- Re: Don't worry -- you've got your wish now, as have all others keen to lock everyone up nm Archived Message
Posted by Sinister Burt
on December 21, 2020, 10:19 am, in reply to "Re: Don't worry -- you've got your wish now, as have all others keen to lock everyone up nm"
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To stop the extra cancer deaths we have to ensure the hospitals don't fill up - that's what causes that - hence lockdown (which we wouldn't have needed if we still had functioning public health - you know these arguments now). If we locked down when science (and the dogs in the street) said we should in march, and also when the science said we should in september (not the gupta/heneghan fossil fuel-adjacent ones), the hospitals would possibly not have filled up to capacity, and cancer treatment etc would not have got so far behind (plus at least 20,000 less covid deaths if we locked at the start of march (according to some science i can't remember now)). The consequences of the lockdown are what they are - no one is denying that (well i do deny the economic effects which are mostly ideological choices) - though i am very sceptical about some of the anti-lockdown people in the government/upper class/right wing media suddenly caring about mental health and poor people with cancer, who they spent the last decade shitting on. The argument is that the effects of not locking down would have been worse than the lockdown (which itself would be worse than proper local public health response) - this was proven for me in march by the subsequent numbers, and again right now seems to me - johnson basicaly did what gupta/heneghan/GBD were arguing for in september - he didn't lockdown against the SAGE advice - and now we have a new spike and hospitals filling up - so that didn;'t work (to be fair, many on the pro-lockdown side were also arguing for schools/colleges/unis to stay open which is arguably the largest source of transmission for the current spike). If there was no lockdown, do you think the hospitals would be more or less full? And would this create more or fewer cancer deaths? If the answer is just locking down all the old/vulnerable (if that was even feasible), don't the same anti-lockdown arguments still apply to them, or is it just that the old are worth less in the economic balance, as stated in the recent memos leaked from the american government discussion? ('let them be infected')). |