Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
I really don’t believe almost all the countries in the world are simply acting out of paranoia. Italian hospital beds weren’t filled by paranoid people in February, they were filled by pneumonia patients.
I do recognise that on a personal level my risks are extremely low. However that isn’t true of everyone in my social circle, family and friends (or indeed, for a significant amount of purchasing power in the economy). If the herd immunity advocates got their way statistically the chances would be that some of them would catch it with a higher mortality level based on age and underlying health issues.
If this was just a flu we are back to the circular conversation where nobody would have noticed. Hospitals wouldn’t have been busier, it’d just be normal, as generally they are equipped to cope with flu every year.
Numbers go down because of significant effort and mitigation. They go up without. At £210bn in cost to date, that’s a lot of Government paranoia. Would have been cheaper with a super-injunction, a D-Notice and hoping nobody noticed.
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You are the only one droning on about the flu! Nobody has claimed that the people in Italian beds were fictional. And you talk about straw man arguments!
Herd immunity is not something man invented. It's nature. You advocate a lockdown until such time as we have a vaccine. You are living in cloud cuckoo land, mate, and you need to get real.
As a self stated economist, I despair of the way you look at the figures. You don't seem to have grasped that the more people you test, the higher number of positive results you are going to pick up. That should be obvious to a man like you - basic stuff really. So while it is correct for the media to say that the number of people testing positive is increasing, the reason for this has been ignored. I would have thought you would have picked that up. We have no reliable way of knowing whether the actual number of infected people is rising because we have no stable set of data to measure it against.
What we should all be watching is the hospital admission rates. They remain very low, and that should tell you all you need to know. Until that rises significantly, there is no cause for alarm.
People should be allowed to get on with their lives now. Vulnerable people should be advised to shield (there should be no compulsion) and care homes should be told to introduce stringent measures to ensure that those in their care are protected. That is what is required. To be clear, a national lockdown is totally unnecessary and would be widely ignored. Enough is enough.