If we follow the rules the lockdown will end sooner.

Regardless of the issue over school attendance the lock down will not last more than two months give or take a week.

By mid May everything will be exhausted.

The pot of gold the government are paying out for furlough.

The economy

Peoples mental state

The point of the lockdown is to prevent the NHS being overwhelmed alongside an increased influx of vunerable patients.

At some point the descion would need to be made wether the NHS is strong enough, the short term v long term, the less vulnerable v those at risk.

 

Balancing that by isolating those in the high risk groups, again its impossible to say without knowing the true figures for how far the virus has spread. We don't know how many have had it and shown little or no symptoms.
What we can be sure of is staying in lockdown until we have a vaccine is not a realistic option. Doing so would cause far more harm in the long run than the virus ever could directly.

 

I think it was clear listening to Chris Whitty yesterday that the whole point is protecting the NHS and make sure everyone has the access to the medical care they need for best chance of survival.
The more I listen to him I believe the plan is still to let the virus spread. I'm not sure any other option actually exists.

 

Those figures are now found to be wrong.

 

We are in lock down for 18 months, some parts of that will be partial but until we find a vaccine we will be in some kind of lock down.

As soon as you release lockdown we will get another peak. If you don’t enforce a full lockdown then a significant amount of people are going to lose their lives (upwards of half a million some of whom are fit and healthy people remember).Letting it spread through communities isn’t an option irrespective of what some people think.

When 10 people who have been made to drive fcukking busses have got it and died in the last 2 weeks then how the **** do we expect anything to go back to some kind of normal.

Nobody is looking at China for anything. They basically locked people in their homes, it’s pretty much guaranteed they lied about numbers and the lengths they have gone to to try to stop the outbreak.

We are in this for the long haul.

 

How many people do we sacrifice by poor health, mental health, increased heart attacks, domestic violence, early deaths?

There's no right answer. Sacrifice millions in the long run to save hundreds of thousands in the short term.
Or sacrifice hundreds of thousands to save millions.

I wouldn't want to make the decision

 

The devastation that would cause would be worse than the virus itself. Moreover as keeps been pointed out by experts we have no idea how far reaching the Virus actually is.
The theory is you wouldn't continue to have praks as high as you went forward due to numbers of people previously infected rising. As such the number of people spreading the virus would presumably drop making the peaks lower and more manageable.
I don't disagree with you that some form of restrictions will stay in place for a long time.
It was interesting to here the CMO yesterday talk about the balance between tackling the virus and the deaths caused by the very means we do that.

 

No one knows how many people it will kill if everyone catches it because no one knows in any country in the world how many people have had it, the figure could be has high as 1% it could be as low as 0.01%. The only real "petra dish" study was on the cruise ship Diamond Princess - 3,711 passengers and crew - 700 were infected, over 3,000 tests were carried out, some people were tested multiple times - 18% of all infected people on the ship had no symptoms - the average age of the passengers was much higher then in the general population, 58, so the passengers included a large number of elderly people, who are most likely to develop severe disease if infected, so the share of asymptomatic people in the general population is likely to be even higher then 18%. Based on age adjusted figures if you take the Daimond Princess study and apply to the general population then the IFR (Infection Fatality Rate looks like >= 0.5%. The key takeaway is that it is much more deadly on older people, over 70s the fatality rate is 7.7% - so yes, you can point to the odd 13 year old who is tragically going to die from it, but if you can keep it away from the over 70s that 0.5% will be even lower.

 

How do you feed people under such circumstances. Who grows, harvests and distributes the food. What happens to the hundreds of thousands who need life saving operations in that time. What will be left of society when it's over? How many people do we kill by other means to save people dying from Covid-19?

 

That gives an idea. I have looked on You Tube for what I watched but can't see it yet. It was on CNN between midnight and 1 am last night with Erin Burnett. It was mentioned during the hour but aired right at the end of it. Being injected with the blood of someone who's beaten coronavirus is worth a look. But I suspect many tests would need to be trialed first such as who would it work on, who wouldn't it work on, how much blood you inject the person with, what ages it works better on, at what point in symptoms do you give it to someone (or before any are shown or before you've even ever had it after a antibody test).

