Thursday, April 23, 2020

The Sliding Sombrero

It's now Day 472 of the lockdown - well, it feels like that - and we still have to put up with people virtue signalling about their readiness to deprive cancer patients of treatment. Hey, morons: this.

If you want to keep people from potentially life-saving treatment to protect yourself against a purely theoretical 0.001% increased chance of death, yes, you are the bad guy.

Meanwhile, normal people are starting to disregard the lockdown. 

Yep, that's a mystery, alright - unless you're one of those weirdoes with an actual, y'know, memory.

For those of us who can remember stuff before last week, the lockdown was meant to slow down the spread of the virus to prevent the hospitals being swamped. Like pretty much any outbreak in history, the idea was that those affected would fall into one of three groups. Some people would get better on their own, some would die no matter what treatment they were given - which is terrible for the people concerned but also, by definition, inevitable - and some would survive with the right treatment. The lockdown, by slowing down the rate of infection, was meant to ensure no one in the third group died through lack of treatment.

Hence, all the talk of flattening the curve.

That's exactly what happened. The lockdown was a rare case of a successful government program but it's somehow become a not rare at all case of a government program that's taken on a life of its own. Nurses are making tik tok videos but we're still locked down. We can't go back to work until.....

Nope, no idea. We're just meant to accept perma-lockdown as one more thing that all upstanding citizens are meant to support simply by definition. Anyone who questions it wants to kill grandma.

4 comments:

Greencoat said...

I get this but the cautious approach to ending the lockdown is based - understandably - on fears of a second surge that's puts us all back to square one.

JuliaM said...

How could it put us all back to square one when there's all these Nightingale hospitals sitting virtually empty?

Greencoat said...

Well, perhaps they're empty because of the lockdown? This is the quandary we're in so I'm not surprised by a cautious approach. After all, I think most people have accepted that the lockdown will last until early May. That is when the real restiveness will set in.

Peter Briffa said...

Surely the logic of the it’s all about not swamping the NHS theory demands that some relaxation of the lockdown should occur in order to let more people get ill?