Generic Virus Thread

[sidcow]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

You do know it's not an actual God, right?

I don't even know what you're saying any more. You're acting like a ref whose made a terrible decision then tries to make up for it by making increasingly bizarre decisions. It's like watching a Uriah Rennie performance now. 

[brommy]

1 minute ago, Rugeley Villa said:

Yes, I’m hoping to get in earlier. I’ll keep a check on it. Unfortunately my wife isn’t getting her booster . She’s starting to lose patience with the whole thing. I’d like her to have it, and I’ve tried to discuss it with her . We are at opposite ends at the moment. 

I remember my wife saying in Summer 2020 that she was “fed up with it all now” and I think I laughed and said something like the whole world felt the same but we’ve just got to get on with things the best and safest way we can.

Surely losing patience with ‘the whole thing’ (I presume she means the virus and it’s associated health concerns and restrictions), it would lead to her wanting anything that could help alleviate the problem, i.e. vaccinations.

[foreveryoung]

27 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

Just booked mine. Earliest appointment is 15th January . 

Starmer on the TV just must be talking boll***s then. It can't be as bad as they are making out, if they can give 4 week appointments. You could be dead within 4 weeks the way they are pushing the vaccines.

[Davkaus]

36 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Ultimately, we need to remember that the NHS exists to serve us, we do not exist to serve the NHS.

I could not agree more. We all put our lives on hold for really quite a long time to protect the NHS. It's been nearly 2 **** years, and the long term goal needs to be, as I think you're saying, for the NHS to cope with life, not for life to adapt to what the NHS can support. If the NHS can't cope with us living a normal life, it is failing and needs to be urgently addressed. It's one thing to make sacrifices in the short term, but for how long?

It should of course be a given that criticism of the expectation that we need to adapt around the capacities of the NHS is a criticism of the government and high level organisation of the institution and not the poor bastards on the frontline doing their best to look after us.

[sidcow]

1 minute ago, brommy said:

I remember my wife saying in Summer 2020 that she was “fed up with it all now” and I think I laughed and said something like the whole world felt the same but we’ve just got to get on with things the best and safest way we can.

Surely losing patience with ‘the whole thing’ (I presume she means the virus and it’s associated health concerns and restrictions), it would lead to her wanting anything that could help alleviate the problem, i.e. vaccinations.

So true.  The more people lose patience and don't vaccinate/ignore the rules the longer we're going to be all in this for. 

I just can't square a free jab that isn't really any great convenience and doesn't really affect you too much being refused in exchange for putting yourself in danger for basically no real reason. 

If someone offered you a wallet of free lottery tickets you wouldn't turn them down "just because" 

[HanoiVillan]

4 minutes ago, sidcow said:

I don't even know what you're saying any more. You're acting like a ref whose made a terrible decision then tries to make up for it by making increasingly bizarre decisions. It's like watching a Uriah Rennie performance now. 

Your response to my comment was 'what an AWFUL attitude'. My point is this is a response you give because of sentimental affection for the NHS brand, its status as 'our national religion', rather than any actual logic.

My point is a simple statement of fact. If you replaced 'the NHS' with 'the Environment Agency', 'GCHQ', or 'Ofsted', it would not be remotely controversial to say that they exist to serve the public, rather than the public existing to serve them.

There are lots and lots and lots of different healthcare systems around the world. The one that we have has some strengths and some weaknesses, but its *purpose* is - the same as any other healthcare system in any other country - to provide medical care for the people who live here. It needs to be able to do that. The public don't 'owe' the NHS anything. That's not to say that people can't help matters by voting for a party that would fund it properly. I wonder how many of the people who are responding to me in OUTRAGE voted for the party that has systematically underfunded it for the last 11 years.

[Rugeley Villa]

2 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

Starmer on the TV just must be talking boll***s then. It can't be as bad as they are making out, if they can give 4 week appointments. You could be dead within 4 weeks the way they are pushing the vaccines.

Starmer is a wimp 

[foreveryoung]

The NHS is not unfunded by the way. It's under managed and not regulated.

[Rugeley Villa]

7 minutes ago, brommy said:

I remember my wife saying in Summer 2020 that she was “fed up with it all now” and I think I laughed and said something like the whole world felt the same but we’ve just got to get on with things the best and safest way we can.

Surely losing patience with ‘the whole thing’ (I presume she means the virus and it’s associated health concerns and restrictions), it would lead to her wanting anything that could help alleviate the problem, i.e. vaccinations.

She’s going down the path that she thinks she doesn’t need to be vaccinated and basically take her chances. Not seeing the bigger picture IMO , but it’s her choice . I don’t want to keep having vaccines myself, but just got to keep with it for now and hopefully things smooth out, but how long do we keep saying that. 

[Wainy316]

5 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

She’s going down the path that she thinks she doesn’t need to be vaccinated and basically take her chances. 

But where is the logic in that?  Unless you think the vaccines are dangerous in their own right.

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, foreveryoung said:

The NHS is not unfunded by the way. It's under managed and not regulated.

It is underfunded. The reason we are having this debate about the 'crisis', and there is such a fraught discussion about making sacrifices to 'protect' it, is that it is a system that is pretty much constantly run at 100% (or more) of capacity. The people who are responding to me in OUTRAGE are not wrong when they say staff are exhausted and the system is struggling to cope, it's just that the conclusion they appear to be taking from that - broadly, 'therefore we should accept periodic lockdowns to protect it' - is bad and wrong and will cause more damage than they realise to the organisation they hold dear by turning the public against it.

