Coronavirus Thread

[Guest Harrydc]

26 minutes ago, filbertway said:

There's a few in this thread that would happily not lay eyes on another human for the rest of their life, but I would imagine the majority (depending on how little they do with ther life) will be between 2-6 months.

I'll take another 3 months or so and then I can't see any future for myself. Had enough.

[leicsmac]

Interesting discussion on the last page or so. Just got a couple of observations:

 

- I can see what Churchill supposedly meant (no attribution to the quote, apparently) when he said "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter". Anti-intellectualism is poisonous.

- Perhaps now some empathy might be shown towards those introverts for whom every day before all this happened was as difficult as everyone else is finding each day now.

[WigstonWanderer]

11 hours ago, Wymsey said:

Even if everyone gets vaccinated, twice, would social-distancing be scrapped and we can shake other people's hands etc?

At some point things have to return to normal, even at the cost a somewhat shortened average lifespan IMO. Hopefully the vaccines will protect the vast majority of people from severe disease, perhaps even reduce transmission, and this will reduce the incidence of long COVID to something akin to that of other chronic illnesses.

 

I’d hope that the better hygiene measures would stick, and also that having had this experience we will be better prepared for future pandemics, similar to how Asian countries generally coped better with the current one.

Edited 7 February 2021 by WigstonWanderer

[Nalis]

14 hours ago, Finnaldo said:

494,163 first doses today 

 

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations

 

Another excellent day. 

Hopefully the weather will only have a small impact on numbers over the next few days.

Edited 7 February 2021 by Nalis

[Buce]

 

 

As well as fighting to keep Covid patients alive, NHS staff are now battling a surge in abuse and denial in the second wave. Dr Rachel Clarke on how she is coping – and what gives hope:

Please imagine it, for a moment, if you can bear to. Being wheeled from your home by paramedics in masks who rush you, blue-lit, to a hospital. Then the clamour and lights, the confusion and fear, the faceless professionals, gloved and gowned, who eddy and swirl past your trolley. Your destination is intensive care where too soon, or perhaps not soon enough, you will arrive at a point of reckoning. You will blanch when they tell you, because you’ve watched the news and know what it signifies: you are going to be put on a ventilator. You will understand, as clearly as they do, that your doctors cannot promise to save

Here, though, is the detail that haunts me. For every patient who dies from Covid-19 in hospital, from the moment they encounter that first masked paramedic, they will never see a human face again. Not one smile, nor pair of cheeks, nor lips, nor chin. Not a single human being without barricades of plastic. Sometimes, my stomach twists at the thought that to the patients whose faces I can never unsee – contorting and buckling with the effort of breathing – I am no more than a pair of eyes, a thin strip of flesh between mask and visor, a muffled voice that strains and cracks behind plastic.

 

Of all Covid’s cruelties, surely the greatest is this? That it cleaves us from each other at precisely those times when we need human contact the most. That it spreads through speech and touch – the very means through which we share our love, tenderness and basic humanity. That it transforms us unwittingly into vectors of fatality. And that those we love most – and with whom we are most intimate – are the ones we endanger above all others.

It’s late January. The wards and ICUs are overwhelmed, awash with the virus. The patients seem younger, the new variant more virulent. We are drowning, drowning in Covid. The sight of a doctor or nurse breaking down has become unremarkable. Too close, for too long, to too many patients’ pain, we have become – just like them – saturated. Behind hospital doors, tucked away out of sight, we seem to suffer as one.

Outside, on the other hand, the virus has once again carved up the country into simmering, resentful, aggrieved little units. It’s too old, too cold to be doing this again. One way or another, lockdown hurts us all. But instead of unity, community and a shared sense of purpose – that extraordinary eruption of philanthropy last springtime – we seethe like rats in a sack, fractious, divided.

One morning, on the way to work, the politicians and the trolls and the suffering and the death become too much. All of a sudden, I’m unable to drive

During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I’ve been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren’t empty. Last night a charming “Covid sceptic” sent me this: “You are paid to lie and a disgrace to your profession. You have clearly sold your soul and are nothing more than a child abuser destroying futures. I do not consent to your satanic ways.” A friend, herself an intensive care doctor, has just been told by another male “sceptic” that he intends to sexually abuse her until she requires one of her own ventilators. And this morning, another colleague, also female, was told: “You evil criminal lying piece of government shit. You need to be executed immediately for treason and genocide.”

