The Corona Virus

[The Bedlington Terrier]

We have shut down our economy for absolutely nothing, we will lose thousands upon thousands of small businesses and jobs.

The over reaction is mind boggling. The statistics are confusing, the science is fatally flawed and conflated, the coronavirus morbidity rate is proven to be less than the 'flu. Enough of the hyperbole, let's get back to reality?

And can we please get in a different clown to run this fooooooking circus?

[sinkov]

And can we please get in a different clown to run this fooooooking circus?

Try as I might BT, I cannot imagine in what way having Jeremy Corbyn, Emily Thornberry, Diane Abbott, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler acting as ring-masters in this particular circus would improve matters. Nope, I've given my head another wobble and I still can't see it.

You're right about the economic damage though, in the long term far more people will die and suffer from the consequences of this than ever will from the virus, but I don't see what can be done. The media and social media are fixated on the death toll, any government that didn't prioritise the short term over the long term would have a sh1t-storm breaking about their heads, especially in this country where the virtue-signalling, hand-wringing, bubble dwelling w@nkers who pass themselves off as journalists in the media, would instantly home in on what they perceived as even one unnecessary death. So lockdown it is.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

If you carefully trawl through any of my numerous posts since the "pandemic" began sinkov, you will not find any reference to anyone within the British Labour Party who I could possibly recommend to organise this sh-itfest.

4000 bed hospitals being built. Mortuary's the size of fooooking air hangers are being constructed and still we are not exceeding the daily "norm" of 1400 British citizens dying per day.

Can someone please take control of this fooooking madness?

[sinkov]

If you carefully trawl through any of my numerous posts since the "pandemic" began sinkov, you will not find any reference to anyone within the British Labour Party who I could possibly recommend to organise this sh-itfest.

4000 bed hospitals being built. Mortuary's the size of fooooking air hangers are being constructed and still we are not exceeding the daily "norm" of 1400 British citizens dying per day.

Can someone please take control of this fooooking madness?

Taking control is what they're doing BT, as long as they don't run out of ventilators, hospital beds or mortuary spaces they haven't lost control. That's all they're doing, giving the impression they are in control. The epidemic will run it's course, nowt they can do about that.

[1959_60]

If you carefully trawl through any of my numerous posts since the "pandemic" began sinkov, you will not find any reference to anyone within the British Labour Party who I could possibly recommend to organise this sh-itfest.

4000 bed hospitals being built. Mortuary's the size of fooooking air hangers are being constructed and still we are not exceeding the daily "norm" of 1400 British citizens dying per day.

Can someone please take control of this fooooking madness?

Where would you treat the sick BT, in the streets? And where would you put the dead?

I'm just glad that you didn't opt for a career in the NHS or Social Care. They would need people like you around like a swift kick in the goolies.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

Taking control is what they're doing BT, as long as they don't run out of ventilators, hospital beds or mortuary spaces they haven't lost control. That's all they're doing, giving the impression they are in control. The epidemic will run it's course, nowt they can do about that.

I can see you have fully bought into this bullsh-it sinkov. I am trawling every news source I can just to find confirmation that more than 1400 people are dying every day.

All I can come across is that almost all of the deaths being attributed to Coronavirus are associated with "underlying health issues".

[sinkov]

I can see you have fully bought into this bullsh-it sinkov. I am trawling every news source I can just to find confirmation that more than 1400 people are dying every day.

All I can come across is that almost all of the deaths being attributed to Coronavirus are associated with "underlying health issues".

No, I haven't bought into anything BT, you only have to look back to post 322 to see that I agree with you about the damage being done to the economy, and how detrimental it will be in the long term, I just don't see that the government has any option but to follow their scientific and medical advice, lockdown the country and hope for the best, they would be instantly destroyed by our media if they did otherwise.

This is from the Telegraph, it's behind a paywall so no point putting a link up, I'll paste the article in full. Toby Young wrote a piece last week in The Critic explaining how damaging our current policy is and proposed the very option you advocate, this is what happened to him, and bear in mind he's one individual, imagine the response should our government actually decide to go down that route.

"This week I found myself “trending” at number one on Twitter. For the uninitiated, that’s not a badge of honour. Twitter creates a new “star” every day and, paradoxically, no one wants to be that person. You’re not at the top of the pyramid, so much as the bottom of a pile-on involving tens of thousands of people.

