Iâm sorry but thatâs just not what the law is trying to do. The law isnât worried about young people at all because the risks for young people are very low. Only one person under 25 has ever died from Covid19 in Ireland. Theyâre leaving the schools open because they know that the risk to young people is so low. Young people who arenât worried about Covid19 arenât eijits, in fact theyâre the most sensible members of society.
This is closer to the truth. The law is to protect the elderly at the expense of the young.
Iâm in advance of 30, I still want to live the life that I want to live. I donât want to spend the next 3 or 4 years locked inside alone. The great majority of other 30-somethings that I know feel the same. I think weâre all sensible to be like that.
The risks of Covid19 on a person in their 30s have to be balanced against the health risks of lockdown, which we know include an increased risk of stroke, amongst other things.
Why can you not just accept that youâre sacrificing the long-term health of young people for the health of those currently elderly? There might be moral arguments for that approach but your extreme insecurity with the point is frustrating.
Any valorization of the âSwedishâ model has to factor in an original death rate five to ten times higher than its nearest neighbours. That point is all I am saying.
As you said yourself, there is a long way to go before we know what was â or is â correct/best practice. That scenario being the case, I prefer caution, while by no means being a lockdown ultra. I just accept the reality that at a certain rate of infection, legal lockdown or not, normal society and commerce becomes nigh impossible. Death rate/ICU rate is beside that point.
Simple stuff, really. I do not know enough to say any more. And I do not believe too many do.
The public has unbounded confidence, which no amount of
experience will dent, in the benign power of the state to protect them against an ever wider range of risks. In Britain, the lockdown was followed by a brief period in which the governmentâs approval ratings were sky-high.
This is how freedom dies. When societies lose their liberty, it is not usually because some despot has crushed it under his boot. It is because people voluntarily surrendered their liberty out of fear of some external threat. Historically, fear has always been the most potent instrument of the authoritarian state. This is what we are witnessing today. But the fault is not just in our government. It is in ourselves.
Fear provokes strident demands for abrasive action, much of which is unhelpful or damaging. It promotes intolerant conformism. It encourages abuse directed against anyone who steps out of line, including many responsible opponents of this governmentâs measures and some notable scientists who have questioned their empirical basis. These are the authentic ingredients of a totalitarian society.
So, I regret to say, is the propaganda by which the government has to some extent been able to create its own public opinion. Fear was deliberately stoked up by the government: the language of impending doom; the daily press conferences; the alarmist projections of the mathematical modellers; the manipulative use of selected statistics; the presentation of exceptional tragedies as if they were the normal effects of Covid-19; above all the attempt to suggest that that Covid-19 was an indiscriminate killer, when the truth was that it killed identifiable groups, notably those with serious underlying conditions and the old, who could and arguably should have been sheltered without coercing the entire population. These exaggerations followed naturally from the logic of the measures themselves. They were necessary in order to justify the extreme steps which the government had taken, and to promote compliance.
As a strategy, this was completely successful. So successful was it that when the government woke up to the damage it was doing, especially to the economy and the education of children, it found it difficult to reverse course. The public naturally asked themselves what had changed.