In short, we have reached the point in the pandemic where what feels like armies of trolls do their snarling, misogynistic utmost to silence NHS staff who try to convey what it’s like on the inside. Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant “Covid is a hoax” outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them.

I well understand why they want to gag us. Our testimony makes Covid denial a tall order. We bear witness not to statistics but to human beings. Our language is flesh and blood. This patient, and then this patient, and then another. The pregnant woman in her 20s on ICU, intubated and lifeless. The three generations of one family on ventilators, each of them dying one after the other. We humanise, empathise, turn the unfathomable dimensions of the 100,000 dead into mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Increasingly, speaking out feels like a moral imperative. Because perhaps – if we can only disprove enough untruths, if we can just slow the onslaught of disinformation – we may have fewer dying hands to hold in the future.

Please don’t flinch. Please don’t look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospitals needs telling. To dispel a few prime ministerial press conference myths, the NHS is not “close to” or “on the brink of” being overwhelmed. We are here and now in the midst of calamity. The Covid patients keep on coming, so unnervingly unwell, and we race to find space for them. But all the spare staff have already been snatched from their day jobs. Elective surgery has shut down, everything inessential postponed. ICUs are filled with obstetricians, paediatricians, psychiatrists and surgeons doing their amateur best to support the small pool of staff with proper expertise. On wards across the country, where Covid patients live and die in their thousands, the medics are stretched perilously thinly. And still the new admissions come.

This week, a doctor friend in another trust sent me this, having been newly redeployed to her hospital’s ICU: “The situation at work is just dreadful. Once I’ve donned PPE and gone into ICU, hours and hours go by. And it’s just awful in there. It’s not calm like the news videos, it’s chaotic with alarms going constantly, patients being intubated and proned. Most of us are NOT trained to do this or deal with this. We are surgeons, anaesthetists, physicians, nurses, HCAs, porters etc. We are NOT ICU staff.”

Newly qualified doctors with scarcely six months’ experience sometimes struggle singlehanded on the Covid wards at night, their seniors unable to leave crashing patients elsewhere. Whoever deteriorates overnight may live or die according to whether a bed can be found on ICU. This is rationing, without being named out loud as such. An unacknowledged peacetime form of battlefield triage: lives being lost because there aren’t enough staff to go around. No one here is being “protected”, not the patients, not the nurses, not the doctors, not the families, and certainly not the NHS writ large.

Sometimes, colleagues confess that they feel suicidal. Sometimes, in the darkness, a patient pleads to die. They cannot take the claustrophobic roar of their CPAP mask any longer. The struggle to breathe is costing them more than they can bear. A student I used to teach looks close to collapse. “I feel as if it might be my fault when they die,” he tells me in a monotone. “If I’d been a doctor for longer, I might know how to do something different. Maybe it’s me – maybe I’m not cut out to be a doctor.” I watch him wrestle to keep his tears at bay, unable even to reach out to give him a hug. The wrongness of it all constricts my chest until it hurts. He’s too young, too green to be standing here like this, accusing himself of failing the pandemic dead, who themselves have been failed by so many in power above. At what cost do these night shifts worm into his soul?

The truth is, patients of necessity are falling through our cracks. We cannot hold them all, we’re too few and too ground down. Rationing does not declare itself in a fanfare of noise. It sidles in, bit by bit, as the Covid cases rise. Intensive care nurses, used to working with a concentration of one nurse per patient, are asked to stretch themselves across four patients or more. Standards start to slip as battered, shell-shocked staff do their brave and hopeless best against the ever-surging human tide. The truth – and don’t we know it, if we’re honest? – is that doctors and nurses are neither angels nor heroes. We’re human. Merely human. We can only do so much.