 

Why would people have poorer health? Why would there by an increase in early deaths? If this is due to a recession, then it has been found (counter-intuitively) that the health of people actually improves in a recession. If it goes longer than 1-2 years, that does change.

I have heard that people say the death rate increases due to a recession, but is that all recessions, or just in particular countries. Is is more likely that the government response to a recession is more important than the recession itself? The death rate in the UK has increased over the last 5-6 years, at a time when the population is increasing but most of the increase is younger, fitter people, suggesting that more older people are dying in a time that was *officially* economically successful.

 

Love it or hate it globalisation has lifted billions out of abject poverty around the world - shutting down the world economy for 18 months will be bad for us, and will reduce life expectancy - but in other parts of the world it will kill millions.

 

Found what I was on about now.......

 

Poorer health from not working.
Poorer health from being sat inside watching TV.
Poorer health from gyms being locked
Poorer health from eating more
Poorer health from poor diet as people are eating whatever they've got in with less fresh food.

Recession does lead to higher deaths and does reduce the life expectancy it's been proven I believe. If for example this reduces my life expectancy by a massive 20 years that doesn't mean I will die this year (I hope) it means I'll be in the figures in 10 years or so but it will still mean 20 years gone

 

1 in 20 deaths due to Covid 19. But when you add in those dying from other things because their life saving treatment has been stopped, you should probably say the figure is much higher.

 

Improved health from less workplace stress
Improved health from less workplace accidents
From food, could be better (less takeaways, less money to spend on food, less alcohol, etc), could be worse (less fruit, vegetables, etc).
Improved health from taking exercise daily - no need to jump in a car, drive to the office and sit behind a desk for 8 hours before driving home and sitting in front of the tv drinking wine
Improved health from lower rates of smoking (too expensive)

There are many factors, and much of it is down to personal choice. Do you choose to sit in front of the tv or do you choose to get fresh air and exercise? (in a normal recession)

Have a read of this from a professor in economics

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...tween-the-economy-and-health?CMP=share_btn_tw

TLR, In a recession, suicides increase but many other causes of deaths decrease.

"And the long-term consequences? It wasn’t the sharp fall in GDP in 2008-9 that reduced, over the course of the next decade, life expectancy for the poorest in our society. It was how the government chose to address the economic fallout of the global financial crisis – by underfunding and understaffing the NHS and social care, and by eroding the basic welfare safety net that people depend on when times are hard. As we are now discovering, these were false economies that left us less, not more, prepared for this crisis."

 

Yes, and we've got 5 more years of Tory underfunding to look forward to - so more deaths. You cannot effectively implement house arrest for 60 million people for 18 months anyway, so its really a non-starter - we may get restrictions on and off - and I don't think we'll see the end to social distancing for a long time, but you keeping people inside for 18 months just isn't going to happen, and it will kill far more people then the virus.

 

Should have had a lockdown years ago its clearly good for us!

 

I understand all that mate, essential jobs will continue obviously but mass movement of the general public will be restrained or continue in lockdown.

What do you think we should do, going back to normal is going to obliterate the country.

The spread is too difficult to try to keep down without severe restrictions. The NHS will collapse, people will die at home, on the street, in hospitals, in care homes. The risk to go out far outweighs any other option.

I understand that this causes problems for the economy and for jobs but this is a global issue, it is far easier to manage the global economy out of a coma than 500k people who are in makeshift graves.

The danger of this virus is far bigger than anything we have seen for many lifetimes, it’s going to take a solution we have never seen before and that might mean a global injection of money from every country, this isn’t time for economical and trade wars between countries affected.

This 1% mortality rate that keeps getting talked about, is up for debate as well, because outseide of China and with negligible testing going off across the globe it looks far higher.

This is potentially going to kill millions of people around the world. Going back to work or trying to make people immune by letting it spread is the last thing we should do. We aren’t even sure yet if people do become immune after contraction. Yet people still want to get rid of the current sanctions.

You need to talk to people who are in the ICU units in the NHS and ask them what they think.

 

Surely it looks a lot higher becuase of the negligible testing?