Would (will?) you snitch on your neighbours?

Circumstances. What a weird predictive text ?

Home Sec is awful and certainly wouldn’t want to mingle with her.

Yes, I would report neighbours.

PM is awful too but “One person’s cough is another’s death nell” rings too true in our family curcunstances.

I have done
Very different circumstances in May.
30+ people involved
Theyd been pushing their luck big style for the whole of lockdown.
It was the final straw.

At the time, air raid wardens were often compared to the Gestapo (we've all watched Dad's Army), but they did the job - they shamed people into co-operating with basic precautions, and saved many lives.

Since someone else has mentioned the war, I'll pose a parallel scenario.

Back in 194? you are returning to your home in the blackout, walking carefully along the darkened roads past houses with no lights showing at any of their close-curtained windows. You turn the last corner - and your neighbour's curtains are wide open, the light streaming across the pavement from all the windows and the front door, where the wife is welcoming guests arriving from cars which also have their headlights on. You can see all this clearly from at least a hundred yards along the road. So can the enemy bomber passing overhead, out of sight. He has time to focus on the patch of light below, aim and fire, and seconds later the neighbour's house is a heap of rubble and the guests have injuries that will affect them all their lives.

Question 1 - if you had been a few minutes earlier and realised the danger, would you have shouted "Put that light out," and run for the air-raid warden? Or would you have said "It is only one party - I'll report them if they do it again" ?
If your answer was the second one, here is Question 2 - why was it important to prevent a human pilot from being able to target a houseful of people in wartime, but not important to stop a virus from spreading round the same houseful of people in peace?

Depends very much on circumstances- if there is one family gathering and one granny too many- I'd of course keep stum.
If there is a big BBQ, rave, etc- then I would phone police. A bit of common sense.

Vampire Queen likens the situation we’re discussing to the Gestapo during the war. The two things are entirely different - we are in the middle of a pandemic maybe you don’t like the totalitarian government as we’re the Nazis and the East German government - and I’m not a Tory supporter.

I would not report anyone for breaking the 'rules'. Dictators and totalitarian governments rely on the willingness of its citizens to do just that. What the hell is happening to our society, that we are having these conversations?

I agree with Shropshire lass, it depends on circumstances. I am cross at the lack of facilities at labs to analyse tests leading to fewer tests being done at test centres despite the test centres having capacity to do more testing .
It wasn't rocket science to work out there would be an increase in testing that would need to be analysed.
How govt knows where cases are peaking now I have no idea if people cannot get tests.

Depends. My elderly neighbours having their grandchildren round, then No. The youngsters down the road having open house parties then definitely Yes. Commonsense has to prevail. I live in a rural area so not many 'neighbours' anyway.

No. You never know when you might need your neighbour. What happened to 'Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself'.

I wouldn’t want to....but know that I should. Dominic C broke the law, but don’t want to fall into the trap of, well he did it, so can we. Two wrongs don’t make a right, as my mother was always saying. Anyway, who wants to be like him??

vampirequeen

The Gestapo managed to wield control by fear. It wasn't the number of officers on the streets that made them successful but the willingness of the general population to denounce each other.

I absolutely agree. I've read that one of the ways the Gestapo used to get people to snitch on others was to tell the population that the Jews...Gypsies....etc., had illnesses that would spread to everyone else if they weren't taken in and placed in quarantined locations "for their own good and for the good of all citizens". Those "quarantine locations" were concentration camps.

I just wish we had a government we could trust.

I don't know what to think any more. I've always been a firm believer in vaccines, and felt strongly that unvaccinated children shouldn't be allowed to attend state schools, but I'm far less sure about this one.

I feel that we have been manipulated for so long that it is impossible to tell the difference between conspiracy theorist 'nutters' and truth tellers, or between sensible precautions and blind panic.

I am staying indoors for health reasons, but I do think that the lack of opportunity to talk to a wide range of other people is making it more and more difficult to make up my mind about what I think. All we can go on is what we are told in the media, which is obviously controlled by people with an agenda. Whether that agenda is in our interests or not is getting increasingly difficult to call.

No because what goes around will come around !!

Would I protect my health the health of my neighbour and public health you bet I would

Covid-19 is not so infectious as flu, but has a higher fatality rate - and that's before taking the effects of "Long Covid" into account. There's also a vaccine for flu.

Sorry, but I'm in favour of erring on the side of being heavy handed.

I'm afraid I don't believe you.

whoops 8 children!!

Dylant1234
You obviously believe that if a child has 3 brothers and each has a friend to play so she is allowed her friend = 7 children + adult you will snitch on them because of the

rules made to protect everyone and try to halt the spread

I'm still asking "Spread of what exactly?"

When, as Stella14 points out:
" it’s illegal to have more than 6 people at home, but you, and many more, can all mix in the pub! You can also take a flight with 200 strangers. And, as a meme going around points out, 7 children can’t gather to feed the ducks, but thirty or more men can gather together to shoot and kill ducks!"

Believe me, the rules are intended to make you have bad relationships with your neighbours, break up society and cause distrust, confusion and discontent, oh and keep you scared of a virus that isn't as bad as flu. If you don't believe me read the government's own resources and action plans. Also compare the death stats for the last 3 months with the same for the previous 4 years or more. We need realistic figures and a realistic attitude accordingly.

Agreed Callistemon. I am not criticising other people's way of dealing with covid19, but there are people who are so frightened that they haven't been over their doorstep for months, don't see family, wash their shopping deliveries, leave their post for 24 hours. This cannot be good for mental health. Schoolchildren being in and out of school due to a fellow student or a teacher being suspected of infection, waiting for a test result is not good for their education, their social skills, the uncertainty of not knowing whether your child will be at school next week for work purposes is unsettling. The whole thing is disrupting society

And for children, their education and their futures.

I am very conscious that I am meeting more and more people who normally obey every rule and law almost mindlessly, but who are now getting more and more mutinous about the whole unseemly shambles. Same here, and to be honest, that's how I am beginning to feel. We can't keep going in and out of lockdown indefinitely, it would be catastrophic for the economy and for the mental health of society.

Interesting post Tillybelle.

I was reading about the Behavioural Insights Team a few weeks ago and was quite shocked how divisions are being encouraged - old vs young, graduate vs non-graduate, northerners disliking Londoners, etc. Apparently, there's a deliberate attempt to smear London because it's mainly Remain and Labour voting and the Tories want to hang on to their new "red wall" seats.

Stella14. Spot on!

P.S. It is true that cases who had been given the flu jab earlier did have a worse illness with COVID and greater risk of death. This same relationship has been found with other illness and the flu vaccine, eg SARS. These are found in the research papers documented in the book by Dr Miller I mentioned above.