Old 07-04-2020, 11:02 AM
  # 8 (permalink)  
vulcan30
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Join Date: Dec 2016
Posts: 86
One thing that puzzles me is that there's virtually no reporting on countries like Sweden and Belarus, Iceland or Japan that didn't lock-down. The reality is those countries didn't have the doomsday death rates that were predicted, they didn't suffer from hospitals being overwhelmed. In fact, their rates of infections, hospitalisations and deaths are following the same downward trends as everywhere else. If anything, the reason for terrible death rates in the UK and New York State in the US is due to patients being discharged into care homes. Knowing the elderly are at the highest risk, could you think of anything more stupid? I suspect the reason those countries are not being reported in the media is because governments are afraid that they may have made a mistake with the lockdown approach and that as time goes by

Also, quarantining healthy people at home with stay-at-home orders/house arrest, that's just plain idiotic. Whilst cocooning people in their homes might reduce transmission rates, it doesn't exaclty help the immune system. Depriving people of sunlight, exercise and social contact, do you think that increases or decreases the likelihood of catching diseases badly, needing hospital treatment and dying? I think that's a bit of a no-brainer.

It's long been known that in older people, loneliness is a health risk, that's known to suppress immune systems. Stay at home orders will only make the problem worse.

What's more concerning is that the whole debate about the various approaches to managing the crisis seems to be getting framed in this binary 'economy over lives' thing. There seems to be no discussion of the pros and cons of each approach, there seems to be this unquestioning, concensus is right, almost like a religion in a way (groupthink?); that's what I have a problem with. The truth is national lockdowns like this have NEVER been done in history. Cities have been quarantined during plagues in history but never whole countries and never on a global scale. The truth is, this is not the black death, this is not the 1918 'Spanish flu'. What about the Asian flu of the late 1950's? It is true that covid is dangerous to older people; the average age for hospitalization with covid involved is around 60, the average age of death with covid involve is about 80. For healthy people under 60 the likelihood of needing hospitalisation isn't any worse than a severe flu. We know so much more about this virus now than back in March. We now have a clearer picture of the total infection rate & that the fatality rate is actually a much lower proportion of infections than originally predicted.
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