The effects of the virus will also be economic. Treating the ill costs money that could have been spent elsewhere. People who are ill are not at work, and people who die are neither working nor spending.
Yes, this is true (and completely ignored by the anti-lockdown brigade). It is also true, I think, that if people start dropping like flies in a particular area, the remaining people wouldn't just blindly keep on with their normal lives in service to the local economy.
Apparently some Republican politicicans don't agree with me.
The effects of the virus will also be economic. Treating the ill costs money that could have been spent elsewhere. People who are ill are not at work, and people who die are neither working nor spending.
Yes, this is true (and completely ignored by the anti-lockdown brigade). It is also true, I think, that if people start dropping like flies in a particular area, the remaining people wouldn't just blindly keep on with their normal lives in service to the local economy.
Apparently some Republican politicicans don't agree with me.
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies. What is asinine is that even if SARS-CoV-2 ends up not being that virulent, we do not know that now, but we do know that viruses can be that bad.
If you're prepared to physically isolate for 2-3 weeks in your second home? Seems like the only reasonable thing to me.
I don't follow. The reason I didn't head to my second home is because getting there would have involved close contact with considerable numbers of other people. Had I been infected and asymptomatic when I left, I could well have passed the virus on during the journey, and been inadvertently responsible for killing someone. Self-isolating for a fortnight once I arrived wouldn't have changed that.
This is mitigated by travelling by individual car, if you have one. However, a full 50% of Parisians don't have one. That's why so many of them left by train. Also the Parisians who have both a car and a second home are already those living most comfortably, on the whole. I have far more sympathy with a student living alone in 12m squared who decided to take the risk of travelling by train to their parents' place in the days before lockdown began than with a family living in a spacious apartment with a balcony who buggered off to their country house in their private car. The latter are using their privileges to have it cushy, and I find that extremely unfair, even before you get to the questions of spreading contagion to rural areas and putting extra pressure on their hospitals. (The fleeing Parisians also emptied the supermarkets when they arrived in the countryside, and the locals were annoyed.) This is a question of collective responsibility, and I don't think those who already have the greatest advantages should be using them to take unnecessary risks.
the quality of that summary is indicated by the fact that the writers try to use the damage to the economy caused by lockdown as part of the argument discrediting the notion of exponentional infection growth, as if the lethality of the virus might be sensitive to economic arguments.
Yeah - this kind of conflation of data and wishes removes any shred of credibility the argument may have had. Any decision about what to do about the virus has to consider both the effects of the virus and the effects (economic and otherwise) of the lockdown, but the assessment of the effects of the virus and the economic consequences of lockdown have to be independent.
It's getting close to the fallacy of an appeal to consequences, or if you like Latin, argumentum ad consequentiam, thus, because I don't like the effects of the lockdown, therefore its mathematical foundation is false. I don't know if any skeptic goes that far, but some get pretty close. I was going to hare off, and check more closely, but I can't face wading through pages of right wing/libertarian propaganda.
Barnabas62:
We're you on NPfIT? Small world if you were, especially if you were with CSC in the NW.
BTW I was wrong about Google. Accordingto what I've read, they also use Bluetooth.
If you're prepared to physically isolate for 2-3 weeks in your second home? Seems like the only reasonable thing to me.
Did you not see the bit about how your second home is most likely in a location with insufficient hospital capacity to start with? If you (person from a larger community) go to [small village] and fall sick to the point where you need hospitalization, you've just taken a bed (ventilator, skilled nurse, etc.) away from the locals. Better to stay where you are, where you are counted as one of the local population and (hopefully) better provided for.
Now, if you can bring your own hospital bed, nurse, ventilator, vent tech, etc. with you, by all means!
If you're prepared to physically isolate for 2-3 weeks in your second home? Seems like the only reasonable thing to me.
Did you not see the bit about how your second home is most likely in a location with insufficient hospital capacity to start with? If you (person from a larger community) go to [small village] and fall sick to the point where you need hospitalization, you've just taken a bed (ventilator, skilled nurse, etc.) away from the locals. Better to stay where you are, where you are counted as one of the local population and (hopefully) better provided for.
Now, if you can bring your own hospital bed, nurse, ventilator, vent tech, etc. with you, by all means!
