NZ, UK, US, Sweden, Poland & Cheese eating surrender Monkeys approaches to Covid-19

Current Affairs
5834

Except the “cautious” approach didn’t work did it, by your own admission western style lockdowns didn’t work, before any consideration of the broad damage they have caused. How well did the cautious approach work for the most vulnerable in Ireland, those in nursing homes and hospitals? The correct approach would have been to put aggressive measures in place to protect the vulnerable, make nursing homes and hospitals secure infection free zones where most of the high risk population were located. That would have at least halved the deaths in Ireland and elsewhere.

The US was vaccinating 1 million a day before Joe took office and that has now ramped to 2.5 million a day. Has to be said a good job overall bringing vaccines to market in record time and rolling them out.

Nobody suggested letting the virus rip through populations with no measures to protect the vulnerable. You made that up and are still committed to that lie a year later.

5835

The cautious approach didn’t work perfectly everywhere but was clearly the right approach if done correctly. This “protecting the vulnerable” mantra is just a throwaway comment by the OIUTF crew without any explanation of how it could possibly be achieved. They couldn’t keep it out during lockdown, what chance had they of doing it if society was operating as normal. Bonkers idea to think it’d be achievable.

Many appear to place more importance on the dollar but fortunatley, apart from the likes of Brazil, the US, and UK, most countries didn’t prioritise the dollar. There will be economic consequences but the economy will recover in time. The quick arrival of a vaccine has vindicated the cautious approach.

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5836

Why are vaccinated people still being restricted by lockdown?

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5837

Because if they aren’t young people will riot

5838

Let me explain to you what “protecting the vulnerable” means with a few examples. My next door neighbor runs the infectious disease department of one of the largest hospitals in SF and a close family friend runs the ICU ward of another local hospital. Neither hospital has had one case of Covid transmission within it’s walls. They have had hundreds of Covid patients admitted and treated, but not one case of transmission to other patients or staff. There are other local hospitals that have had outbreaks, but nothing on the scale of say Ireland where hospitals were riddled, which is no surprise given infectious disease control is a foreign concept in Irish hospitals. In my opinion at least half the deaths could have been avoided if hospitals and nursing homes were properly run, that should have been the #1 priority of governments, rather than fucking around with 5km limits.

My daughter worked in a nursing home for the summer and they didn’t have one Covid death, and very few cases among staff or patients. They had strict adherence to good infectious disease control practices and strict control on anyone entering. There are two nursing homes within 5 miles of her place, that had 100 and 80 deaths respectively. So, yes the vulnerable can be protected.

The rest of your post is gibberish. There is no statistical difference between how the UK has done in terms of Covid deaths compared to most other European countries, in terms of death rate Belgium and Czech Rep are a bit higher, Spain, Italy and France etc. a bit lower. The epidemic has followed the same trajectory in every western country, the only exceptions are Norway and Finland who closed their borders early and kept them closed. In the same fashion there is statistically no difference between most US states, New York, New Jersey and other eastern seaboard states the worst, all of whom had strict and long “lockdowns”. California had the longest and strictest lockdown and has done no better than states that have had their economies open since last May.

The reality is “stay at home” type measures did nothing, the evidence of that is states in the US and countries elsewhere that abandoned it last summer, or never had it to begin with, did no worse than countries that kept it in place. In fact in hindsight, states and countries with prolonged “stay at home” orders did much worse in the second wave since December.

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5839

Using anecdotal evidence from a country that has the highest death rate is atypical you, absolutely oblivious to the contradiction in your posts. There is a care-home near me that kept it out for most of last year but it got in at Christmas, resulting in 16 deaths. To have kept it out for so long meant they were doig something right but it got in eventually.

You say, and I quote “There is no statistical difference between how the UK has done in terms of Covid deaths compared to most other European countries”, again comparing an island nation with the worst performing countries in mainland Europe but refuse to compare Sweden with Finland, Norway or Denmark. You just cherry pick stats to suit whatever lies you are telling. Your goose was cooked on this matter last year but you still persist. You’re the one talking gibberish.

