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Yeah, "happy" was the wrong term - shouldn't have thrown that in.
I just think it is significantly more complicated than those posts make out - like the negative aspects of lock down will be mitigated by somehow lifting it.
Imagine the negative impact on mental health if, post lockdown, you end up infecting a relative or family friend and they die.
This virus is pretty awful, so there is no alternative simple world where we open things up, go back to relative normality and only some old people die. I think it is a lot more complicated than that.
Scrabble-
Yeah, "happy" was the wrong term - shouldn't have thrown that in.
I wasn't being deliberately narky about that, but I think it's a interesting example of how our thinking about this can be shaped by our (completely normal) emotional response to really hard choices.
I just think it is significantly more complicated than those posts make out - like the negative aspects of lock down will be mitigated by somehow lifting it.
Well at one level... of course they will? If lockdown has negative affects and we lift it, then those negative effects cease (or at least cease accumulating). There will be other consequences, but the effects of lockdown can be removed by removing the lockdown.
Imagine the negative impact on mental health if, post lockdown, you end up infecting a relative or family friend and they die.
This virus is pretty awful, so there is no alternative simple world where we open things up, go back to relative normality and only some old people die. I think it is a lot more complicated than that.It is a hugely complicated situation and there is a lot of work going on to understand the social, medical and psychological ramifications. Things won't be quite the same again, but I think there will be a relative return to normality with Covid-19 as an endemic disease (like flu) with a vaccination against it. The question is, how do we get there with minimum damage overall.
ffm
We're learning about this all the time, and of course deaths aren't limited to the over-70s, but my impression is that the vast majority of deaths still fall in that demographic.
Of course I'm not happy. Nobody is happy in this situation, because all the decisions in this situation are shit, but that doesn't mean that we should always default to minimising the short-term pain, without considering the long-term implications. It's not less valid to ask whether you're happy to damage the long-term wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of children. We've entered lockdown and it feels like people expect that there will be some sort of eureka moment when somehow this all gets sorted and we can go back to life as normal; however, while we're waiting for that to happen we may quietly pass the point where the negative effects of the lockdown surpass the positives.
This is also important. In addition, the problem of the NHS not being able to treat non-Covid patients has to be factored in.