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There may well be drinking water shortages, food shortages, transport shortages, electricity shortages as well as health care shortages.
What would we have done in the Second World War, would we have sat on our hands and declared we must work from home?The Second World War is a very apt analogy. The UK economy was transformed out of all recognition to defeat Nazism. Food and fuel were rationed. Children were relocated to the countryside to protect them from the Blitz. Blackout was imposed. Resources were requisitioned and entire industries repurposed.
By contrast, this government has been reluctant to do anything at all, and now they’re giving up.
We could be rid of covid in under a month. If absolutely everyone took one month’s supplies, went home and just stayed there without exception for four weeks, when we all came out covid would be all but extinct, any few remaining cases easily mopped up by trace and test.
I know this is not practical, but it defines the best-case scenario so that we can make a comparison; a short sharp shock would kill covid quite easily. We could have been free of covid well over a year ago, and we could still go for wiping it out at any time.
If the vaccines don’t stop infection or long covid, we may well be forced to take that option eventually, as our population get progressively weakened by repeated bouts of infection.
We could have got rid of covid at the first lockdown if there was proper quarantine rather than voluntary self isolation and exposing all your family to infection. It is a frame of mind that prevents the measures needed. Late incomplete lockdown, not properly carried out, lack of masks at the outset, poor test and trace, still current and prevention of international travel. All of these were carried out late and reluctantly and incompletely.
The vaccines will reduce death and serious illness but not eliminate them and will also reduce transmission but will need over 90% vaccinations of the whole population not just adults.More than 46 million people in the UK have now had their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine,
it has been said that five and a half million has contracted some sort of covid,
one eight of a million have died of covid
46,500,000
128,000
5,500,000
= 52,128,00067,000,000 – 52,128,000 = 14,872,000
So just under fifteen million are readily available for contagion
however the vast number of those will be under eighteen, who we have decided not to jabA possible solution would be to vaccinate children?
I think that is being considered. The ethical objection is that they are being vaccinated not to protect themselves but to protect others hence the reason why this is currently not happening here.
If those under eighteen become a reservoir of covid infection,
they might possibly infect their parents, grandparents, their teachers and neighbours.
Although it might seem wrong to forcibly inject teenagers against their will, teenagers do not make electricity, gas, water and sewers run, they do not operate the trains, buses, they do not work in slaughterhouses, they do not trawl the seas for fish and they do not man the hospitals.
Society cannot function without working adults.Just seen Marr, on iplayer,
professor Neil Ferguson, claimed we may soon get up to 200,000 covid cases per day and several thousand hospitalisations each day before things calm down in the Autumn.
He seemed to suggest that most of this explosion in covid positives was happening in teenagers.It seems reasonably clear to me,
that teenagers should be next to be vaccinated against covid.“Although it might seem wrong to forcibly inject teenagers against their will……”
There is no equivocation, it is utterly wrong to force anyone, teenager or adult, to have any treatment against their will so long as they can reason the consequences. Parents must decide for younger children but any teenager who demonstrates capacity to reason should be allowed to decide for themselves. There is much precedent in medicine for this concept.
Teenagers are often forced against their will by their parents.
Teenagers are forced to go to school.
I remember as a child being lined up for injections with children crying because they didn’t want it, it made no difference, you got it if you wanted it or you got it if you did not want it.Michael
Consent to treatment is vital to give anyone any form of medical treatment or intervention and there are rules and laws about it. You can read all about it here. You can ‘force’ teenagers and even older children to have treatment only if they lack capacity or if the treatment is life saving in which case even decisions by parents can be overruled. As the balance of benefit to children from the vaccines is not yet clear, and as there may be serious, if rather rare complications, forcing children to have vaccines would be utterly unethical and illegal.Quote
“Allison Agar, from Redcar, spoke to Stephen Nolan on BBC Radio 5 Live about her son George. He is 17 and has started a petition for all Year 13 students to be given the choice to be fully vaccinated before going on to higher education.
Allison said by the time George went to university he would have had, at the most, one vaccine.
She is worried about him mixing during “super-spreader event” Freshers’ Week.
“He’s weeks away from his 18th birthday,” she said. “Should he not be considered an adult for the purpose of the vaccine?”
Allison said it wasn’t just about his own health.
“He wants to protect himself but also other people knowing that he will go back into the community,” she added.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-57864699
It does seem to me that young people are going to keep the covid pandemic going for longer, unless they allow themselves to get vaccinated.
It must be only for the hard of thinking to claim it is wrong to vaccinate people under 18 just because they will not get very ill or die.
We are all in this together, sink or swim, we have been offered a way to get through it and that way is vaccination.Michael, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that they shouldn’t be allowed to choose to be vaccinated if they so wish, just like adults. Forcing teenagers to be vaccinated against their will is an entirely different thing. Just like it is with adults.
There is also the ethical issue. You are asking a group who may derive little benefit for themselves to be vaccinated for the benefit of others with a vaccine that may (I repeat, may) have unforseen adverse effects in the longer term.
First off, do no harm.“Do No Harm”
the harm has already befallen us, in this country, more than one eighth of a million covid deaths.
More than five million covid positive cases.
Currently we have more than five hundred people in critical care, yet a month ago it was less than one hundred, so the Delta is currently rampant even though almost fifty million doses of covid vaccine has been injected, mostly with eager uptakers. More than half a million “pinged” and asked to self isolate.
Firms are already shutting down divisions because of self isolating key-workers.We can not go on and on with this crap.