Even worse, here you'd be taking up one of two beds in a temporary ward if you needed oxygen and you'd need to be flown by air ambulance to the mainland if you needed ventilation. If we had anything like the usual summer numbers of second home owners up just now we'd have serious problems.
Did you not see the bit about how your second home is most likely in a location with insufficient hospital capacity to start with? If you (person from a larger community) go to [small village] and fall sick to the point where you need hospitalization, you've just taken a bed (ventilator, skilled nurse, etc.) away from the locals. Better to stay where you are, where you are counted as one of the local population and (hopefully) better provided for.
Now, if you can bring your own hospital bed, nurse, ventilator, vent tech, etc. with you, by all means!
What matters is not the hospital capacity but the hospital capacity relative to the infection rate. If the place you're thinking of leaving is such a hotbed of the virus that the proportion of the population infected is twice the national average (not unlikely for a city where people live closer together) and the place you're thinking of going to is only 25% under-provided with hospital beds (no idea what the real statistic is) then the hospital there may be under less pressure.
Besides which, I have to question the assumption that the resources of one part of the country rightly belong only to the people of that part of the country. Being part of the same country should mean some sense that we're all in this together. Most of my taxes are spent by the national government for the benefit of everyone in the country. Is the country/state a better place if each county has to fund (and thus "owns") its own hospitals, or if resources are pooled ?
(Appreciating that the extent of public vs private funding and central vs local government varies across different countries...)
Besides which, I have to question the assumption that the resources of one part of the country rightly belong only to the people of that part of the country.
Oh, get over your legalistic nonsense. It's not about what "rightly belongs" to who - it's about what provision is available. Popular tourist areas have their populations increase dramatically when the tourists come. In general, tourists don't require much in the way of healthcare - nobody makes a routine doctor's appointment while they're on holiday, people who are sick don't tend to go on holiday ('cause nobody enjoys a holiday whilst they're sick), and the elderly and infirm tend not to travel so much. Plus, tourists are only there part of the year.
All this means that the local healthcare provision is sized for the full-time population, not the tourist peak. If a loaf of tourists show up and start getting sick, all this breaks.
It's not about rights, or about what belongs to who - it's about not screwing things up for everyone.
It's not who owns the resource, of course the nation does (in the UK at least) and if you get sick the nearest hospital will treat you. But, those services are planned around a particular population profile, if there are a significant number of people in the region in excess of that then those services will creak. Especially when social distancing will have impacted the ability of some services to function as intended - how many pharmacies will examine a patient with a minor rash? If you need to get to the nearest A&E how will you do that? Normally you might take a taxi if not an emergency, or call for an ambulance (which will have a long way to come). Obviously no one wants potential covid cases in their taxi, the risk of transmission to the driver and subsequent passengers is too high, assuming you can find a taxi to call; so that means more ambulance call outs (remember each one of those is a significant response time compared to urban areas) and the ambulance then needs to be disinfected before it next goes out.
And if the area has a higher than average level of infection (:cough: South Lakeland), then it’s health service, designed around its usual population profile, will already be struggling even if the absolute level of infection is lower than in higher density areas.
And it's not infection rate. It is, how many people are going to need that freaking ICU bed for any freaking purpose, during the time you are there? If there are only four ICU beds (which might be generous for some rural areas), you could easily be the one who fills up the last one, regardless of whether the other beds have strokes or COVID in them. And infection rates do not remain stable (Dear God, I wish they did, we'd be in so much less trouble just now). Read up on "exponential growth" and consider how that impacts your tiny rural hospital--if, in fact, there is such a thing at all.
Barnabas62:
We're you on NPfIT? Small world if you were, especially if you were with CSC in the NW.
BTW I was wrong about Google. Accordingto what I've read, they also use Bluetooth.
Perhaps a few less acronyms would make for a more intelligible post.
We are just starting to come off a very tight lockdown here. For the first time in weeks, we were able to sit down at a café for our morning mid-walk coffee. Restaurants can open with a limited number of patrons, so small (I think 10) that I doubt many will take up the opportunity. But our infection rates have remained low - just over 7000 cases, and exactly 99 deaths. Sadly, over 10 of these have been at one Anglicare nursing home, where a staff member introduced the virus very early in the piece.
