Acceptable Covid death rates

The risk of dying from Covid in this country is absolutely miniscule. The fact that we have idiots who think we should spend years restricting our civil liberties and freedoms because of a disease that has been hyped-up to sell newspapers and generate clicks is depressing.

It is not miniscule for the OP - far from it.

I have a question for you. Pre-covid times there would often be people who would get on, for example, buses, and who would be clearly suffering from a cold or flu and who would just spend the entire trip sneezing and coughing openly on the buses, making no attempt to even cover their mouths. What would you honestly think of those people?......Or are you one of them?

I used to work with a fella who was notorious for coming into work anytime he was ill and go coughing and spluttering all around the office. I think he was deluded that people would think he was great for making the sacrifice and still working when he was visibly ill so he made sure to go around to let everyone see he was ill. Again, he had no concept of even turning his head before he'd cough or sneeze at you if one came on him as he was talking to you. Other staff used to complain that the management wouldn't tell him to stay at home. It was stupid because the next week there would invariably be a handful of people off with whatever he had spread. The reason management wouldn't intervene was that your man was a complete oddball in general (and I suspect undiagnosed autistic).

You would be fully in support of either of the above's "civil liberties" were you stuck beside them during their coughing episodes?

I don't know whether you are deliberately trying to sidestep and twist the point or whether you genuinely didn't read it or whether you did, and decided to go off on some tangent

Or is it the case that you'd react differently depending on the person's susceptibility to catching infection? i.e. if you are on a plane for example and a fella gets on and sits beside you and spends the whole time coughing and spluttering across you and making no effort to cover their mouth, you would try to ascertain their susceptibility to infection before coming to a conclusion on whether you were ok with them doing so?

In my case when the (undiagnosed autistic) fella would go around advertising and making sure that everyone knew he was coming into work while sick, would you "ah I don't mind that Jimmy comes up to me just before he deliberately sneezes across me so that I can know he is sick because sure he gets sick a lot. Now if he only got sick once every few years, I'd be pissed off that he coughs in my face when he is, but seeing that he gets sick a few times a year I actually like to receive those veritable showers of infection"

Acknowledging that someone should cover their mouth while coughing is as much of a "civil liberty issue" as acknowleding that people should wear masks on public transport during a pandemic. I don't see how people accept the former but cannot accept the latter.

I never mentioned anything to the effect that the fella I knew should be forced to take weeks off.

...the needs of the economy sometimes out way human needs, we really should have a long think about this one post covid, but we probably wont!

The Government at the time literally introduced a ban on smoking indoors in public places overnight. It’s not the same as introducing measures such as lockdowns in an attempt to prevent the spread of a highly infectious disease.

What point are you attempting to make?

He’s making the point that he was right. It’s an absolutely useless point, but sure he was right and that’s all that matters 🙄

theres no need for these deaths, and for wrecking the economy, it is possible to protect both, we just dont want to, we re just being dumb humans, programs such as 'personal responsibility' have serious limitations at times, probably most of the time

Surely you’re not that far up your own fundament that you imagine anyone who doesn’t share your opinions doesn’t care about protecting people or the economy? They’re not dumb either. They just don’t share your opinions, or how you imagine everyone else should think about their lives and what matters to them, according to your opinions.

We've done 18 months of this, how long do you realistically expect anyone to keep going with that to "protect the vulnerable"? It's not possible - we have been there and done that and we have to get back to normality now. It's sad of course if anyone dies from it but that's just an acceptance that needs to be made to get back to normal life - which is this "default" state you talk of that we shouldn't be doing.

Yes we should, 90%+ of the population have done what was asked of them - there's nothing more that should be asked of them. The country has to reopen now and life has to move on. Granted it may not be normal for the some of the seriously compromised for quite some time yet, but for the rest of us we have to get back to normality.

First of all, you have my sympathy for your situation.

But with covid, flu, any health condition and in general any human activity, there is a level of risk that is considered acceptable, and this level of risk leads to a death rate that is considered acceptable. Yes, it's cold, but that's the way it is. We don't have hospitals that are minutes away from everyone so there will be deaths from heart attacks and strokes that will only happen because they can't reach the hospital in time. We are accepting a small death rate from road accidents, we are trying to reduce it but we know there is no way to make it zero, so we accept some deaths for our comfort of driving. And so on.

The health system is no concern of mine and I'm not sure it's the responsibility of anyone else either - they have had nearly 2 years to upgrade, increase capacity etc - you might remember that being the reason we initially entered restrictions in March 2020. Then they came along again in winter 2020 and it was yet again about "protecting the health service from being overwhelmed". We are now in November 2021 hearing the same thing again. If our health service is still a shambles given the time and money given to it to get it's **** together over the last 18 months that is nobodies fault but the health service. As I said in another thread, it's sink or swim time for them now.

Nobody's stopping you from getting the best mask as you can, nobody's stopping you from wearing it, hell wear it all the time. Get all the PPE you want. Wear it everywhere. Nobody's asking you to go to packed pubs or nightclubs. Sorry you're classed as vulnerable but we can't stop the world for you. We all only get one life and we've all had the best part of two years stolen off us. We won't get them back, they're gone. It's time to open everything.

How is full reopening of the economy going to do this?

we re effectively removing all safety measures that have been put in place to protect our economy and our society, we can already see whats more than likely to occur, an overwhelming of our health system, yet again, and a potentially even slower than normal slow down, post christmas, this is all very obvious right now

You think measures like shutting down construction, restricting restaurants to takeaway, keeping pubs & nightclubs closed were designed to protect the economy?