alan Wrote:
The way to reduce ALL the harms is less covid not more - what’s so difficult to grasp?
That's a fallacy. That's why
Reducing covid has increased an enormous number of harms.
1) over 400,000 fewer child welfare and child abuse reports have been filed during the lockdowns
2) 3 million people have missed cancer screenings
3) children have lost a year of education and a year of their lives
4) the mental health of young adults has been destroyed and the number of those with suicidal thoughts has increased to 14%
5) the economy has collapsed. People have lost their businesses. And will lose their homes once the lockdown is over and financial aid is removed,
the list goes on
the cost of reducing covid has been to increase harm overall. This is as plain as the nose on your face.
you should ask yourself that why you are finding it difficult, because you have reduced an infinitely multi-variable problem to a faulty one-dimensional one. That of reducing covid at the expense of all other things.
It's fine for an old person like you to lose a year of your life to lockdown. Every year is much the same as any other. When you are a child, you never get that year back. For a year my young niece never saw another child. She has never met a child of her own age, let alone played with a child. She has not been able to go to nursery and be a child, She is in a house with adults every day. That is not natural, it was forced upon her by people wanting to protect the old. Old people that had the luxury of childhood even when the country was ravaged by much more serious diseases (TB, diphtheria, polio etc,)
Teenagers have not met other teenagers and been able to form friendships and relationships and meet and have sex and live normal lives. You are only 16 once. They have been asked to sacrifice too much for something that is of no harm to them. Their education has been, literally, decimated.
The education of the youngest children, especially the poorest has been halted. The most important years in school lost forever. Poor children will never catch that year up.
The full cost of saving people's lives from covid has not been costed, and it has not even been considered.
It's been fine for nice comfortable middle class people in their nice houses to sponge furlough off the state and sit in the gardens with their nice families.
You have believed that reducing covid is the be all and end all, when more lives could be saved every year by doing simply things like banning smoking, banning alcohol, introducing rationing, banning dangerous sports, banning everything except things prescribed for our health. We don't do these things because we accept that a risk in our lives is more important than a government proscribing what we can do and where we can do it.
The covid cure has been worse than the disease.
The government has made you fearful of life. What happens when another pandemic comes along? And then another. This is not fanciful.
History will judge our obscene reaction to this with shame when the fallout is recorded.
Your one-dimensional analysis is pathetic.