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
This is an.important point to have made. Some parts of my Canadian province have had no infections. There's only 6 deaths in the province, 138 active cases. People wear masks if things are crowded.
As for the trump related issues: no idea. Hope your country recovers.
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
One of his sons, Jr I think, made the statement that the whole thing will immediately end after the election. Evidently, it is a democratic plot to discredit his father. There will be some of his followers that believe it. Oh, it was Eric, hard to tell one idiot from the other.
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
Yes.
And, to some extent, that’s a very understandable reaction. Even very empathetic people (not the potus, he wouldn’t know empathy if he fell over it) can feel a disconnect with news broadcasts.
When my dear friend and neighbour of 40 years died of it three weeks ago and a good friend was very ill and still can’t work due to fatigue in recovery (she’s a teacher) - that brought it home in a very real way. I confess to being far more careful since then.
I don't think hospital beds were treated as local property in any sense here. Indeed the way French hospitals in the worst-affected regions were kept from saturation of the kind seen in Italy was by ferrying patients around the country. In Mulhouse, a triage unit was set up whose only job was to free up ICU beds by identifying patients stable enough to be moved and finding places for them in other regions. In practice this usually meant patients who had started to recover but were still too unwell to leave the ICU.
However, moving to your second home is in itself a potential vector of infection. It only takes one person to start a cluster, and getting on a train to your country home and then stripping the shelves of the local supermarket like a horde of ravening locusts is one way to do it. The virus moves when people move.
By all means, please continue, Martin! I need to read *reasonable* discussions on this stuff and SOF is one of the few places I've found where that's actually a possibility!!
In fact, call me delusional (many have!), but to paraphrase Pam in the US version of "The Office," I'm convinced that I feel God in this Chili's - - er, forum -- today! 😉
It's interesting that a kind of culture war has emerged over lockdown. The skeptics tend to be right wing, and in the UK, pro-Brexit. A lot of them hate big government, and hence see lockdown as tyrannical. Some of them equate covid with flu, and tend to treat mass deaths as no big deal. I suppose there is a cognitive dissonance in seeing a Tory govt take such Keynesian measures, but now the skeptics are hotfoot in urging schools back, etc. They adore Sweden, for some reason, well, no lockdown.
I'd quite like to see the overlap between the "sacrifice the old" restart-the-economy brigade and the "every life is sacred" anti-abortion crowd. I suspect there's a correlation...
I've also seen people question whether there's a correlation between the "we don't need to wear face coverings and socially isolate, because God will protect us" crowd and the "we need to be able carry guns to church to protect ourselves" people.
I'd quite like to see the overlap between the "sacrifice the old" restart-the-economy brigade and the "every life is sacred" anti-abortion crowd. I suspect there's a correlation...
Funny thing is they're also usually the anti-assisted dying crowd.
Forgive me if I question their consistency somewhat.
I think there's probably some overlap in the US. Both are about fear, identity, rightness, and safety. But I don't think it's necessarily a total overlap. Done as a Venn diagram, the center has people who are members of both groups--but they're not the only people in the diagram.
One of the difficulties with depending on X (Someone, or lower-case someone, or something) to protect you, to get you out of jams is that it doesn't always work. People who truly believe in X, try to follow the rules, etc. are still wide open to bad occurrences--and that adds an extra dimension of trauma when something occurs. (Whether X is Deity, seatbelts, political beliefs, sports teams, etc.)
It can take a lot of work and personal restructuring to find a manageable way to deal with that. And it's hard to understand that before it happens to you. People want to be safe.
If you can get hold of dried yeast, you can take some into sugary water and let it grow. Use some of it for your bread and leave the rest growing. That will allow a small quantity of dried yeast last a lot longer. The trick is finding the yeast in the first place ...
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
So why do they think the world *outside* the US is locking down ? What do they think the Italians were dying of ?
If you can get hold of dried yeast, you can take some into sugary water and let it grow. Use some of it for your bread and leave the rest growing. That will allow a small quantity of dried yeast last a lot longer. The trick is finding the yeast in the first place ...
quetzlcoatl:
As regards your in depth socio-analysis of self-confessed lockdown skeptics:
It's interesting that a kind of culture war has emerged over lockdown.
