I’d be surprised if anyone disagreed with any of that. No lockdowns, obviously, they are insane and have been proven to be ineffective in most countries. Of course, if herd immunity through a workable vaccine isn’t delivered then eventually natural herd immunity will occur through these blindingly obvious measures - just more slowly. The tiny percentage of possible reinfections will also stop because the virus will no longer be in enough hosts. So, we won’t have to worry about possible reinfections anymore.
Is anybody actually saying people must not wear a mask, or practice good hygiene, but they must have orgies etc? Even Trump isn’t advising letting the virus rip.
Applying perfectly logical measures such as wearing masks and good hygiene is the tricky thing. Stating the obvious is easier.
So you are the prime minister, national health board is saying you’ve got a week before all ICU are full. Infections are doubling every week, community spread is in every town and village, contact tracing and testing cannot remotely keep up.
The ICU are on the verge of being full all the time. I recall a month or so ago the UK’s were going to be overwhelmed in a fortnight.
However, in your hypothetical situation which is often predicted but never happens I would not order a national lockdown. I understand how that would look bad politically, but I like to think I would still do the right thing.
You know what happened in northern Ireland already ?
Lockdown. Again. No choice.
Of course I think they should manage things better before being forced to do this like a yo-yo.
Numbers with the virus in hospitals there doubled in just one week. This is what makes it so difficult to manage, it’s exponential growth when everybody is mixing or staying indoors more.
With just 17 intensive care beds now free across Northern Ireland, if the current trend continues and the figures double again this week there could be none left by Monday – unless the Nightingale Hospital in Belfast is opened this week.
Of course there was a choice. The choice was between doing another “lockdown”, or not doing a lockdown. But that’s politicians. “Hey, you know that thing we did last month that didn’t work? Let’s do it again and see if it works better this time!”
In answer to your question to BiggusDickus, surely the answer is obvious: build some more critical-care facilities. “Flattening the curve” means what it says: the same number of people infected, the same number of people dying; but given enough beds, more of those people get to die in hospital … with, as per your friend’s scenario, security guards to prevent them dying with dignity, but hey-ho, we gotta give up some of our freedoms, right?
Doubling hospitalisations per week
I ask again, what is the alternative to ‘locking down’’? ICUs need qualified professionals to run them and also cost a fortune . With a rampant epidemic most businesses won’t have customers anyway.
You can’t just wave your hands in the air if a PM.
This is the thing most people seem to miss. The virus is shutting down businesses anyway. My brother works in heavy engineering. For safety and legal reasons, and because it’s simply impossible anyway, they cannot work when only 3 of his shift of 15 come in because the rest are isolating. They are unable to supply their customers, who are now sitting idle.
Even when there’s a ’ lockdown’ essential industries are still operating. So the hysteria about the word lockdown is ridiculous anyway. One way or another social distancing will be mandated/enforces.
Your question implicitly assumes that “locking down” achieves some reduction in cases that require hospitalization. But the empirical evidence from the past 8 months or so is that it doesn’t (which is why the WHO have advised governments to stop doing it). Infections continue just the same, albeit by different routes.
ICUs achieve nothing. People in acute respiratory distress die regardless. Their only purpose is to show that Something Is Being Done. So train up some nurses in the relevant management procedures, set up some temporary facilties, and your votes at the next election are assured. “Smoke and mirrors” is the phrase I’m looking for, I think.
There’s a difference between people staying away from work because they are ill, and staying away from work because they’re following some largely-pointless procedure.
The virus is not shutting down anything. Governments are. The debate is over whether that shutdown is producing a net positive outcome for humanity, or not.
Where is the data supporting this assertion ?
I listed above how hospitalizations in Ireland went from from 1-2 in Summer to 10s to 100s now in October .
An advisor to the WHO claimed in a separate organisation…
His comments were initially published on a blog for the organisation 4SD, of which Dr Nabarro is Strategic Director. Here, he described a “Middle Way” for handling the pandemic, which relies on local public health to implement a robust system of testing, contact tracing and isolation. He wrote that lockdowns have a role to play in interrupting the transmission of coronavirus, but that lockdowns alone will not achieve elimination:
We know lockdowns don’t achieve elimination (blindingly obvious ), the point is, how do you deal with an epidemic ragng out of control ?
Contact tracing and testing have proven to be fairly useless once the numbers start getting high.
Again…I ask for the fifth time…How do you deal with a virus that has extraordinary transmissibility , which is already in the ‘hundreds per hundred thousand’ range ,without implementing a lockdown of sorts . Call it whatever bullshit it is now…Circuit breaker…Level 4…Level 5… blah blah…?
I heard a WHO official mentioned that lockdowns should not be the primary method of dealing with the pandemic, but did they actually advise governments not to use lockdowns at all? I am not entirely sure what level of restriction constitutes a lockdown anyway…
Mod, feel free to delete this post. Brianjones raised the same point above.