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5840

What about the comparison between Florida and Cali @mikehunt

5841

The country (excluding small places like Gibraltar and San Marino) with highest death rate in the world is the Czech Rep, followed by Belgium, UK, Hungary, Italy and Portugal, before the US. Where did they all go wrong? Far right governments? Putting economy over people? Didn’t lock down hard enough or long enough?

5842

Doesn’t fit his narrative.

The reality is western countries had a choice last Jan - March to address a highly infectious virus that all evidence pointed to sweeping across the planet. They could take the approach of Taiwan, Singapore and Australia/NZ, close their borders and have enforced quarantine of anyone allowed in. Literally every western country decided not to do that bar Finland and Norway, and instead went for the half assed lockdown approach. Which has essentially had the same result everywhere, regardless of whether lockdowns were kept in place until now, on and off lockdowns, or lockdowns abandoned in early Summer last year. But they work according to the lockdown fetishists.

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5843

Can’t give me an answer @mikehunt?

5844

You surely can’t deny that the number of fatalities across Europe would be far far higher if they hadn’t introduced restrictions. You keep labelling them lockdowns while admitting they aren’t actually lockdowns, contradicting yourself again.

5845

In Ireland?

5846

We’re only halfway through this lockdown.

The logic seems to be we need to be locked down to avoid being locked down.

:face_with_monocle:

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5847

Anywhere

5848

Look mate, you are a simpleton if you can’t comprehend what I’m saying, so clearly I’m wasting my time here. When I use the term lockdown, I mean ordering people to stay at home and the knock on effect of closing businesses bar those that are deemed “essential”. That is the commonly understood definition of lockdown in these conversations. It obviously doesn’t impact you so perhaps that’s why you can’t comprehend it.

I am not opposed to restrictions, like border controls, cancelling events and large gatherings, educating the public on social distancing, wearing masks indoors in shops and public transport, sensible measures that work to reduce spread. These measures don’t do much long term damage, relative to shutting down businesses, denying children an education, not allowing people to go to parks, beaches, etc.

You continue to ignore the evidence against lockdowns, which is that countries (and states in the US) that either never had a lockdown or abandoned lockdowns in early summer last year have had the same outcome as those that kept them in place.

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5849

You could have left that post with your first six words.

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5850

Here we go again

5851

DANIEL FINKELSTEIN
Were we too ready to surrender our freedom?
The past year’s experiments in curtailing civil liberties have set a worrying precedent for handling of the next crisis
Daniel Finkelstein
Tuesday March 16 2021, 5.00pm GMT, The Times

Well, this has been fun. Shall we do it again?

Next week marks the first anniversary of a vast social experiment. For almost a year now we have been under virtual house arrest, a policy that has, extraordinarily, commanded broad assent and high levels of compliance. It’s the first time we have done anything remotely like it. But I wonder whether it will be the last.

A few days ago, the former Supreme Court justice Lord (Jonathan) Sumption gave an interview to the website Unherd setting out his latest view on Covid. I’ve found his previous remarks on the topic wayward but he’s always worth listening to. And so it proved. Sumption made three arguments, two of which I found flatly wrong.

The first was that we have got the whole Covid thing out of proportion. I can’t agree with that. In the absence of preventive measures, it is clear that hundreds of thousands more people would have died. There are, of course, trade-offs but the impact of Covid is so severe I’m not surprised that almost everywhere, national governments have made a similar choice.

His second point is particularly relevant. Sumption anticipated that people would begin to break the law: “Some laws invite breach and this is one of them”. People would tire of the emergency restrictions on freedom of movement and stop complying. He may have seen Saturday’s vigil for Sarah Everard as vindicating this view. And certainly some people’s reaction to this event was a little odd. Should I be able to invite all my family to my wedding? No. Should I be able to go to my friend’s funeral? No. Should I be able to attend a large demonstration? Yes!