That's certainly true. It has become a rallying point for libertarians.
The skeptics tend to be right wing, and in the UK, pro-Brexit.
Maybe but not in my case. Right-left is very tired as a distinction. Had it not been taken over by the far left, I would have preferred Labour, which is why I am sore with the likes of Red Len who has contributed more than any Tory to keeping them out. I am 100% anti-brexit which is why I joined and campaigned for the Lib-Dems who then ran a crap campaign.
A lot of them hate big government, and hence see lockdown as tyrannical.
The two are not related. I do not want small government, and most of the governments imposing lockdown are right of centre. Sweden's is left of centre. But I do see the lockdown as a dangerous move towards tyranny, although to say tout court that it tyrannical is to weaken the case through over-statement. Skeptics want openness of information and open debate and are much more nervous about government encroachment that lefties. OK if there is enough good reason, but we want to know why decisions were taken. (e.g. 2m as opposed to the scientists view of 1m followed by France, Spain etc). Who made that decision? Why? What was the basis of total lockdown? Not Report 9 which does not advocate it explicitly. I'd really like to know.
Some of them equate covid with flu, and tend to treat mass deaths as no big deal.
I know of nobody that has equated COVID with flu, but your second point is relevant, though again overstated. What is true is that skeptics think it rational to set lives against economic damage, which of course they believe will result in loss of life, but cannot prove the extent of that. Also setting saved lives against ruined lives. I admit I do not buy in to the sanctity of life, which I suspect most on this ship do, which is why any debate as to the legitimacy of any policy which would lead to more deaths is ruled out on principle. That's the sort of thing sanctity of life means. And of course I admit that lockdown reduced the number of deaths in the short term.
I suppose there is a cognitive dissonance in seeing a Tory govt take such Keynesian measures, but now the skeptics are hotfoot in urging schools back, etc.
I don''t see the connection and anyhow I have no general beef with Keynes. I think children are suffering socially (most important) and educationally for no adequate reason.
They adore Sweden, for some reason, well, no lockdown.
Well precisely because of no lockdown and the accompanying fact that these decisions are not in the gift of politicians.
In fact there is an irony in that the Brexiteers were banging on about not being governed by unelected technocrats, and isn't Sweden marvellous! . . because the key decisions on COVID were taken by, ...err..., unelected experts.
People are not dropping like flies now. They are betting that people will not be dropping like flies in the future. It is not about whether a lot of people will die, but whether a lot of people will see a lot of other people dies.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
So why do they think the world *outside* the US is locking down ? What do they think the Italians were dying of ?
It isn't; they aren't. It's all fake news and crisis actors.
Anteater, interesting to read your comments, most of which seem uncontroversial. I assume your "in depth" comment is sarcastic. I was surprised that you think the covid/flu comparison uncommon, I seem to see it all over, it is one of Bolsonaro's pet phrases, although I think he called it a little sniffle. I thought Trump did at first, a little difficult now with 90 000 dead.
stripping the shelves of the local supermarket like a horde of ravening locusts
Hmm, I take it you still can't find any wholemeal flour either?
I have a surfeit of wholemeal and plain flour -- yeast on the other hand ..
You can get a sourdough starter fro Etsy:)
I started my own -- it's a bit of a faff but I managed to create a small loaf yesterday. Would still prefer yeast from an ease of use/time perspective though.
If you can get hold of dried yeast, you can take some into sugary water and let it grow. Use some of it for your bread and leave the rest growing. That will allow a small quantity of dried yeast last a lot longer. The trick is finding the yeast in the first place ...
Thank you for the tip! I have dried yeast to last about three more weeks then I’m sunk. My tummy reacts badly to bought bread (the preservatives). My Brexshit prepping means I still have plenty of flour, I shall buy the expensive stuff off Etsy when I run out.
I've just come into this discussion and get the impression that the anti-lockdown position is regarded as right-wing, libertarian, and know-nothing. Is it just possible, however, that the non-general lockdown approach of Sweden might prove to have been the most sensible approach, based on the science, of course?
As I understand it there have been two or three coronavirus deaths among the under 18s, and the likelihood of dying for those under 50 or even 60 is still pretty remote. Out of a total of 65 million people in the UK there have been around 35,000 coronavirus deaths. Of those deaths around 40 per cent have been in care homes. To address the problem we have had a lockdown that is trashing the economy and creating a collateral of people dying of other conditions and suffering mental health problems.
