maccydee wrote:ealing_ayatollah wrote:Bluebina wrote:ealing_ayatollah wrote:Bluebina wrote:
That was the original plan that Dom came up with heard immunity let the old die,
Not quite sure how you get letting the old die from protecting and isolating the vulnerable?
Protecting and isolating the vulnerable - OK how?
Much of what we have done just inverted.
It really wouldn't have been that hard to have reinforced the shielding program and provide financial and practical assistance for those within the program keeping them isolated as was the whole point of the program.
If the whole point of lockdown was to protect those particularly vulnerable to it, why try to protect those who are highly unlikely to have severe symptoms?
Thats just illogical. It makes far more sense to focus attention and resources on a smaller, more manageable demographic.
To your other points, as I mentioned in my other post the NHS would have been under less burden if there was less panic - use of the 111 system, more effective hospital management and a different communication approach could all have mitigated that burden, my earlier post covered that in detail so I won't cover that ground again but point you back there.
Final point, slight correction you say 127,000 dead so far, to be accurate that should be up to 127k who died with not of COVID.
Again it is the simple matter of perspective. 127k dead sounds like a big scary number, the reality is it is evidently inflated by the government's own admission of what is classed as a Covid death.
Problem is isolating the most vulnerable and trusting the rest just wouldn’t work. It would get to those most vulnerable.
The measures taken were to limit the spread. They can never stop the spread.
Mac - I think this is where we meet an impasse regarding differing views in how it could have been handled - but totally respect yours and other's position and accept I'm in the minority on this
The way I see it if we really boil it down to its barest elements there are only really two approaches that have been adopted.
On one side it is the authoritarian approach that has leveraged fear, that we and most nations have adopted. It is the ultimate expression of the nanny state. We cannot trust you to do the right thing, so we will make rules to keep you in check. It is how you deal with children.
On the other hand there was the more trust-based approach adopted by Sweden and some US states like Florida. Which fostered a similar approach to what I would have advocated for more along the lines of we are in this together if we are all sensible, we can beat this together. It treats the citizens as adults.
I honestly believe that there was a definite moment where we could have taken something akin to the second approach after the initial lockdown and we would have suffered less and established a truly incredible level of social cohesion and togetherness. Instead, for various reasons, we are now perhaps more divided as a society than we have ever been in my lifetime.
Perhaps we're not sensible enough as a society here in the UK to have adopted such an approach, the Swedes do have a natural understanding of collective responsibility - it is why they have one of the best welfare systems in the world yet it is rarely abused like it enough is here.
I just think that if the government gave us a bit of responsibility for our own lives, and had grown-up discussions with us, trusted us they would have been surprised.
Remember there were hundreds of thousands of volunteers (myself included) turned away by the NHS because they weren't needed as there were hundreds of thousands already there to help. The same goes for fruit picking jobs, which the government deemed to be beneath the British citizen so they shipped in Eastern European labour instead - but the volunteers were there.
I totally accept I'm potentially being naively idealistic on this, but I just can't help believe we would have responded better than most expect if the messaging had been different.
Anyway, derailed this off the original topic of Vaccine Passports by accident so my apologies for that chaps.