Corona Virus Treatment

The most stupid lockdown rule was that at one point you couldn't even meet a family member from another household, but you could go into a supermarket full of strangers to fight over the last bog roll.

There are loads of good lessons from it all though. My favourite being that if you have a desk job, you can actually do it from anywhere, and don't need to contribute to road traffic congestion and packed public transport. Sadly that was fiercely opposed by those that lease office space, control freak bosses, and sad people that fail to understand that as much as you might get on with your colleagues, which is great, they are not paid to be your friend and the office is not a social club.

 

So why is it every year, at a certain time, we hear the same old line, "the office party".

And I'm sure Boris would disagree.

 

Ah yes. The compulsory fun that is the office party. Where we're encouraged to ditch our professional facade and get drunk and stupid among people we have to face the next day.

In all my years, I've never met anyone that likes the office party. I've been to a few but like most, I usually try to find a good excuse to get out of it. You need a good excuse because apparently it's important to show you're a team player. The fact that you get on with your colleagues and get the job done all year round apparently isn't proof of team spirit.

The real reason for the office party is for the management to desperately try to prove how cool the company is, how they're just like us, honest gov, and probably to find out who really likes who, and who would fight eachother if they didn't have to work together.

 

It is what you want it to be. During Covid I kept base with the government statistics which were available to anyone that bothered to look, Interestingly at the height of `covid` the flu all but disappeared. When people started to question this they combined the figures so that the flu figures disappeared.
First it was 2 weeks to flatten the curve....it failed.
Then....wear masks....it failed.
Then keep distance......it failed
Then stay at home....it failed.
Have a vaccine....still didnt work.
then get a booster....that didnt work.
then get more boosters...result is now there are more unexplained excess deaths.

I am vulnerable / old never wore a mask or had any of the vaccines and never stayed indoors and mixed with people on a daily basis. Its up to the individual to make up their own mind.

 

Must say, I think the vaccine did the job in the end, but most of the precautions were ludicrous and were achieving pretty much nothing.
Do we bother with yet more vaccines, what is the latest variant?We were told that almost on a daily basis at one time.

It seems they have run out of scare stories, so is it little wonder nobody gives two hoots anymore.

 

We should make up our own mind if we have the Flu & Covid jab.
I will have both given the chance.

 

I had Covid at the beginning of this year and if I hadn't had my jab and my boosters I do not think I would have survived. I was in a bad way.

 

Lots of people point to the fact that there were a lot of deaths despite all the rules.

The rules were never to prevent the spread of covid. Literally every scientist acknowledge that would be impossible, as did the government. As much as I think the government handled a lot of things terribly, I give them credit that they were at least honest on that point.

What the restrictions did is bought time. They slowed the spread. This did two things. It meant the hospitals were not completely overwhelmed, and it gave the boffins time to study the disease and develop treatments and vaccines.

If we consider the alternative approach, the one Boris Johnson openly admitted he wanted, which was to do nothing and let it run its course, then the disease would have spread so fast before anyone understood it that hospitals would have been completely overwhelmed. We saw that in China when it first emerged. People would have been quite literally left to die because there wouldn't have been enough medics and facilities to treat them. It would not just have been covid victims either. It would be anyone that needed emergency treatment for anything. Doctors and nurses, who also happen to be human, would also drop like flies, further exasperating the problem, with more people getting seriously ill and fewer people to try to help them.

Eventually a vaccine was developed. It was given out in order of priority groups. It hasn't eradicated covid and some people (myself included) still got very sick with covid despite being vaccinated. Does that mean it didn't work? I don't believe the vaccine helped in my case because having had covid twice, once before the vaccine then again when fully vaccinated and I was really poorly both times. But it's not about me, it's about the population. If the vaccine works well for even 50% of the population then that's 50% of the population that won't be needing emergency care when those the vaccine didn't work for need it.

 

I agree with everything you say, however

I have to ask, how can you possibly know it didn’t help you? Much was made at the time that the vaccine won’t stop one catching it, but would lessen its effects.

 

Well, I didn't die when I caught it before the vaccine. I also didn't die the second time, but I was very ill, possibly worse than first time, and there was one point where I thought I was about to die. The second time it also lasted longer, and even after the main lurgy had passed, my brain was battered for many weeks to the extent I started to worry I had early onset dementia, as well as varying degrees of amnesia, having lost the ability to recognise some people I'd worked with for years.

That said, you are correct. I can't possibly know that it didn't work at all. It could well be that the second round might have killed me if not for the vaccine. I can only make assumptions based on what I experienced on both occasions. To be properly scientific about it we'd need multiple identical copies of me living in identical conditions, except some with the vaccine and some without, and see how many of my clones lived or died. However unfortunately that's not possible, so I can only draw conclusions on a sample size of one, which is statistically unsafe but it's all the data I've got.

I should stress however I'm absolutely not regretting being vaccinated, even if in my case it was likely useless. Because as I said before, it's not about me, it's about the population. While it might not have done much for me, the data suggests it worked well for the majority (although data also suggests it has no effect for some), and I couldn't have known in advance if it was going to work for me or not. I could only know that if enough people get it, then those it was effective for would be saved by the vaccine, meaning those people wouldn't be taking up valuable hospital time, so that anyone for whom the vaccine was ineffective would have a better chance of receiving help if they needed it.

 

The scientists were prepared but the government didn't do anything.

 

I mostly agree, but for a subtle but important point.

The scientists had a plan, and were acting on the data as it emerged. They did the right thing, modelling the emerging pandemic in data, making predictions based on it, and giving solid advice to the government based on their expertise and the data.

The government initially chose to completely ignore them. Just as they'd completely ignored much earlier advice from the scientists to prepare for a viral pandemic by developing a plan and stockpiling PPE.

If the scientists got anything wrong it was that they put too much faith in the governor. After several weeks of being ignored while Boris's strategy was to let it run rampant, the scientists eventually got together and wrote an open letter, detailing what would happen if the government didn't change course, and they went public with that to shame the government into action. That's when we finally saw the first lockdown, likely too late by then.

I genuinely believe that if the government had acted immediately on the advice of the scientists, lockdown would have been shorter, fewer people would have died, and the economic hit would have been much smaller.

 

It's not just Governments getting it wrong, though. Personal responsibility comes into it. A couple who live part-time in our village were flitting between Italy (which was very badly affected), Lyon and their house here for months during the first outbreak. Hardly a surprise when the village had it's first cases within a week of their first arrival. Multiply that up by all the selfish, arrogant people who continued to travel all over the place, despite Government warnings, and business types who couldn't possibly conduct their business virtually......Is it any wonder that it turned into a pandemic?

 

I dont think, bearing in mind how people move around the world these days, that it's ever going to be possible to keep this kind of thing out of a particular country.
Australia tried it and I think New Zealand tried it, it partially worked in NZ, but there is only a hand full of people living there all spread out.
In Australia the lockdowns seemed never ending in the populated parts.

Its the places with large congested populations that came off worst, its close contact with other people that spreads this kind of stuff.
Similar to the Black Death, they blamed rats, and fleas but the fleas were jumping from person to person I bet.

 

You can't get much more close contact than sitting in a long, thin tube with 250 other people, all breathing the same recycled air! Even before Covid, it was a surefire way to catch a cold or 'flu