So the vigil could be represented as a fraying of the consensus about social distancing, with a whole new demographic joining the sceptics.

Yet this would be a misreading. The organisers of the vigil decided not to go ahead when a court ruled that it would be in breach of coronavirus regulations. And those who proceeded anyway, and then resisted the police request to disperse, were a small number. They also did not enjoy majority public support, according to opinion polls.

All of which brings me to Sumption’s third point, on which he is strongly and importantly right. Having locked down the country for the best part of a year and suspended basic civil liberties once, we are far more likely to do it again. We have crossed a line and it will stay crossed.

To read the scientific advice or revisit the debate about Covid a year ago is to appreciate that much of it was based on an assumption that proved to be incorrect. We weren’t like China, the thinking went. The state couldn’t just order people to stay at home.

In an interview with The Times before Christmas, the epidemiologist Professor Neil Ferguson described the dawning realisation that this wasn’t right. The government’s scientific advisers had been reviewing China’s approach last March. “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

We could “get away with it” is a revealing way to put it. The pandemic has taught government that in order to feel safe, we are willing to put up with much greater sacrifices of our liberty than it had previously imagined. This lesson will not be forgotten.

At every stage of the pandemic, there has been a tendency to underestimate the public craving for safety, and support for tough measures to protect it.

Conservatives have been bewildered to find themselves making passionate speeches about liberty that have no resonance. Liberals were surprised, after the weekend, by public support for the Metropolitan Police commissioner Dame Cressida Dick over her force’s handling of the vigil. It took quite a while for the prime minister to realise that voters preferred certainty and security to early but precarious liberation.

We will start the next health emergency in a very different place from last March. The assumption next time will be that severe measures can readily be countenanced because public compliance can be relied on.

Which is why it matters that we haven’t attempted to measure the trade-offs between saving lives and saving our way of life. The case for Covid restrictions seems so strong that few people have thought it worth pressing for a proper assessment of everything that we’ve sacrificed. Especially since it is a complicated calculation: if we had let the virus rip, that too would have affected education, the economy and social life. The calculation is also an awkward one: it involves trying to determine how valuable a life is, getting us into all sorts of trouble comparing, for instance, the death of a 90-year-old with the value of someone being able to complete their GCSEs.

While we may not think such calculations are worth bothering with given the scale of this pandemic, we will wish we’d made them when the next crisis comes, involving a slightly less infectious disease, perhaps, with a slightly lower but still marked fatality rate.

A bad flu season might take the lives of 20,000 people. What if it threatened, say, 10,000 more than that? If that happens, the authorities may not react as they have done in the past. Now they know we might be willing to isolate, or wear masks, or cancel mass events or even lock down again. We need to discuss how many deaths we are willing to tolerate before we do those things.

Because it will come up. Not just with infectious diseases, either. A more aggressive approach to obesity — bans and taxes on certain types of food — might commend itself to public health practitioners now they know we are prepared to put safety above liberty. And it may apply to preventive measures against terrorism, for instance, or the threat of a dirty bomb.

Those of us who value liberty more highly and who have a higher appetite for public risk, a group in which I include myself, need to appreciate the precedent that has been set.

Ensuring that the powers the government has granted itself are abolished rather than kept for a future occasion is going to be hard political work. As is ensuring that we set the bar very high for renewing such powers in the future.

And we can start by insisting that any public inquiry into the pandemic isn’t just an inquiry into the advice proffered by Dominic Cummings’s optician and the hospital gloves and masks we were sold by a bloke in a pub. It also has to include a full analysis of the choice we made and the circumstances in which we would consider making it again.

Has this been fun? Not really. Shall we do it again? Quite possibly.

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5852

We’ve taken a horrendous step here with these lockdowns.

5853

That’s a very good article. It still amazes me the support in opinion polls for current restrictions. When almost everyone I meet feels they are over the top and is willing to break them in some way. Can anyone explain this??