We should quickly offer covid vaccinations to all older children and encourage them to take it.Vaccinations can be provided only so fast. The government has set the order in which groups are offered it, so the least they should do is maintain restrictions until vaccination is complete; at present, demand continues to exceed supply. I’d like my second jab sooner, but I still have a couple of weeks to wait.
“First, do no harm” is the motto of the doctors, which is precisely who the government ignored, right from the start. This is from five days before the first lockdown; 18 March last year –
Richard Horton (editor of the Lancet)
– Scientists have been sounding the alarm on coronavirus for months.
– Why did Britain fail to act?Germany
U.K. and Spain seem to be galloping away from the rest of Europe.
However what interests me, I can’t think of any good reasons, Germany records such minuscule figures, 20 to 40 times less than the U.K.
One reason could be because they are Germans, they follow orders and do what they are told; however there are millions of Moslems in Germany, and I can’t see them doing what they are told.
Perhaps another reason could be their vaccination programme is the best in Europe, after all Turkish/Germans invented the first commercially available vaccine, that now produced and controlled by the American firm Pfizer.
Maybe German people do not live in overcrowded accommodations?
I have not been to Germany for almost thirty years but then most people lived in blocks of flats.
Maybe most Germans are so well off they eat better quality food, maybe they are not so obese or have less diabetes?Germany has more residents than anywhere in Europe apart from Russia and Russia is doing very, very, badly.
So come on you theorists: why is it, lately, hardly touching the Germans?
Maybe they’ve also got enough sense to open the windows.
Michael
“One reason could be because they are Germans, they follow orders and do what they are told; however there are millions of Moslems in Germany, and I can’t see them doing what they are told.”
Let us pause for a second and consider the implications of what you say: That Muslims are inherently anti vaccines. This is as close as you can get to a racist statement I am afraid. And what do you base this on, may I ask? I advise you to read this article from the Lancet to become more familiar with the social and cultural issues that are related to vaccine hesitancy, a very different kettle of fish from anti-vaxxers.
From the outset it is important to distinguish between people wholly opposed to vaccination (anti-vaxxers) and individuals with limited or inaccurate health information or who have genuine concerns and questions about any given vaccine, its safety, and the extent to which it is being deployed in their interests before accepting it (vaccine hesitancy).7 In conflating and problematising the spectrum of those who do not accept vaccination, authorities might further erode trust and confidence, thereby exacerbating rather than resolving the factors underlying vaccine hesitancy. COVID-19 vaccines arrive as the social contract between some governments and their populations is being eroded8 and when many people, especially those in vulnerable groups, have little confidence that their government will protect them. In the UK, for example, a parliamentary report highlighted that more than 60% of Black people do not believe that their health is protected by the National Health Service to the same extent as White people.9
Also it is worth noting that vaccine hesitancy is not exclusive to muslims, it is the whole BAME community, the majority being black Afro-Caribbean.
But also look at vaccination rates in predominantly muslim countries:
- United Arab Emirates: 68.4% one of the best in the world
- Bahrain 65.8%
- Morocco at 26.7 % is better than Switzerland and Lichtenstein
and so on as shown here.
Maybe, just a small maybe, it has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with social justice, deprivation and possibly also social integration. And maybe the Germans are better at tackling these than UK?
Hi Clark, ventilation could be part of the answer but I think generally most Europeans spend more time outdoors than British people. British people tend to be fatter and suffer from more diabetes and eat more processed foods.
If German people are currently getting infected at 1/40 th the rate British people are currently getting infected, this is something worth looking into more deeply.
Possibly it will be the Delta that is the largest factor.
but there may be other contributing factors, which would be good for u
SA I had not thought specifically of vaccine hesitancy for immigrants in Germany.
When I last visited Germany in the very early 80’s I was struck by how conformist the German people were, they did their utmost best to follow all the rules, coming from Britain (at that time) I thought that strange, as all the people I knew, did their best to not follow rules.With regard to Asian immigrants in Germany, I expect people that have been there for decades, would try to merge into German society and follow the normal rules.
However much more recent people such as the one and a quarter million Syrians may not yet have reached full rule-taking attitudes?
A useful set of figures would be what proportion of trace-and-test trails were successfully pursued to conclusion, ie:
In the UK, around 40,000 infections being detected per day caused half a million people they’d been in proximity with to be contacted (“pinged”) by trace-and-test. With a testing capacity of, say, 100,000 per day it’d take 5 days to test them all; meanwhile, the positives among them are passing it on, creating yet more to follow up. Viral spread races ahead of trace-and-test.
But if, say, around 20 positives are found in a day, and on average they each had 20 encounters, that’s just 400 to follow up. Of those 400, the negatives are “trail closed”. The positives lead to further tests, but that’s easy – with a testing capacity of 100,000 per day, even speculative contacts of those “tested today but results pending” can be tested that same day. Tracing, testing and isolation can get ahead of infection, so spread is choked off.
It’s like fire; the sooner you fight it the less of it there will be to fight. Get ahead. And then make sure you stay ahead.
So maybe that’s the difference in Germany; maybe their trace-and-test is still ahead of infections, with all trails pursued until they find 100% negatives. In the UK, we can’t even follow all the trails because we have far too many. The percentage closure rates of trace-and-test would tell us, but I don’t know where to find those figures.
The anatomy of unintentional racism.
“…there are millions of Moslems in Germany, and I can’t see them doing what they are told.”
“However much more recent people such as the one and a quarter million Syrians may not yet have reached full rule-taking attitudes?”
So are these one and a quarter million people not taking rules as a good German citizen should, because A) They are Syrians?, B) because they are Muslim?, or C) because they are refugees in a new culture and maybe confused and shocked?
Think again about the implications.
