I have no interest in ‘chatting’ to dimwits or George Hook wannabes.
Now run off to your burrow.
You’re consistent at least
I know quite a few people who got the virus. For one friend, a frontline medical worker in her mid fifties, the process was three or four days of feeling tired and back to work in less than three weeks. No great problem.
Another friend, very fit 47yo woman, yoga, hillwalking, is still in a bad way, five months later, with the so called ‘tail’ version of the virus.
Caution certainly is prudent.
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Decent post, but suffers from the all too common opinion that there are right and wrong answers to the difficult ethical questions Covid raises. It’s this black and white thinking that leads people to call others murderers online for holding a different opinion (something they likely wouldn’t do face to face either).
The simplest ethical test is the overloaded ICU ward, Italy in March for example. There is a genuine ethical dilemma, do you focus on those who have the best potential therapeutic outcome, or do you focus on those that are most at risk. You cannot do both. The former is for the greater good as you save more lives and those that survive have better quality of life outcomes, the latter is a moral choice based on all lives having equal value.
This is a not a trivial thought experiment. Unless you have actually personally faced those decisions or at least talked at length to someone who had to make those kinds of decisions, you don’t actually know what the ethical question entails, you imagine you know.
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Very hard to argue with any of this. Most people are going about their lives on the bank holiday weekend completely as normal. I think most people think the pubs should be open though.
Are we going to stay locked up, masked up and sober forever?
Where are you getting your three weeks from?
A herd immunity approach with no actual practical plan to protect the most vulnerable is unconscionable. Having no actual practical plan to protect the most vulnerable is also unconscionable. Most western countries are in the latter category, Italy, France, Spain, the UK, Ireland. The only countries that stand out are Germany and the Scandinavian countries bar Sweden. Germany the most interesting as they actually have a fairly high number of cases, but 20% of the death rate of their neighbors. Many factors involved, but they clearly protected the most vulnerable.
The impact of lockdowns isn’t just economic, it’s also life and death. People not getting the treatment they need, not getting diagnosed, lives spiraling into depression and suicide, domestic violence, potential societal breakdown (have you looked at the murder rate in US cities lately?), etc. These ethical questions are just as significant as attempts to save lives by suppressing this virus.
It is not as simple as that.
We are seeing the impact of pubs right now not being open. It’s meaning less activity in the city centre. That has an impact on other businesses.
We have to consider every closing properly now. The argument that pubs can’t control the virus isn’t compelling. There is a risk to them and there will likely be outbreaks from them, but there is likely outbreaks from lots of places. Pubs applying the rules of contact tracing and social distancing can open like any pub that serves food. People shrugging their shoulders about house parties being inevitable and we can only control what we can control are kidding themselves. It’s like having a Diet Coke with fast food. You can’t avoid the inevitable on reopening society broadly, if you are going to keep pubs closed then you are going to encourage house parties. What are we trying to achieve?
In terms of the overall lockdown arguments, the issue is that people don’t see the coming tsunami
Most insolvency practitioners in Ireland are expecting the flood to begin in the new year.
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All generally fair points.
There are many different and as yet imperfectly understood factors with this virus, which is why I find people attempting to be so definitive about it rather strange. The stark difference between Portugal and Spain in virus stakes appears to be vaccine linked. Those areas of opacity remaining, prudence certainly remains the most sensible route – the most truly conservative route, in a good sense.
I did say there would have to be different priorities. Those priorities would have to include people suffering from lack of vital medical access due to pandemic. This factor, which you quite rightly raise, is all the more reason to avoid any chance of a state’s medical services being overtaxed. Which is where I came in.
We’re primed to focus on the present over the future and what we can easily imagine over what is more indirect. The images from Italy spooked Europe. In my estimation the lockdown was the correct course of action at the time to buy time, flatten the curve, put in place testing and other tracking processes and protocols and setting up systems for social distancing, hygiene etc.
That has been done now and the danger is our attention bias is still focused only on Covid 19 and we ignore the as yet unseen economic, societal, educational and other health issues that will arise as a consequence. It’s not to argue to throw anybody to the wolves but we need to take longer and wider point of view - locking down won’t eradicate the virus seems clear. All we can do is limit and control it while we wait for a vaccine that does seem hopeful.
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How do the Chinese have basically no deaths and no new cases? How did they end up with a relatively modest death toll despite being the epicenter of the outbreak?
Censorship.
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Cos they’re shipping lads in from North Korea to replace the 800000 that have died. They have to learn the language and memorise all the details and relationships of the person they replaced lives. Saw it on YouTube.
Use a comma like a good lad. I’m getting old and my eyes aren’t what they were
8000000 commies
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COMMA, C O M M A, you senile fuck
Ah. I have you know. Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon…
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Is that 80 billion or 800 billion?
8 billion. Sure there’s only 80 billion in all of China. They cant all have got it. Shure most of them are off spying on the rest of the world.