-Removed-Sometimes I wonder what planet some people live on.
If you don’t control a pandemic which can hospitalize people, the hospitals can’t handle the input. This stagnates not only care for corona victims, but stagnates care for everybody else too.
The amount of infections increase, more people get sick, more people can’t work, backlog to hospitals increases.
Healthcare workers start dropping out. This increases the backlog which increases the amount of people who can’t work.
When people can’t get the healthcare they need the situation creates a panic.
The mere idea of no toilet paper causes a bloody panic. What do you think’s going to happen when you cut your finger off and there’s no doctor to sew it back on?
Panic creates stress, stress leads to more people not working. This mixed with the collapse of the health system... crashes society.
Please tell me this isn’t something new to you.
Why on Earth do you think all the pro-business governments are using lockdowns, etc.? For the giggles?
What do you think happens to an industrialized State when essential services stop functioning?
Many major cities are having difficulties keeping, for example, the garbage collection up and running. And that’s with the lockdown.
Without a lockdown you’d be looking at garbage piling up. So, major diseases, rat infestations, etc.
Add that to the collapse of the health service mixed with a tad of panic.
Seriously. Stop thinking of the seriousness of corona in numbers of dead. It is not interesting and it has nothing to do with the measures being taken.
-Removed-That is indeed your opinion.
And completely void of reality.
I presume you think the tories are introducing these measures as a communist plot to destroy London or something?
No. They’ve got top advisors (economic, social, health, etc.) who have explained to them in detail what will happen if they don’t take measures.
Hence the measures. They didn’t want to take any measures. That delay is what buggered the UK in March, April and May.
-Removed-It's a moot point since in actual history, we did not adopt that strategy (Sweden kinda did, but that's another story).
The big problem now is that governments are still assuming that COVID has as much destructive potential as it did in March. That is unscientific and belied by the reality that the infection fatality rates have plummeted all over.
Whether locking down in March was the optimal strategy is certainly debatable. You might even convincingly argue that we should have locked down harder and faster like they did in Wuhan.
But that's spilt milk. Locking down now all healthy people as though we have no population resistance and no treatment methods that help is like building huge battleships after Jutland or lots of aircraft carriers after World War II. It's fighting the last war.
What we need are measures that are commensurate with the threat that COVID poses NOW, not with the threat it posed in March. That COVID is headed for flu-like status after therapeutics, vaccines and population immunity is built up is hardly up for debate. That lockdowns and school closures are terrible for society is also hardly up for debate. So, the only question is whether they're worth it.
That's why we need to spread out the cases using low-cost measures until the therapeutics and vaccines come on line (I'm old enough to remember when people lauded this strategy as "flattening the curve" ) but avoid intolerably high cost measures like crushing small businesses and closing schools. But limited mask mandates? Sure. Avoiding large gatherings? Makes sense. Distancing when possible? Absolutely.
But nobody can show me a scientific paper that would indicate that all of these measures would be insufficient to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system in a place that's already been hit by COVID (and so has some level of immunity). When I see such evidence, I'll reconsider. Until then, high-cost anti-COVID measures are counterproductive and unnecessary.
-Removed-The world economy was ready to crash. This was the main reason. The 2008 crash was evidence of central bank mismanagement. Instead of letting the imbalances sort themselves out, the economy was artificially propped up by trillion dollar bailouts and now that those imbalances are showing problems they found an excuse for another bailout to artificially prop up the economy. This is just kicking the can down the road which only delays the inevitable. In the end it will only be worse.
-Removed-No it won't. People don't act "normally" during a deadly pandemic; they tend to reduce their exposure to others which depresses consumer spending which generally accounts for around 75% of GDP. So if the pandemic isn't brought under control it will continue to have negative effects on the world economy.