I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still. I feel sick. I want to scream. Something monstrous, like cancer, is twisting in my chest. One morning, on the way to work, the politicians and the trolls and the suffering and the death become too much. All of a sudden, I’m unable to drive. In a layby I cringe, doubled up, fighting for breath. My body is in mutiny, it’s overruled my head. You clench your teeth, wipe your cheeks, turn the ignition, set off again. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

A unity of sorts emerges with the stupefying news that in Britain, an island, the cumulative Covid death toll has surpassed 100,000. On the same day, we learn that our death rate per head of population is the highest in the world. As the country reels from these calamitous statistics, the prime minister insists that his government “truly did everything we could to minimise loss of life”. Yet a quarter of those deaths have occurred in 2021 – during the last four weeks alone – making Boris Johnson’s words a patent lie. He didn’t lock down promptly, he didn’t close our borders, he didn’t protect care homes, he allowed tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable residents to die. And then, instead of future-proofing Britain from a second surge last summer, he offered bribes for social mixing. But our eating out, far from helping out, sent Covid cases ticking hungrily upwards.

This second wave has been turbocharged by Downing Street’s procrastination. Putting off lockdown until the eleventh hour has – yet again – wreaked havoc. Urgent cancer surgeries should not be postponed. Covid patients should not be calling Ubers to rush them to hospital because the ambulances they need are nowhere to be found. Doctors and nurses should not be suicidal with stress, nor tended by their own as they suffocate and die on ventilators. It did not have to be like this. None of these horrors were inevitable.

How – from where – can we find cause for hope when our political leaders, despite a track record like this, insist they’ve behaved infallibly? Well, by early spring, the country’s most vulnerable citizens should be vaccinated, a prospect that makes me ecstatic. And lockdown has already sent new cases plummeting downwards. The deaths, we know, will follow. Momentum too is building towards a zero Covid strategy – the complete elimination of the virus – as demonstrated so successfully by countries such as New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam.

But my main reasons for optimism lie closer to home, flickering and sparking amid the darkness. I turn my gaze from the dizzying statistics and look instead to the human beings around me. Their ingenuity and kindness give me the steel to go on. One day, for example, a peculiar procession outside the hospital turns heads on the high street. It is led by a strangely immaculate tractor, freshly waxed and wreathed with flowers, gleaming beneath the winter sun. The tractor is destined for a nearby village, hauling an agricultural trailer on which a coffin has been laid. Several cars follow, their stern-faced drivers dressed in black. It’s the funeral cortege of a larger-than-life farmer, known to all in his village and far beyond. Pre-Covid, hundreds of locals would have packed into the village church, eager to pay tribute to a man much loved. Now though, a virus dictates our forms of mourning. No large gatherings are allowed.

When the tractor arrives in the village, lumbering slowly towards the empty church, something magical and startling begins to unfold. Word of mouth and social media have told the neighbours when the cortege will pass and now, on their doorsteps and in porches, behind their gates, on garden paths, they assemble at a respectful social distance. As the tractor passes, so begins the applause. First a ripple, then a clatter, then a thunder, then a roar. In physical estrangement, a population finds its voice. This community, unbowed, celebrates a man they loved – and how. My heart lifts. I feel hope flicker. For however bleak the times, however grim our prospects seem, human kindness finds a shape and form: it will not be locked down.

All across the hospital, you see it. In the tiny crocheted crimson hearts, made by locals for patients and delivered in their scores so that no one feels alone. In the piles of donated pizzas, devoured at night by ravenous staff. In the homemade scrubs, whipped up by an unstoppable army of self-isolating grandmothers whose choice in fabrics is fearlessly floral. In the nurses and carers and porters and cleaners who keep on, despite everything, smiling. I may be tired and angry and sometimes mad with grief, but every single day at work, I see more kindness, more sweetness, more compassion, more courage, more resilience, more steel, more diamond-plated love than you could ever, ever imagine. And this means more and lasts more than anything else, and it cannot be stolen by Covid.

• Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Dr Rachel Clarke is published by Little, Brown

[WigstonWanderer]

7 hours ago, Harrydc said:

I'll take another 3 months or so and then I can't see any future for myself. Had enough.

Mate, seriously, you need to reach out to family and friends and talk to someone. Things really will be looking up in due course, it just takes a bit of patience for a while.

[reynard]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55967767

 

Potentially of great concern. Though only a small sample and not peer reviewed yet the fact that protection diminshes for fit younger people under the age of 35 what will be the case for the older and more vulnerable members of society?