Is there not case for suggesting that it would have been better to quarantine the care homes immediately, including staff and residents, and for the government to recruit staff to fill the gaps created by those who could no longer move from home to home, and the advise the elderly and those with certain medical conditions to self-isolate? Allied to that for the government to test, track and trace. There might also be a case for restricting mass sporting events and the like. This would allow much of the economy to continue to function.
The problem, of course, is that in the UK, at least, the administrative infrastructure for such an approach has been dismantled and preparations for such a crisis wilfully ignored.
Perhaps at the end of the day the lockdown has been about saving the NHS from being overwhelmed, but how many lives it has saved from coronavirus might prove another matter entirely.
Comments
Yes, this is true (and completely ignored by the anti-lockdown brigade). It is also true, I think, that if people start dropping like flies in a particular area, the remaining people wouldn't just blindly keep on with their normal lives in service to the local economy.
Apparently some Republican politicicans don't agree with me.
I don't follow. The reason I didn't head to my second home is because getting there would have involved close contact with considerable numbers of other people. Had I been infected and asymptomatic when I left, I could well have passed the virus on during the journey, and been inadvertently responsible for killing someone. Self-isolating for a fortnight once I arrived wouldn't have changed that.
This is mitigated by travelling by individual car, if you have one. However, a full 50% of Parisians don't have one. That's why so many of them left by train. Also the Parisians who have both a car and a second home are already those living most comfortably, on the whole. I have far more sympathy with a student living alone in 12m squared who decided to take the risk of travelling by train to their parents' place in the days before lockdown began than with a family living in a spacious apartment with a balcony who buggered off to their country house in their private car. The latter are using their privileges to have it cushy, and I find that extremely unfair, even before you get to the questions of spreading contagion to rural areas and putting extra pressure on their hospitals. (The fleeing Parisians also emptied the supermarkets when they arrived in the countryside, and the locals were annoyed.) This is a question of collective responsibility, and I don't think those who already have the greatest advantages should be using them to take unnecessary risks.
It's getting close to the fallacy of an appeal to consequences, or if you like Latin, argumentum ad consequentiam, thus, because I don't like the effects of the lockdown, therefore its mathematical foundation is false. I don't know if any skeptic goes that far, but some get pretty close. I was going to hare off, and check more closely, but I can't face wading through pages of right wing/libertarian propaganda.
OK. Didn't think of that.
We're you on NPfIT? Small world if you were, especially if you were with CSC in the NW.
BTW I was wrong about Google. Accordingto what I've read, they also use Bluetooth.
Did you not see the bit about how your second home is most likely in a location with insufficient hospital capacity to start with? If you (person from a larger community) go to [small village] and fall sick to the point where you need hospitalization, you've just taken a bed (ventilator, skilled nurse, etc.) away from the locals. Better to stay where you are, where you are counted as one of the local population and (hopefully) better provided for.
Now, if you can bring your own hospital bed, nurse, ventilator, vent tech, etc. with you, by all means!
Even worse, here you'd be taking up one of two beds in a temporary ward if you needed oxygen and you'd need to be flown by air ambulance to the mainland if you needed ventilation. If we had anything like the usual summer numbers of second home owners up just now we'd have serious problems.
What matters is not the hospital capacity but the hospital capacity relative to the infection rate. If the place you're thinking of leaving is such a hotbed of the virus that the proportion of the population infected is twice the national average (not unlikely for a city where people live closer together) and the place you're thinking of going to is only 25% under-provided with hospital beds (no idea what the real statistic is) then the hospital there may be under less pressure.
Besides which, I have to question the assumption that the resources of one part of the country rightly belong only to the people of that part of the country. Being part of the same country should mean some sense that we're all in this together. Most of my taxes are spent by the national government for the benefit of everyone in the country. Is the country/state a better place if each county has to fund (and thus "owns") its own hospitals, or if resources are pooled ?
(Appreciating that the extent of public vs private funding and central vs local government varies across different countries...)
