by poid » 18 Aug 2020, 8:22 am
you're spot on ziege. The approach we have right now is to basically scare the crap out of everyone and lock things down, not considering that while you save some people's lives you take others through mental illness and reducing available health care, and ruin the lives of many others by destroying their livelihood.
Fair enough, at the beginning governments panic and lock everything down because not enough is understood. Now, however, it is very clear that there are certain people who are more vulnerable than others, and the priority should be protecting those people while allowing others to start getting back to normal. Yeah, you'll have the virus spread, but you can protect people at the same time. There is no guarantee that a vaccine will even work, there is no effective coronavirus vaccine and the flu vaccine is at best 40-60% effective, but it's hard to determine (I never get flu shots, and never get the flu; if i got flu shots and never get the flu was the vaccine effective, or would I have not got the flu regardless?). Where's any discussion of boosting your own immune system to help deal with not just Covid, but any diseases?
Instead what we have is complete overreaction, and constant news trying to scare people. There's an article this morning saying if you think you have the flu you probably have Covid. Really? Does the flu not exist now, or is the media happy to scare people to get more 'clicks'? Yesterday the City of Sydney LGA was put on the 'hotspot' list; seriously, because of a relative handful of cases in the east you put the whole LGA on the list? Now more CBD workers are panicking and dont want to go into the office, which again means less customers for those small businesses in the city that are already being crushed. Is that really a good outcome?
Sadly there seems to be no ability within government to understand what is going on and react appropriately. There is a price to be paid for all of this, we shouldn't pretend otherwise.