 

Obviously all ifs and buts but if it did mean that a great many people were not protected from serious illness and hospitalisation from the South African varient then we're going to end up back at the start again.

Really time to completely close the borders to all but freight traffic. Even if for a short time.

[StanSP]

5 minutes ago, reynard said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55967767

 

Potentially of great concern. Though only a small sample and not peer reviewed yet the fact that protection diminshes for fit younger people under the age of 35 what will be the case for the older and more vulnerable members of society?

 

Obviously all ifs and buts but if it did mean that a great many people were not protected from serious illness and hospitalisation from the South African varient then we're going to end up back at the start again.

Really time to completely close the borders to all but freight traffic. Even if for a short time.

Need to see the full study and that's against 'mild disease' anyway, those current prelim findings. This is important as well I thought:

 

But the company expressed confidence that the vaccine would offer protection against serious cases, because it created neutralising antibodies similar to those of other coronavirus vaccines.

[Sampson]

6 minutes ago, reynard said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55967767

 

Potentially of great concern. Though only a small sample and not peer reviewed yet the fact that protection diminshes for fit younger people under the age of 35 what will be the case for the older and more vulnerable members of society?

 

Obviously all ifs and buts but if it did mean that a great many people were not protected from serious illness and hospitalisation from the South African varient then we're going to end up back at the start again.

Really time to completely close the borders to all but freight traffic. Even if for a short time.

The problem with completely closing the border is you'd get a flood of British & Irish citizens and residents all coming back at once before the travel ban.

 

I don't think any government, even Australia or New Zealand has banned all overseas traffic for that reason.

 

You can't really ban UK & Irish citizens or residents from entering the UK, else you'd suddenly get a flood of people all coming back at once so they dont fall foul of Visas or residency permits they currently have in other countries. It's much better to still allow free movement for UK & Irish citizens and residents so that they come back in drips and easier to control.

[reynard]

1 minute ago, StanSP said:

Need to see the full study and that's against 'mild disease' anyway, those current prelim findings. This is important as well I thought:

 

But the company expressed confidence that the vaccine would offer protection against serious cases, because it created neutralising antibodies similar to those of other coronavirus vaccines.

I agree but efficacy of vaccines usually decreases with the age of people receiving it. The study talks about moderate and mild occurences. Hard to know what they mean by that of course but a moderate illness for a 25 year old might equate to a serious one for a 90 year old.

[reynard]

1 minute ago, Sampson said:

The problem with completely closing the border is you'd get a flood of British & Irish citizens and residents all coming back at once before the travel ban.

 

I don't think any government, even Australia or New Zealand has banned all overseas traffic for that reason.

 

You can't really ban UK & Irish citizens or residents from entering the UK, else you'd suddenly get a flood of people all coming back at once so they dont fall foul of Visas or residency permits they currently have in other countries. It's much better to still allow free movement for UK & Irish citizens and residents so that they come back in drips and easier to control.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/09/australians-stranded-overseas-say-slashing-arrival-caps-makes-returning-home-near-impossible

 

Not popular obviously but Australia has restricted the number returning and made them go into enforced quarantine for 14 days.

Yesterday not a single case in Australia and 30000 fans allowed at the Australian Open.

I understand what you are saying but things can and have been done elsewhere in the world.

[OrielCaziado]

8 hours ago, Harrydc said:

I'll take another 3 months or so and then I can't see any future for myself. Had enough.

I am the same and want to know what the end target of all these restrictions is.  Is it zero cases?  You look at the panic mode the Western Australians went into for one single case and wonder will that be us next Autumn every time a case is found. Or do we have a figure that we are accepting will die each year through Covid related infections. As some posters have said there is a decent proportion of the population who love this new Covid restrictive life we now have. There’s plenty who don’t work or work in a sector that they think is safe from going under due to the economic crash that awaits us. There’s people like my neighbours who are retired, never go out socialising or abroad on holidays and are content watching TV and gardening so are totally unaffected.  

[Mark 'expert' Lawrenson]

20 hours ago, StanSP said:

 

I don't understand. Does Covid-19 only enter the bar if it knows alcohol is being served? 

😂 made me chuckle 

[foxfanazer]

8 hours ago, Harrydc said:

I'll take another 3 months or so and then I can't see any future for myself. Had enough.