Oh, get over your legalistic nonsense. It's not about what "rightly belongs" to who - it's about what provision is available. Popular tourist areas have their populations increase dramatically when the tourists come. In general, tourists don't require much in the way of healthcare - nobody makes a routine doctor's appointment while they're on holiday, people who are sick don't tend to go on holiday ('cause nobody enjoys a holiday whilst they're sick), and the elderly and infirm tend not to travel so much. Plus, tourists are only there part of the year.
All this means that the local healthcare provision is sized for the full-time population, not the tourist peak. If a loaf of tourists show up and start getting sick, all this breaks.
It's not about rights, or about what belongs to who - it's about not screwing things up for everyone.
Perhaps a few less acronyms would make for a more intelligible post.
We are just starting to come off a very tight lockdown here. For the first time in weeks, we were able to sit down at a café for our morning mid-walk coffee. Restaurants can open with a limited number of patrons, so small (I think 10) that I doubt many will take up the opportunity. But our infection rates have remained low - just over 7000 cases, and exactly 99 deaths. Sadly, over 10 of these have been at one Anglicare nursing home, where a staff member introduced the virus very early in the piece.
Hope you don't mind me jumping in, but this is a really important point, and something that keeps me awake at night.
A little background: I'm married to a conspiracy-believing super-Trumper, who is certain that this whole thing is just a plot to keep Donnie from getting reelected in November, as do many of our family members and friends.
My concern is that the reason so many of these folks are not accepting this virus as a real danger is because they haven't seen it hitting anyone they know. And because it isn't affecting *them,* it simply can't be a real thing.
And even if they *do* see bodies in the streets, they'll find some way to dismiss them. They were just the homeless; they had underlying conditions; they weren't anyone we know. Like Pauline Kael, the movie critic who famously said she was shocked when Nixon was reelected in a landslide, because "no one I know voted for him."
https://theconversation.com/the-costs-of-the-shutdown-are-overestimated-theyre-outweighed-by-its-1-trillion-benefit-138303
This is an.important point to have made. Some parts of my Canadian province have had no infections. There's only 6 deaths in the province, 138 active cases. People wear masks if things are crowded.
As for the trump related issues: no idea. Hope your country recovers.
Oh, it was Eric, hard to tell one idiot from the other.
Darn!
Yes.
And, to some extent, that’s a very understandable reaction. Even very empathetic people (not the potus, he wouldn’t know empathy if he fell over it) can feel a disconnect with news broadcasts.
When my dear friend and neighbour of 40 years died of it three weeks ago and a good friend was very ill and still can’t work due to fatigue in recovery (she’s a teacher) - that brought it home in a very real way. I confess to being far more careful since then.
Do you think the Democrats could give the rest of the world a break, seeing as we can't vote in your election?
(We have our own on September 19 - the anniversary of Women's Suffrage here
Just a thought.
However, moving to your second home is in itself a potential vector of infection. It only takes one person to start a cluster, and getting on a train to your country home and then stripping the shelves of the local supermarket like a horde of ravening locusts is one way to do it. The virus moves when people move.
Hmm, I take it you still can't find any wholemeal flour either?
You can get it on Etsy - £6 a bag.
I'm not Martin, but I think it goes like this.
I have a surfeit of wholemeal and plain flour -- yeast on the other hand ..
Actually, I'd be interested in Martin's take on it. I've sometimes agreed with him in other topics! 😁
By all means, please continue, Martin! I need to read *reasonable* discussions on this stuff and SOF is one of the few places I've found where that's actually a possibility!!
In fact, call me delusional (many have!), but to paraphrase Pam in the US version of "The Office," I'm convinced that I feel God in this Chili's - - er, forum -- today! 😉
(No pressure!)
Funny thing is they're also usually the anti-assisted dying crowd.
Forgive me if I question their consistency somewhat.
I think there's probably some overlap in the US. Both are about fear, identity, rightness, and safety. But I don't think it's necessarily a total overlap. Done as a Venn diagram, the center has people who are members of both groups--but they're not the only people in the diagram.
One of the difficulties with depending on X (Someone, or lower-case someone, or something) to protect you, to get you out of jams is that it doesn't always work. People who truly believe in X, try to follow the rules, etc. are still wide open to bad occurrences--and that adds an extra dimension of trauma when something occurs. (Whether X is Deity, seatbelts, political beliefs, sports teams, etc.)
