>>It's a shame some of those who are being somewhat blase about lockdown don't see this kind of stuff.
Trying to be delicate...
Lockdown has nothing to do with preventing you getting the disease. Everybody will get it, or at least be exposed to it, sooner or later.
Lockdown has nothing to do with stopping you dying from the virus. Everybody going to die from the virus will die from the virus.
Lockdown is to prevent the third category; people who would not have died who may die from coronavirus or something else due to the lack of available medical care. And for that it was, and to an extent is, essential.
It does that only by slowing down the spread to that the system isn't hit with too many in one go.
I'm not sure what people think Johnson's Government has done wrong. NOBODY has died through the lack of medical care, the NHS got close but never actually ran out of capacity, everybody who needed care got it, and they are opening the country as quickly as they can.
People keep saying "Oh but 40,000 people died". Exactly how do these critics think that could have been prevented or reduced? Perhaps infection from virus today could have been prevented, but it would simply happen tomorrow.
Lockdown or quarantine cannot achieve more than that unless you stay in it forever. Just one person infected the world. So if after quarantine one person in the country is positive, or just 1 positive person comes through the borders, then it spreads again.
Unless and until everybody has had it and there is sufficient herd immunity or an effect vaccine is invented. That's it.
What more exactly do people think the Government should have done?
Nobody died through the lack of health care. Sounds like a perfect result to me.
Releasing quarantine is a matter of juggling the release of quarantine with the increase of infection rates. And there *will* be an increase in infection rates, it's just a matter of keeping it below the capacity of the health service.
So far.
Only a vaccine will change the equation. Or time.
On a slightly different matter people talk a lot about how age is the significant factor. It actually isn't, at least not directly. It is a matter of other conditions. Though of course the older one is the more likely one is to have other conditions.
Thus there is a point, and perhaps we are at that point, where we believe the health system can cope with a significant increase in infection and so we allow it to spread, and focus on keeping the particularly vulnerable as protected as possible.
In the end, I'm not sure people's reaction to quarantine is as important any more. In fact, given that the Government originally worked with a model of only 50% effectiveness, and planned for that, I'm sure that not only is the current behaviour expected, it is also desired.
And I haven't heard of any reports of people being reckless around vulnerable people. Mostly people seem to be quite sensible about that aspect.
They're just being reckless around other fundamentally safe people. And that is probably desirable.
What we do need to do is start allowing people to make their own decisions; do you want to be with a loved one when they die of Coronavirus even knowing the risk, perhaps small, that you may contract it? i think most people are capable of that decision.
Of course, now that the media and politicians have returned to their default behaviour, it's all nit-picking and scoring points. Long past the point we can expect any sense out of that lot.
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