mainly, not exclusively, the younger population have little to fear.

I think, then, that I ought to make it absolutely clear that I am not a member any longer of any political party, or movement. I am wholly independent. I dislike demagogues intensely.

My criticism of the media has been wholly based upon the relentless coverage, and the manner in which it has been undertaken, and its influence in poor decision making. That is a comment on the politicians as much as the media.

I have no political leader, and actually regard most of them with an equal level of disdain. Although it might not mean much to an American, I have been a Private Eye reader in the UK for well over 30 years now, and my attitude is very similar to that esteemed organ’s. 

I know 

The problem with the logic of only isolating the elderly is nothing stops young people from becoming 'carriers'.  So the only way to isolate the elderly completely would be to cut off their contact from the rest for anything and everything, including essential services.  Don't see how that would be feasible.  

I agree with the prof on the importance of extensive testing but both the US and the UK missed the bus on that.  It's too late to get down to controlling the disease only through testing once you have allowed community transmission of the virus.  This is what India did too and this is why we have a lockdown too.  The ideal thing would be to do what Korea, Taiwan or Germany did but that would have required early action on the virus instead of wasting time denying that it would be consequential.  I read that in Germany they are using thermal screening at workplaces and at restaurants etc they measure the temperature to decide if a person might be a covid risk.  Implementing these precautions extensively is what it takes to live with the virus.  W.r.t UK I can only go by the reports which do not indicate anything of this sort was done.  I have relatives and friends in the US who too said this wasn't done.  That is when you have to resort to brutal solutions like a lockdown.  Yes, I agree a lockdown should not have been necessary.  But a full commitment to science and rolling it out early was.  This is where the UK and its two large former colonies have failed.  The bill for peddling pseudo science and whipping up rage among the 'aggrieved majority' as a convenient short term approach to winning elections has come due. At least India has the excuse of overpopulation, poverty and stretched resources.  What is Donnie's excuse for twiddling thumbs for two months and trying to waste time calling it a liberal hoax?