It can take a lot of work and personal restructuring to find a manageable way to deal with that. And it's hard to understand that before it happens to you. People want to be safe.
You can get a sourdough starter fro Etsy:)
So why do they think the world *outside* the US is locking down ? What do they think the Italians were dying of ?
Bottom of a bottle of BCA.
As regards your in depth socio-analysis of self-confessed lockdown skeptics:
That's certainly true. It has become a rallying point for libertarians. Maybe but not in my case. Right-left is very tired as a distinction. Had it not been taken over by the far left, I would have preferred Labour, which is why I am sore with the likes of Red Len who has contributed more than any Tory to keeping them out. I am 100% anti-brexit which is why I joined and campaigned for the Lib-Dems who then ran a crap campaign.
The two are not related. I do not want small government, and most of the governments imposing lockdown are right of centre. Sweden's is left of centre. But I do see the lockdown as a dangerous move towards tyranny, although to say tout court that it tyrannical is to weaken the case through over-statement. Skeptics want openness of information and open debate and are much more nervous about government encroachment that lefties. OK if there is enough good reason, but we want to know why decisions were taken. (e.g. 2m as opposed to the scientists view of 1m followed by France, Spain etc). Who made that decision? Why? What was the basis of total lockdown? Not Report 9 which does not advocate it explicitly. I'd really like to know. I know of nobody that has equated COVID with flu, but your second point is relevant, though again overstated. What is true is that skeptics think it rational to set lives against economic damage, which of course they believe will result in loss of life, but cannot prove the extent of that. Also setting saved lives against ruined lives. I admit I do not buy in to the sanctity of life, which I suspect most on this ship do, which is why any debate as to the legitimacy of any policy which would lead to more deaths is ruled out on principle. That's the sort of thing sanctity of life means. And of course I admit that lockdown reduced the number of deaths in the short term. I don''t see the connection and anyhow I have no general beef with Keynes. I think children are suffering socially (most important) and educationally for no adequate reason.
Well precisely because of no lockdown and the accompanying fact that these decisions are not in the gift of politicians.
In fact there is an irony in that the Brexiteers were banging on about not being governed by unelected technocrats, and isn't Sweden marvellous! . . because the key decisions on COVID were taken by, ...err..., unelected experts.
It isn't; they aren't. It's all fake news and crisis actors.
I started my own -- it's a bit of a faff but I managed to create a small loaf yesterday. Would still prefer yeast from an ease of use/time perspective though.
Thank you for the tip! I have dried yeast to last about three more weeks then I’m sunk. My tummy reacts badly to bought bread (the preservatives). My Brexshit prepping means I still have plenty of flour, I shall buy the expensive stuff off Etsy when I run out.
Off to start a thread about it
Here it is - https://tinyurl.com/y9uqy2sw
Please excuse my levity, but this juxtaposition was the best giggle I've had for a long time.
I've just come into this discussion and get the impression that the anti-lockdown position is regarded as right-wing, libertarian, and know-nothing. Is it just possible, however, that the non-general lockdown approach of Sweden might prove to have been the most sensible approach, based on the science, of course?
As I understand it there have been two or three coronavirus deaths among the under 18s, and the likelihood of dying for those under 50 or even 60 is still pretty remote. Out of a total of 65 million people in the UK there have been around 35,000 coronavirus deaths. Of those deaths around 40 per cent have been in care homes. To address the problem we have had a lockdown that is trashing the economy and creating a collateral of people dying of other conditions and suffering mental health problems.
Is there not case for suggesting that it would have been better to quarantine the care homes immediately, including staff and residents, and for the government to recruit staff to fill the gaps created by those who could no longer move from home to home, and the advise the elderly and those with certain medical conditions to self-isolate? Allied to that for the government to test, track and trace. There might also be a case for restricting mass sporting events and the like. This would allow much of the economy to continue to function.
The problem, of course, is that in the UK, at least, the administrative infrastructure for such an approach has been dismantled and preparations for such a crisis wilfully ignored.
Perhaps at the end of the day the lockdown has been about saving the NHS from being overwhelmed, but how many lives it has saved from coronavirus might prove another matter entirely.
(If this has already been covered, I apologise).