Originally Posted by
swaledale
Well I'll take the first part first, yes handling this crisis on a regional basis would be best, indeed local emergency planners have complained that its very centralised and there is insufficient information and poor communication from central government, who appear to be politically opposed to local government at precisely the time its needed and also worried about controlling the flow of information and how its presented. Not very successfully as the backlash from devolved countries and local authorities has shown.
There is much dispute about the calculation of the R figure, scientifically as it depends upon the quality of the data and may not be that useful in the control of the virus anyway - its too complicated to explain here. However its irrelevant in the case of children as the current information is that they are neither major spreaders or affected by the virus.
Another point about R is that actually we need the virus to spread, to increase the percentage of the population who have it in order to get back to normal life!
Again there is a misconception that the lockdown was about stopping infection per se, when in fact its designed to stop a large number of cases occurring at the same time and overwhelming the NHS, that has been successful and planning beyond that the only way forward is to have the resources to deal with infected people and track and test.
This virus isn't going away but unless its very different from other coronaviruses, immunity will build up and it will become something we live like flu.
OK so 250,000 infections is artificially low, firstly because its suspected that the figure is most likely double that - a lot of people have been asymptomatic, so not aware they have had it, others have had it but its not being confirmed by testing.
Conversely the death rate could well be exaggerated, many thousands of people were dying of something else have been attributed on death certificates to Covid-19 when there has been no test to confirm. It has been admitted by Government scientists that there is considerable overlap between deaths from flu and Covid-19, so its a moot point about how many additional people have died from Covid-19 who wouldn't have died anyway. But lets be generous and say 20,000.
So a virus that kills 36,000 (last time I looked that was over 30K but hey ho) in one year, is worse than continuous factors which could be addressed that kills an average 30,000 every year - I'm talking excess winter deaths due to respiratory diseases, poor diet, poor housing and air pollution, deaths that could be avoided if action was taken. Whilst obviously its worse than driving that injures or kills over 6,000 every year? Flu kills around 17,000 every year.
So even though all the evidence shows that children are not at risk (unless classed as vulnerable due to health reasons), that they do not on current evidence act as major spreaders of Covid-19 and that teachers are certainly at lower risk in their job of infection, than the thousands of workers who meet and deal with hundreds of different people everyday, you feel that they should not return to work?
Bear in mind that the thousands of people who have had to work, often having to travel by public transport, have not actually suffered significant levels of death or illness either (I'm not suggesting that any death is not tragic) so that the risk of working is clearly not at the level suggested.
So whats your alternative? That everyone who works should be able to choose whether or not they go back to work? How exactly is that going to be paid for?
Its very easy to take a risk averse approach if it costs one nothing to the individual to do so. In the current situation if your sick, or of an age considered vulnerable then the vast majority, can sit in their homes claim their pensions and protect themselves. However for the young and those at work a return to normal life (with suitable precautions) is essential as soon as possible for both their well being and the country's.