Sorry mate I can't scroll by and ignore that. Make sure you're talking to people about how you feel and try to find whatever pleasure you can from life at the moment. Exercise certainly helps. Here if you wanna drop me a DM 

[Mark 'expert' Lawrenson]

3 minutes ago, OrielCaziado said:

I am the same and want to know what the end target of all these restrictions is.  Is it zero cases?  You look at the panic mode the Western Australians went into for one single case and wonder will that be us next Autumn every time a case is found. Or do we have a figure that we are accepting will die each year through Covid related infections. As some posters have said there is a decent proportion of the population who love this new Covid restrictive life we now have. There’s plenty who don’t work or work in a sector that they think is safe from going under due to the economic crash that awaits us. There’s people like my neighbours who are retired, never go out socialising or abroad on holidays and are content watching TV and gardening so are totally unaffected.  

Albeit I have a limited knowledge on viruses but I’ll wager that cases will rise next autumn because that’s what happen in the autumn and winter months, and like you I worry that this is our lives for the foreseeable future.

We will be allowed a little more freedom for the summer months and restrictions will return for the winter.

I also agree with your point that there are plenty of people quite comfortable living under the current restrictions, anyone who has no fear of losing their job, or has no mortgage or rent to pay will be far happier than someone who’s employment is under threat and are worried paying the mortgage etc.

 

[Super_horns]

It is the mild variant but should this worry us if we have had the AZ vaccine ?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55967767

[Mapperleyfox]

9 hours ago, Harrydc said:

I'll take another 3 months or so and then I can't see any future for myself. Had enough.

I'm more or less feeling the same....

 

Another couple of months at the most and i'm done. What's the point of just existing?

[OrielCaziado]

12 minutes ago, Mapperleyfox said:

I'm more or less feeling the same....

 

Another couple of months at the most and i'm done. What's the point of just existing?

These people moaning about the younger generation still not obeying the rules must have forgotten how good life was when they were young. I’d finish work on a Friday and the weekend would then involve into town on the Friday finishing with either a shag or most times a Kebab at 2am.  Up the next day and play football in the afternoon before trying to avoid the kebab with mates at 2am after a session in Town trying to pull again. Sunday morning I’d still be up for football at 10.30 kick off before an afternoon on the beer again.  I’d go work on Monday and as this was before mobile phones existed me and the lads at work would spend all day telling our stories. 
 

These memories will last with me forever yet when I think back it really only went on for about three years, although at that age three years felt a life time. Imagine being 19 or 20 now and not being to enjoy those great years and being vilified if you attempt anything outside the draconian boundaries. 

[Super_horns]

Well hopefully the vaccine will be rolled out successfully and work although worryingly there now seems to be some doubts about that unfortunately.

 

If all the over 50s and vulnerable are vaccinated and it’s  deemed safe enough I reckon any restrictions will be reduced as there is less of a threat to high numbers of deaths and hospitals admissions.

 

Hopefully any COVID idiots are a minority because their actions won’t help anyone .

[SpacedX]

42 minutes ago, OrielCaziado said:

These people moaning about the younger generation still not obeying the rules must have forgotten how good life was when they were young. I’d finish work on a Friday and the weekend would then involve into town on the Friday finishing with either a shag or most times a Kebab at 2am.  Up the next day and play football in the afternoon before trying to avoid the kebab with mates at 2am after a session in Town trying to pull again. Sunday morning I’d still be up for football at 10.30 kick off before an afternoon on the beer again.  I’d go work on Monday and as this was before mobile phones existed me and the lads at work would spend all day telling our stories. 
 

These memories will last with me forever yet when I think back it really only went on for about three years, although at that age three years felt a life time. Imagine being 19 or 20 now and not being to enjoy those great years and being vilified if you attempt anything outside the draconian boundaries. 

I think about this a great deal, particularly given the hedonistic and Bacchanalian excess of my youth. I spent years playing professionally in a band - in the pre-internet era this would have finished us. I'll be the first to admit that was I the same irresponsible, rebellious, wayward individual of my late teens today, I'm certain would be flagrantly flouting these restrictions.

