Care home residents confined to their rooms and forbidden visits from loved ones are giving up on life and “fading away”, say staff and families.
“The virus won’t be the killer of these people, it’s the distress and fear of not seeing family that is doing it,” said one carer who asked to remain anonymous but has reported her concerns to the Care Inspectorate in Scotland.
Lockdown
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One reason why the models failed is that they – just like most countries’ politicians – underestimated how millions of people spontaneously adapt to new circumstances. They only thought in terms of lockdowns vs business as usual, but failed to consider a third option: that people engage in social distancing voluntarily when they realise lives are at stake and when authorities recommend them to do so.
As countries plan how to leave lockdown, they can look at Sweden and ask: what happens if you don’t involve the police, if you don’t issue edicts about how many of your relatives or neighbours you can visit, and just ask people to be careful? Might that work? The Swedish experiment casts huge doubts on the models, and makes the case for trusting the public.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-we-trust-covid-modelling-more-evidence-from-sweden
Only some of roughly 36 million jobs lost since the beginning of the lockdowns designed to protect hospitals from surging cases of COVID-19 patients are not coming back in a V-shaped or a U-shaped recover. The University of Chicago estimates that 42% of the recent layoffs will result in permanent job losses.
Most people have accepted a temporary period of ’social distancing’ to contain the spread of COVID-19, but it seems that some in authority, like UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, would like to see us keep our distance from each other indefinitely. We must never let this happen because if we do, humanity is dead.
People with no history of mental illness are developing serious psychological problems for the first time as a result of the lockdown, amid growing stresses over isolation, job insecurity, relationship breakdown and bereavement, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has disclosed.
What is unique about this pandemic–apart from the fact that it’s rather small–is that the damage that it does is self-inflicted.
This is a very odd plague. It’s rather small in scale but it’s gigantic in consequences because we have chosen to inflict a form of economic suicide on ourselves.
This week on “So What You’re Saying Is…”: Dr. David Starkey argues that a calamitous series of events and decisions caused a panicked British government to recklessly abandon its sensible coronavirus plan for one that is likely to harm the nation far more than the virus itself.
Comparing this virus with historical pandemics Starkey believes the dire situation we are encountering today has a different cause. Earlier pandemics such as the Black Death eradicated up to half of the population of Europe. In contrast, although it is profoundly tragic on a personal level to the individuals and familiies it afflicts, coronavirus is nowhere near as devastating on a population-wide level as previous pandemics. Consequently, Starkey argues, the Conservative government was correct to follow a similar path to Sweden which was far more relaxed than elsewhere in Europe.
This approach suited Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s libertarian attitude and personality. But on a single weekend there was a calamitous confluence of events and decisions that caused the Tory government to panic (Northwick Park hospital overwhelmed, Imperial College modelling showing potential 500,00 deaths etc.) and enforce an extreme lockdown without any plan to deal with the epidemic. It was simply a goal to protect the NHS.
Protect the NHS: The Tory Government, says Dr. Starkey, was desperate not to be seen as responsible or the NHS being overwhelmed. Eager to prove to the traditional Labour “Red Wall” that the Conservative Party really was their natural home, the British government prioritised the NHS’s capacity to deal with Covid-19 over everything else– but disastrously this included its treatment of cancer patients etc. A bizarre and unprecdented abandoning of the Hippocratic oath that we have not seen in other countries, argues Starkey.
When faced with danger, humans draw closer together. Social distancing thwarts this impulse. Professor Ophelia Deroy from Ludwigs-Maximilians Universitaet in Munich (LMU) and colleagues argue that this dilemma poses a greater threat to society than overtly antisocial behavior.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200424132539.htm
Imperial College’s modelling of non-pharmaceutical interventions for Covid-19 which helped persuade the UK and other countries to bring in draconian lockdowns will supersede the failed Venus space probe and could go down in history as the most devastating software mistake of all time, in terms of economic costs and lives lost.
The argument for a lockdown was overwhelming. When Boris Johnson addressed the nation eight weeks ago, it appeared as if a killer virus was about to engulf the population at astonishing speed. You had to be mad or bad, it seemed, not to back the Prime Minister as he urged us all to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. The moral justification for collective action was crystal clear. “Squashing the sombrero,” as Johnson colourfully put it, was needed to buy time for the NHS to fight this thing. And we did it. Britain achieved that aim.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/16/moral-case-blanket-lockdown-fading-fast/
For maintaining a precious sense of proportion, check out some other annual global fatalities: influenza, up to 650,000. Typhoid fever, up to 160,000. Cholera, up to 140,000. Malaria, 620,000 in 2017, almost all in Africa (so who cares, right?). In 2018, tuberculosis, developing treacherous antibiotic resistance, killed 1.5 million people. Why haven’t we closed down the whole world for TB?
What is destroying lives and livelihoods is not predominantly the illness. The UK economy is not in a tailspin because it can’t survive without the labor of the 32,000-plus fatalities, however much we may miss them as individuals. This is not a natural disaster but a manmade one.
https://spectator.us/natural-disaster-manmade-united-kingdom-costly/
Today’s figures for the first quarter of 2020 show Britain’s economy shrunk by two per cent, but that takes into account just a few days of lockdown (and suggests that the recession started some time before). The March figure is more like it: despite only formally being in lockdown for eight days in March, the UK economy contracted 5.8 per cent that month alone. As Capital Economics puts it ‘in just one month the economy has tumbled by as much as it did in the year and a half after the global financial crisis.’
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-coronavirus-crash-could-be-even-worse-than-we-feared
As the world comes out of lockdown, the regional approach is being used everywhere. London is the safest place to try it here
Teaching unions are working against the interests of children in opposing plans to reopen schools, Lord Blunkett said today.
The former education secretary said that he was “deeply critical” of the approach of teaching unions towards attempts to open schools in England on June 1, for children in reception, year 1 and year 6.
But if we are going to be served up with the daily death toll from Covid-19, isn’t it about time we were also provided with the number of deaths caused daily by the national lockdown? If you are prepared to dig around a bit, it is already possible to work this out from officially released figures.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/13/can-no-longer-ignore-excess-deaths-caused-lockdown/
Some patients are struggling to eat and sleep despite trying multiple rounds of antibiotics, and for many others existing problems are getting more serious because of the lack of treatment caused by the closure of normal dental services.
This is not a straightforward battle between a pro-human and a pro-economy camp.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/take-shutdown-skeptics-seriously/611419/
We found that closure of education facilities, prohibiting mass gatherings and closure of some non-essential businesses were associated with reduced incidence whereas stay at home orders, closure of all non-businesses and requiring the wearing of facemasks or coverings in public was not associated with any independent additional impact.
“Surprisingly, stay-home measures showed a positive association with cases”
“These results would suggest that the widespread use of face masks or coverings in the community do not provide any benefit”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.20088260v1