[nick76]

7 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

She’s going down the path that she thinks she doesn’t need to be vaccinated and basically take her chances. Not seeing the bigger picture IMO , but it’s her choice . I don’t want to keep having vaccines myself, but just got to keep with it for now and hopefully things smooth out, but how long do we keep saying that. 

I don’t understand, it’s a free jab and takes less than 1 minute to administer.  With the local places doing the jabs, people are there and back in less than an hour.  It’s probably one of the least inconvenient things to do.

Of all the things we have to do in life that we don’t want to this is so minuscule and the benefits to the person and others is potentially huge…what am I missing?

I don’t understand the “how long do we keep saying that” either? This isn’t going away, yet a simple jab very infrequently seems a big deal that can protect us.

[brommy]

7 minutes ago, Rugeley Villa said:

She’s going down the path that she thinks she doesn’t need to be vaccinated and basically take her chances. Not seeing the bigger picture IMO , but it’s her choice . I don’t want to keep having vaccines myself, but just got to keep with it for now and hopefully things smooth out, but how long do we keep saying that. 

I’m struggling to see her logic. We’re all fed up with the virus and wish it would just disappear overnight, but as it’s obviously not going to do that, is it too much trouble to spend 20 minutes getting vaccinated, even if that is once every 4 to 6 months for the foreseeable?

[sidcow]

I always come back to the cousin of my Brother in law who was at deaths door in hospital who told his Dad that not having the jab was the worst decision of his life.  He'd been very vocal about not being jabbed. 

It's easy to be flippant when you're sitting typing away on the Internet in full health. 

You're perspective changes when you're surrounded by an ICU team trying to force oxygen into your dying lungs just because you were pissed off about the inconvenience of another jab. 

[nick76]

9 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

It is underfunded. The reason we are having this debate about the 'crisis', and there is such a fraught discussion about making sacrifices to 'protect' it, is that it is a system that is pretty much constantly run at 100% (or more) of capacity. The people who are responding to me in OUTRAGE are not wrong when they say staff are exhausted and the system is struggling to cope, it's just that the conclusion they appear to be taking from that - broadly, 'therefore we should accept periodic lockdowns to protect it' - is bad and wrong and will cause more damage than they realise to the organisation they hold dear by turning the public against it.

Or you want to do what you want without considering the well being of others or the greater population.  No doubt the NHS is underfunded, under managed and all the rest but the NHS would never cope with all the funding in the world if we didn’t look after it by being sensible and thinking of others…it’s part of the reason we have seatbelt laws, speeding restrictions, drink driving laws, drug laws, gun laws, hospital rules etc…there has to be some restrictions for the well being of all.  Until we get a proper handle of the virus we have to balance the risk/freedom and that has to take into account NHS capacity as it is, not how a dream NHS should be because we aren’t living in that reality are we.

[Kuwabatake Sanjuro]

3 hours ago, desensitized43 said:

There's some evidence from South Africa but our situation and theirs arent a direct comparison because...

- It's summer in SA

- Their population is signaficantly younger than ours

- Their vaccination rates are different, both in sheer number, but also the type of vaccine used (We used AZ to vaccinate the elderly and it appears this is an inferior vaccine)

- Their population lives in very different conditions (shanty towns etc)

- Their natural immunity rate is different because they've not had the "waves" of infection we've had.

 

Some of the above are to our benefit and others to our detriment. It's all very complex.

This explains how it might appear milder well I think.

[trekka]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

Ultimately, we need to remember that the NHS exists to serve us, we do not exist to serve the NHS.

[Genie]

26 minutes ago, sidcow said:

I always come back to the cousin of my Brother in law who was at deaths door in hospital who told his Dad that not having the jab was the worst decision of his life.  He'd been very vocal about not being jabbed. 

It's easy to be flippant when you're sitting typing away on the Internet in full health. 

You're perspective changes when you're surrounded by an ICU team trying to force oxygen into your dying lungs just because you were pissed off about the inconvenience of another jab. 

There was a nurse on the news the other day saying that lots of sick unvaccinated patients in hospital are asking to be jabbed and they have to tell them it’s too late now. 

[HanoiVillan]

12 minutes ago, nick76 said:

Or you want to do what you want without considering the well being of others or the greater population.  No doubt the NHS is underfunded, under managed and all the rest but the NHS would never cope with all the funding in the world if we didn’t look after it by being sensible and thinking of others…it’s part of the reason we have seatbelt laws, speeding restrictions, drink driving laws, drug laws, gun laws, hospital rules etc…there has to be some restrictions for the well being of all.  Until we get a proper handle of the virus we have to balance the risk/freedom and that has to take into account NHS capacity as it is, not how a dream NHS should be because we aren’t living in that reality are we.

The first bolded is where you go wrong. These restrictions exist - as the NHS does - for the protection of people's health, *not* to 'protect the NHS'. This formulation, that we need to arrange our lives and laws specifically to reduce the burden on the healthcare system, is in fact a recent idea, which has really come to the fore during a period when the government have underfunded the service, and you can certainly see the appeal from their perspective of getting the public to blame each other.

Re the second, I agree, which is why my first post in this recent chain said 'we need to resist the temptation of getting into 'social distancing' to reduce the load on the health service until it literally cannot be avoided'; it is sadly conceivable that the system may reach a point where some social distancing measures do end up being necessary. *However*, it is in no way guaranteed that we reach that point, and it needs to be both an absolute last resort, and acknowledged that it is not a normal or indefinitely repeatable public health intervention.

[bickster]

3 hours ago, desensitized43 said:

(We used AZ to vaccinate the elderly and it appears this is an inferior vaccine)

This bit isn't particularly true. Pfizer came online before AZ and the oldest parts of our population were given Pfizer iirc