Chris Whitty - another lockdown

How would any of us have managed a pandemic? It’s an interesting question because many people, both on Gransnet and in the general public think they know how to manage this Covid pandemic better than this government. I really wish we had a different government just to show that no government is able to manage a pandemic very well, whatever choices and decisions they make. Holland and Israel vaccination schemes are excellent but they’re both thinking of reintroducing further restrictions. France now has a spiralling number of the South African variant. New Zealand, Australia and Canada have chosen to close their countries, even not letting some of their citizens return. Sweden went for no lockdown but has still had many deaths. India and Brazil have had horrendous numbers of deaths.
To be honest I think we’re sort of doing okay. We need to get the rest of our young people vaccinated though and that should help us. We also need to take individual responsibility for our health and for me that means no big crowds and where necessary wear a mask, but I’m unsure whether they help to cut transmission or whether they just make us feel they help to cut transmission.
Very sadly I believe we’re going to have to get used to living with Covid. It doesn’t appear to be going anywhere soon, whatever pandemic management strategies different countries have chosen, Covid is still there.

Cossy

I have also read online about a further surge end of August to end of September ! Is it a surprise ? Not realty ! Pandemic has been managed the worst way ever bar USA !

My friend in the US says it's terrible over there and not been managed well at all.

Pending lock down or not I think its foolish to ease all restrictions, a steady easing would be better,we have put up with this for so long, surely everyone can wait another month.

Is it really surprising with all the outdoor events and partying at the moment. All those crowds at Wembley and Wimbledon couldn’t of helped , plus overcrowded airports etc. I for one am keeping a low profile and having a great time enjoying the quiet countryside , just so glad most people prefer to be sardines on the beaches.

The Mirror adding scaremongering to something that was said. They do it to sell papers. The people who buy them believe it and it gets spread around forums like this Get facts correct before posting. It is really simple to find the real truth....

I think it's like learning to swim. In the end you just have to jump in and get on with it. Covid will be around forever and we have to learn to get on with our lives with it there. I agree the government is not making a very good job of things overall but I agree with BJ that we have to take responsibility individually and now at beginning of school holidays is as good a time as any if we are ever going to do it.

The government the scientist Uncle Tom wobbly and all of us have never had to deal with this pandemic before so there is a large portion of try this if not try that thinking that has been put into the mix. Health and safety is our own responsibly. The euro football games the Wimbledon tennis and Sandwich Kent open golf should have all been cancelled because they were all held in lockdown time, they were not so we now see the rising numbers.

TanaMa I agree with you wholeheartedly

I always say listen to the way Chris uses his words and not what you think you hear. He as said could be a winter lockdown on several occasions but then again so has Boris lol

If you have ever worked in science or with scientists you will know they will never give a definitive answer because there simply ins't one. Covid is here now for ever, so, we will have to learn to live it with now as we have so many diseases down the centuries. Your only protection is your own bodies, imunity system and activate that it has to come into contact with the disease in one form or another. Lockdown if considered carefully shows all it does is prolong that process. So what do you do you come up with a vacine. Simple explanation is Jenner observed Milkmaids didn't get smallpox, because they had been infected with cowpox and be had come immune to smallpox. Therefore vacination of others helped very much to reduce and almost eliminate smallpox.

I have also read online about a further surge end of August to end of September ! Is it a surprise ? Not realty ! Pandemic has been managed the worst way ever bar USA !

It is useless to keep blaming the Govt - blame the selfish, senseless people who won't help in stopping the spread if the virus. Whichever Country, whichever Govt they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If so many people have the absolute answer then why ate they not in Govt making the decisions - rather them than me!!

No don't believe that govt. would lay itself open to such a charge. They're rather more subtle than that.

11 pages!!! wow! all I can say is, we don`t need him to tell us that! we are not stupid, despite the Government treating us as though we are!

My adult daughter said to me this week that for the first time since the pandemic began she is feeling frightened. Me too. Up until now it seemed to be a largely controlled situation and people were sensible. The rules seemed to make sense and although hospitals were really challenged and far,far too many people were dying we seemed to be working to a system.
Now 5 people I know have Covid, four double jabbed , one too young. One grandson is off school as a friend has tested positive. We have freedom day tomorrow whatever that will mean and the more we know the worse it seems. The jabs although wonderful do not seem to be curbing the rise in infection rates and what else do we have in our arsenal against this awful thing ? Plus we have the usual winter infections to deal with soon and flu. I am sounding very negative today and that is how I am feeling. It’s really unsettling, I have constantly been optimistic about the situation but now I am really not.

All media should be shut down , do people realise what they are saying.

It's not going away any time soon, so we got to live with it and try get back to some kind of normality. Children have missed to much school. To many small businesses have closed and mental health is spiralling. No more lockdowns!

