[jfman]

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

Some, including jfman, say that we locked down too late, allowing the virus to take hold. It has been calculated that this resulted in the peak being not far short of what it would have been had we done nothing. If that is correct then it has probably brought down already most of those who were going to die anyway. That means there will probably be no second wave, unless of course the virus mutates, in which case anything could happen.

This would explain why other countries that locked down earlier have a second wave now - it is attacking those now who would have got it had it not been for the lockdown.

On your second point about social distancing, etc, isn't that what we are doing now?

Old Boy the contortions that you put yourself in to justify the Governments steps at every stage and the contradictions that result are utterly laughable.

No lockdown - they're going to die anyway - has become we had a late lockdown, there were early deaths but it's alright now. Despite the obvious contradiction that many believe we are better at treating complex cases.

Again there's no evidence to support that we won't go into a second wave unless we keep present restrictions and likely add to them. Steps the Government are taking from next week. It's speculative nonsense, much like your claim that it won't like high temperatures.

---------- Post added at 10:04 ---------- Previous post was at 10:02 ----------

Originally Posted by OLD BOY

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.

By the point that happens it will simply be too late to intervene. Almost nobody catches Covid and falls into a hospital bed on day 2.

Of course we know the actual numbers are rising - testing has been available for those with symptoms for some weeks now. You can bury your head in the sand, as you have throughout the pandemic, but your 'solutions' neither protect public health or the economy.