The Covid repsonse - a question of balance

DISCLAIMER: COVID IS REAL AND IT'S RIGHT TO TAKE IT SERIOUSLY!!!

OK, now that's out the way - it's not SAGE or individual NHS Doctor's job to worry about anything outside their own professional area. For example, it's simply not in their remit to worry about the economy or unemployment or children's (lack of) education and their disastrous effects on families and individuals that will last for years. So, the fact that the NHS press their case hard for major restrictions is both natural and unsurprising.

BUT it IS the Government's job to weigh-up and balance ALL the risks, not just across physical health issues but also mental health and all the non-health issues within society as well.

This is NOT an either/or situation, even though many try to portray it as such; it's a question of balance; and I think the Government is now getting the balance wrong and that this will become clear over the next few years.

I understood it at first as, thanks to the disgraceful collusion between China & the WHO, we knew so little about Covid for months after it first started.
It could have turned out to be another Bubonic plague with 30-40% death rates but after the first lockdown, we had acquired enough knowledge to know that this was not the case.

You will note that for several months now, we've been bombarded not with the number of fatalities but with the number of 'cases'. 
The number of cases tells us nothing useful since it can be put down as a direct result of the increase in testing.

What WOULD be useful is to know the percentage of the population seriously ill or who have died due primarily to Covid (not a secondary cause).
Is that informaiton not available or is it being held back because it doesn't fit the narrative?
What would also be useful to know is, of this percentage, how many were NOT in an obviously vulnerable category. Again the answer will be statistically so small as to not fit the narrative.
So we are only being fed the information that fits the official narrative. Indeed, as happend with The Great Barrington Declaration (see here Great Barrington Declaration), social and mainstream media repress alternative views, even from acknowledged experts.

So where do I think things have gone wrong?
Well, we've known the vulnerable categories for more than 6 months now and, outside of those, we knew that most people who caught Covid either had no symptoms or at worst felt grotty for a few days as they would with a heavy cold or flu.
Yes, there were tragic exceptions but you can't make national policy based on a statistically small number of exceptions.

We knew enough to be able to identify those in the high-risk categories and could have targetted the huge sums of money specifically on helping them and their immediate family or carers to form safe-bubbles so as to live & interact safely, while everyone else took whatever precautions they felt appropriate for themselves but without bringing large swathes of the country to a virtual halt with all the economic, unemployment, mental health and many other knock-on effects it has brought.

Instead, we continue to have a heavy-handed catch-all policy which will, in my view, cause more deaths and suffering over the next few years than Covid itself.

Of course, those whose only job is to contain Covid will identify what they believe to be the safest & surest way to contain it.
Although there are disagreements across experts, the Government’s advisers have decided that full or partial lockdowns and major restricitons on movement and gatherings is the answer.
But even if we only think about health issues, what about non-Covid serious medical conditions; or medical conditions that are less serious but nevertheless very distressing or those that have now become serious because they’ve been side-lined for so long?
Here is just one example of this https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1338384574968115200?s=20 
And don’t get me started on the adverse affects on mental health or suicides or domestic abuse.

It's the continuing nature of the response focussing almost solely on Covid, and the lack of wider vision to see the damage being done to our people and society in these and many other areas that I have become more concerned about over time.
It has become counter-productive when weighed against all the other societal problems the covid policy response creates or exacerbates.

The 1918-1919 Spanish Flu killed over 225,000 in the UK. One year on from the first suspected UK Covid cases and we are at about 70,000 and in reality less as some who would have died anyway just happened to test positive for covid but that's not what ended their life, yet they were included in the figures - (all the better to scare you with?)
Of course, every death is tragic for the family concerned but Government policy has to be based on an assessment of ALL the risks to our country’s future, both medical and non-medical, not solely on the fear and emotion surrounding Covid fatalities.

The main reason that 12 months on, so many who are NOT in the known vulnerable categories are living in fear of Covid has little to do with its death or serious illness rate;
  
The main reason why so many more are now unemployed and that we have a groaning mountain of debt that will have to be paid back in higher taxes and lower real-terms pay has little to do with Covid's death or serious illness rate;

The main reason why so many individual and civil liberties that we thought inviolable, such as where we can can go, when and with whom, have been removed has little to do with Covid's death or serious illness rate; 

No, it’s down to the Government and their medical/scientific advisers' (fully backed by the Labour opposition & all other Westminster Parties) continuing to insist, aided and abetted by both mainstream and social media companies, that we need to treat Covid as if it’s the Black Death or Spanish Flu revisited, when it clearly isn’t as serious as those.

Covid is highly contagious but NOT highly deadly outside the vulnerable groups.

We should have spent the summer months identifying the vulnerable and their carers &/or families (which is easily done); made special provision for them to form safe bubbles but allowed the rest of the country to make their own decisions on the extent to which they mingle with others or use PPE.

We should have asked for retired Doctors & Nurses to volunteer to be trained on Covid-specific care and ready to work in the Nightingale Hospitals, thereby taking some pressure off the main NHS Hospitals.

As it is, I greatly fear that when the analysis is done in a few years time, it will be clear that the deaths and more widespread suffering caused by the lockdown policy response will be far greater than the number of those dying from Covid.

Short term decisions primarily made to avoid short-term criticism.

SIGH!!!

[At the time of writing this, there is talk of a possible new variant of the virus, so of course, if the facts change, I'll change my view but at the moment, I'm content with this analysis.]

Extremism and why we need to avoid it!

Those who feel that they do very nicely from the UK being in the EU or are fearful that their life may be made worse or are more ‘One-World’ than ‘Nation State’ in their view, are full of doom and gloom; they see their opponents as either stupid or evil or both. 

Those that feel that the way the EU operates is undemocratic and contributes to their life &/or our country’s life in a negative way just want out no matter what the consequences; they see their opponents as either stupid or evil or both. 

Both extremes are wrong as extreme views usually are because life and modern societies are massively complex.

In contrast, extreme views are very simplistic; they lack nuance or issue-specific judgement. Hence, they are often hypocritical and/or contradictory and therefore produce injustices of their own.

Convincing yourself either that a complex problem is in fact simple, or that simplistic unnuanced ideas will properly solve complex problems is just ridiculous; but worse it’s dangerous.

Dangerous because you either don’t change anything at all, including things that need to be changed; or you change too much and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

All or nothing style views/ideologies must be avoided whenever possible and strongly resisted when they arise. 

Of course, it’s much harder to think non-ideologically, open-mindedly, treating each issue on its merit and doing our best to tread a careful path through a maze fraught with dangers, but the alternative, simplistic extreme ideology, always leads to authoritarianism, then dictatorship and gulags/concentration camps and the loss of human rights and individual freedoms.

It would be retreating back into the past where 90% of people were serfs at the beck & call and whim of a small number with all the power; your only freedom is the freedom to do what you're told, on pain of imprisonment, torture or death.

So let’s make the effort not to go down this path, shall we?
Let's strongly resist the extremists, whether they be governments, large corporations or powerful lobby groups and get back to good faith reasonable interactions where we disagree.