Even Israel, the paragon of vaccinating everyone and held up by media and Labour as how we should be doing things , lifted all restrictions and is now about the reimpose restrictions due to rising cases.
It’s not the governments fault that people, are selfish and stupid, the vaccination reduces the risk of death , it does not make you immune, which too many people seem to think,
Use your common sense and wear a mask etc, if people actually took responsibility for themselves and stopped blaming everyone else we would not be in this situation

All media should be shut down for a period of time, everything. This scare mongering is getting more than silly now.

MayBee70

I’m saying that you say you disagree with the 19th but do everything possible to discredit the scientists that also disagree with opening up. And that confuses me which is why I asked you if you agreed with it as you’d written so much stuff saying the scientists weren’t epidemiologists therefore we shouldn’t listen to them.

It is possible to think that restrictions are being lifted too early in England without joining in the chorus of doom from some commentators.

I see your excitable machine learning expert from Indy SAGE and raise you an actual, real, professor of epidemiology from Edinburgh (Mark Woolhouse, not known for his sunny disposition):

Its widely accepted that the number of cases would increase, we've known this would happen when we unlocked for many months now..., So "dangerous, unethical experiment" seems a very inaccurate description of what's going on.
Its not an experiment but its an unprecedented situation because we've got a new pandemic here and the UK is in an interesting position because we have such a successful vaccine program.

rosie1959

What I can’t understand as cases in Australia are low why haven’t they taken this time to vaccinate everyone quickly They can’t stay locked up forever

Because they haven't got the vaccines- there is a shortage.

Snippets from the link below:

March 2021
5 March: A vaccination row in the EU delays Australia’s first supplies of AstraZeneca vaccines.

April 2021
8 April: Scott Morrison announces the vaccine rollout will be “recalibrated” after Atagi advises that Pfizer be the preferred vaccine for under-50s due to concerns about risk of rare blood clots linked to AstraZeneca.

9 April: Following a national cabinet meeting, Scott Morrison announces Australia has secured a further 20m doses of the Pfizer vaccine taking the total to 40m. The newly ordered doses are expected to be available in the final quarter of 2021.

17 June: Atagi releases new advice that recommends people under 60 (previously under 50) be given the Pfizer vaccine, and not AstraZeneca, because of the rare blood clotting risk. The vaccination rollout is again thrown into turmoil, with the change putting supplies of Pfizer under further strain.

19 June: The government releases a new document that contains no targets, but instead sets out vaccination allocation “horizons”. Scott Morrison is later asked if he is aware that the horizon is something you never reach.

July 2021
1 July: The finance minister, Simon Birmingham, admits Australia is at the “back of the queue” when it comes to Pfizer and other mRNA vaccines.

www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/09/from-the-front-to-the-back-of-the-queue-how-australias-vaccine-rollout-unravelled

Queensland's Health Minister Jeanette Young said:

I do not want under-40s to get AstraZeneca.

I don’t want an 18-year-old in Queensland dying from a clotting illness who, if they got Covid, probably wouldn’t die. We’ve had very few deaths due to Covid-19 in Australia in people under the age of 50, and wouldn’t it be terrible that our first 18-year-old in Queensland who dies related to this pandemic died because of the vaccine?

No wonder Australians are reluctant to be vaccinated.
They can't stay locked down for years.

I think there’s still a lot of vaccine hesitancy in Australia due to the scare stories about the AZ vaccine. I know what you mean, though. A country that has done so well covid wise is so behind in their vaccine programme.

What I can’t understand as cases in Australia are low why haven’t they taken this time to vaccinate everyone quickly They can’t stay locked up forever

As we seem to have two threads running in tandem I am going to copy my last post on "The decision to end restrictions is dangerous and premature, unethical and illogical".

Just reading a very well balanced article in the Economist

It reports that with cases rising exponentially larger numbers of people will need treatment in hospitals and more will die. Obvious, but I think important to remember. The government are warning that they might surpass 100,000 a day in August. The writer points out that we would need to rise to about 150,000 a day—three times their winter peak—for hospital admissions to approach the levels experienced in January. That could occur in about four weeks.

Unsurprisingly, the hospital admissions will be highest among the unvaccinated. This includes the young waiting or too young to be vaccinated and the small pockets of vaccine hesitancy.

The article goes on to comment on Johnson's insistence that we must learn to live with the virus and the scientists view that we can better cope with the inevitable deaths and hospitalisations that we come from following this view while the schools are closed and the winter flu, etc., is not burdening the hospitals. It points out that scientists have expressed concern about levels of long covid expected and the government has replied that it is investing £50m into research on the chronic effects of the disease.

MayBee70

Just remind me how many people have died in New Zealand and Australia.

I don't know how long this policy will continue to work as I think the general consensus is that Covid is not going away whatever measures we take. I am concerned that Australia and New Zealand will find that their lockdown policies may be in vain in the end, especially since the vaccination programme in Australia in particular is not at all successful.

In the meantime, their citizens cannot get home and have to go on a waiting list to do so.
Others cannot enter or leave even though they have have suffered family bereavement.

This cannot continue for years.