 

At the same time, even back then, I was always conscious of the fact that I was born into a very favourable era in time that allowed me to behave like a complete dick. - That, and in view of my insatiable pursuit of pleasure, very grateful/guilty that I hadn't been drafted into a major World War, fought on a front line and had my head blown off at the age of fifteen. 

 

So the 'younger generation' haven't been able to go on the lash, eat shit food, shag about and play ball games on a park for a year? My heart bleeds. Only it isn't a year is it? Because I think you'll find that didn't really stop which is one of the reasons that we're so in the shit now. And actually, screw this right of passage - on reflection, it means very little. You learn far more through responsibility. I'm more concerned about the impact on very young children that need social interaction in terms of their development and at the other end of the scale, the elderly and infirm that are increasingly isolated and may not have even seen their grandchildren. 

 

My message to the 'younger generation' is be thankful that you weren't a teenager in 1914 or 1939 - or born into a war torn African nation or a teenager in Myanmar right now. It's all relative, I get that -but this is what the world does. There are many, many other existential threats to our existence than the next pandemic, we have become too comfortable, too complacent. What troubles me is not the fact that they can't go on the piss or get laid, more the damage to their prospects, the ruination of futures, the fact that we may have been deprived a young person's enterprise or innovation - and all this on the back of Brexit.

 

Nonetheless, life will return to normal - and if things aren't quite the same as they were before, then perhaps in some ways that's a good thing. Life has taught me, brutally, to be thankful for what I have and never to take anything for granted. 

Edited 7 February 2021 by Line-X

[Super_horns]

Or just be thankful they haven’t been told to stay at home even when the lockdowns have been lifted without hardly going out incase they die.

 

In the summer we did have quite a relaxed time with pubs open and people allowed to meet up .

 

Everyone has had to sacrifice their normal lives for a while .

 

There shouldn’t be a competition as to see who has had it worse .

 

Not every youngster goes on the lash all night eating eating Kebabs anyway

 

i am sure most were quite happy to help protect an elderly or vulnerable relative or friend .

 

As I say hopefully won’t go on for too long if the vaccine works well .

Edited 7 February 2021 by Super_horns

[Sampson]

2 hours ago, reynard said:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/09/australians-stranded-overseas-say-slashing-arrival-caps-makes-returning-home-near-impossible

 

Not popular obviously but Australia has restricted the number returning and made them go into enforced quarantine for 14 days.

Yesterday not a single case in Australia and 30000 fans allowed at the Australian Open.

I understand what you are saying but things can and have been done elsewhere in the world.

Honestly think you're causing more hassel than it's worth that way though and you'd be setting up for a sudden surge if people coming home when they needed to.

 

Just think it should be easier to close the borders to everyone except British & Irish citizens or residents, as New Zealand and many other nations have done. That way the numbers should be small enough that we can keep track of them at least.

Edited 7 February 2021 by Sampson

[Buce]

2 hours ago, OrielCaziado said:

I am the same and want to know what the end target of all these restrictions is.  Is it zero cases?  You look at the panic mode the Western Australians went into for one single case and wonder will that be us next Autumn every time a case is found. Or do we have a figure that we are accepting will die each year through Covid related infections. As some posters have said there is a decent proportion of the population who love this new Covid restrictive life we now have. There’s plenty who don’t work or work in a sector that they think is safe from going under due to the economic crash that awaits us. There’s people like my neighbours who are retired, never go out socialising or abroad on holidays and are content watching TV and gardening so are totally unaffected.  

 

Hardly panic mode; they locked down for five days and contained it.

 

Doesn't really seem too big a price to pay to maintain 'normal' and save a few thousand lives along the way.

[OrielCaziado]

56 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

Hardly panic mode; they locked down for five days and contained it.

 

Doesn't really seem too big a price to pay to maintain 'normal' and save a few thousand lives along the way.

They still haven’t opened everything up as it was last week and they still have masks. My point was is that what will be happening to us next winter every time there’s a new outbreak.  Might seem a small price to pay depending on how much it personally affects you. 

[leicsmac]

7 minutes ago, OrielCaziado said:

They still haven’t opened everything up as it was last week and they still have masks. My point was is that what will be happening to us next winter every time there’s a new outbreak.  Might seem a small price to pay depending on how much it personally affects you. 

Depends if self-interest is everyone's guiding star at all times, I guess.