[jfman]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Rachel seems to contradict herself and is not entirely accurate in her portrayal of this issue.

However, I just want to highlight two points in particular, as most of this has been done to death already.

Surely, this is the point - you cannot shield the vulnerable - or the rest of the population, for that matter, from this virus. So the lockdown is not eliminating the deaths, it's just slowing down the infection rate. If you locked everyone away so it couldn't get to them, the virus would simply start spreading again as soon as you unlock the doors again, because the virus is out there and people from abroad will keep bringing it in. Only herd immunity or a vaccine is able to thwart it.

That's untrue. If you did lock everyone away until there was no virus as soon as you unlocked the doors - who would they get it from?

We are an island - we can isolate people at the borders for two weeks to limit the spread, only allow people in who were tested in the immediate period prior to travel, only allow people in from other countries that have contained the virus, etc.

There's a number of mechanisms that can be used - again we come back to the idea that you think it would be too hard and you'd rather just open up the economy for 250,000 people to die.

It would be bad enough if we managed to deliver a vaccine by September, but it is unlikely that this would be mass produced and given to all the population by the end of the year. That is the best case scenario.

People are already sick and tired of the lockdown and starting to breach it in greater numbers, and we are only in week 5! I cannot understand how people can seriously believe that this lockdown can be sustained until the end of the year, let alone another 18 months, if this is how long it takes to get a new vaccine. I can tell you that the government is not going to be funding 80% of salaries for much longer, and businesses need to get back on their feet pretty quickly or they will collapse, taking all those jobs with them.

No, people have had enough, and that means we have to get to some semblance of normality quickly. Sadly, yes, that will mean more deaths. But which is the less of two evils, and is it really in our gift to control this thing? Waiting in lockdown or partial lockdown for 6-18 months is not at all sustainable.

The polling shows the people are in support of the lockdown. Support for this Prime Minister has never been higher.

You are unfortunately continuing to conflate public opinion with your own subjective opinion on these matters.

Incidentally, I have heard many older people say that they are not prepared to spend their final years in lockdown, and they will not comply with these rules beyond the 12-week period.

Anecdotal evidence.

If that's what older people think, how will you control the younger ones? I can tell you, you won't, and this is one good reason why this country needs to relax these restrictions as soon as possible, despite the death toll.

Some may argue that, but I think what those of us have tried to convey is that the death figures are not all that exceptional, in that you can get something like up to 40,000 flu deaths in a year and people barely notice this.

Which again comes back to the question of how Coronavirus got noticed in the first place if it was simply another case of the normal flu.

Yet look at the news each night and the figures are sensationalised

Understating the figures by 20,000 can hardly be considered sensationalist. If you think it's bad now I hope you weren't reading the papers when Italy and Spain hit 20,000 deaths.

Incidentally, whatever happened to Italy being worse affected because of more intergenerational households and bigger family meals? That pseudoscience didn't last long.

to the point that some more highly strung people have been terrified by this. But we have only just reached these numbers and the figures are now declining.

The five year average for the number of deaths in the UK have been exceeded now, it is true, but not by a particularly large number - 184,950 in 2020 compared with 174,718 over the same period on average over the last five years. Does the BBC announce these figures throughout the year and agonise over these deaths? No, they don't, and people scarcely notice as a result. The media is scare-mongering big time, and while it is sad that anyone has to die, most of us know that you cannot control nature as some would claim.

The power of human beings to control everything is limited and we need to come to terms with that. We have to ask ourselves whether the ruination of our economy is worth the relatively small impact we can make on the continuing progression of this virus before a vaccine can be found.

Old Boy you are the one continuing to spread fear and terror on this very forum. We are on the verge of becoming a space-faring civilisation. Something like 0.7 on the Kardashev scale with plans to put a man on Mars.

You are massively understating the capability of the human race if you think that we couldn't delay the spread of a virus until a vaccine is found.

Just come out and say you'd prefer we didn't pay people to sit in the house for 8-12 weeks and prefer they died in low paying jobs just so the FTSE 100 can go up 10-15%. That'd be a much more honest assessment of the matter.

---------- Post added at 09:59 ---------- Previous post was at 09:53 ----------

Originally Posted by Carth

Herd Immunity

Allegedly, the infection rate is falling . . how do we know that we aren't already close to it?

There are people out there who probably have the virus but no symptoms.
There are those who have/had the virus with very minor symptoms.
There are those who have/had the virus and put it down to a week with Flu.

Until everyone is tested, nobody knows who has it, has had it, and - importantly - has possibly had it twice.

When levers are gradually released if herd immunity is a thing then numbers won't spike in the same way, indeed they may not rise at all and continue to reduce. If testing is up to scale then that would allow you to accelerate the easing of restrictions every 3-4 weeks with confidence.

There could be valuable lessons to be learned from Germany, Italy and Spain in this respect who are seen as 'ahead' of us in the curve.