My sin was to write an online article in The Critic, a conservative magazine, expressing scepticism about the Government’s Covid-19 strategy. I queried whether it was worth spending £350 billion and destroying the economy to slow the rate of infection. Is the case fatality rate really as high as Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College would have us believe? Dr John Ioannidis of Stanford University has speculated that it may end up being 0.05 per cent, lower than seasonal flu. And what if Professor Sunetra Gupta and her team at Oxford University are correct and up to 50 per cent of us have already been infected?

Even if we accept the Imperial estimate that 250,000 will die if we don’t keep everyone locked down for the next 18 months, aren’t we placing too high a monetary value on extending the lives of people who, for the most part, are very elderly and will die soon due to underlying health conditions? The average age of the patients who’ve died of coronavirus so far is 79.5 and average life expectancy in the UK is 81. I worked out that we’re valuing the lives of those 250,000 people at £500,000 each.

It was that last calculation that enraged the Twitchfork mob. Tens of thousands of people across the UK started denouncing me as a “Nazi” and a “eugenicist” or, if they were feeling charitable, a “Tory scumbag”. Apparently, anyone who dissents from the official Government line – that we should do “whatever it takes” to stop people becoming infected – deserves to be cancelled. Several people even called for me to be locked up. In fact, NHS doctors place a monetary value on patients’ lives and use it to make clinical decisions every day. As a general rule, the National Institute of Clinical Excellence values one quality-adjusted life year (Qaly) at between £15,000 and £30,000, depending on health. Even if we assume that each of those 250,000 people will enjoy another eight years of perfect health, we’re still valuing their lives twice as highly as we would in normal times.

Evidently, lots of people find such reasoning deeply cynical during a time of national crisis, when our instinct is to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. But the economic damage being done by the lockdown will also cost lives. According to Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University, if GDP falls by over 6.4 per cent over the next two years as a result of prolonged economic inactivity, more lives will be lost than saved thanks to rises in poverty, violent crime and suicide. We’re already beginning to see the first signs of this in Southern Italy, where civil unrest is breaking out because people cannot afford to buy food.

The conclusion I reached is that the Government should end the lockdown after Easter and return to a mitigation strategy, with self-quarantining limited to those most at risk. Let’s get the economy going again before tens of thousands of businesses go bust, consigning millions to the dole queue. Our high streets were in trouble before the outbreak of Covid-19, but if the lockdown is extended for 18 months they’ll never recover. Not everyone will agree with this analysis and that’s fine. What I find harder to understand is the intolerance shown towards those who challenge the current direction of travel. Surely, at a time like this, when the Government is making decisions every day that will affect all our lives for years to come, we need more scrutiny of those decisions, not less? One of the most common criticisms made of me on Twitter is that I’m not a virologist or an epidemiologist so I should shut up. Instead, we should listen to the experts. But scientific experts aren’t infallible and how we respond to this crisis is ultimately a political decision, which means it’s a proper matter for public debate. Now is not the time to stop holding our elected leaders to account."

[1959_60]

It's a real dilemma isn't it?

What would you do if you were PM and the majority of the public wanted the restrictions lifting, even though you knew that it would result in the deaths of up to 250,000 people?
This morning I learned that a friend of mine lost his Mum to the virus in a retirement home. At the moment these deaths are not recorded in the official daily figures. He was not allowed to visit her in the home so he never said goodbye. The service was conducted in front of a very sparse gathering, lot's of people were not allowed to attend.

As you say, around 90% of the public currently support the measures but this won't last indefinitely.

Like Toby Young says, an uncomfortable truth is that the NHS has to put a monetary figure on a life.
It can only provide the service level that it's budget allows.
They are already playing God to a certain extent - because they have to.
This crisis is just going to bring this fact home much more starkly.

[1959_60]

If you carefully trawl through any of my numerous posts since the "pandemic" began sinkov, you will not find any reference to anyone within the British Labour Party who I could possibly recommend to organise this sh-itfest.

4000 bed hospitals being built. Mortuary's the size of fooooking air hangers are being constructed and still we are not exceeding the daily "norm" of 1400 British citizens dying per day.

Can someone please take control of this fooooking madness?

BT, in an average year we lose around 8,000 to flu. That is around 666 per month.

We have lost 684 to the virus IN THE LAST 24 HOURS.

And it hasn't peaked yet.

[Supersub6]

I find it quite amusing that there is always a big debate about whether or not euthanasia should be legalised, however, now we have journalists advocating that, because someone is 79.5 years of age and takes ill, and his life expectancy is only 81 anyway, he should be neglected and allowed to die. I would lay odds on that, should any person express the wish that they want to die by the euthanasia method, the same journalist would be saying that you can't allow that to happen.
It's a strange world.