I think that what's happened is the opposite - the young have been thrown under the bus (even disregarding social activity we have things like school closures, university admissions, exams cancelled), and that economic activity is being hindered unnecessarily, which is having enormous knock-on effects already which will persist for a generation.
I think that the appropriate response is for the vulnerable (old, immunocompromised, or really just anyone with low risk tolerance) to isolate and be given the resources to do so.
Care homes, for example, should be dealt with via paying the staff much higher salaries and having them stay on-site, effectively 'sealing off' the care home and creating an isolated unit.
If you're poor and have to go to work, you should be given enough money such that it's your free choice and you can stay at home if you want.
My vulnerable friends and family are forced into doing this, lockdown or no lockdown, they're disinfecting packages, haven't been outside for months, and probably will be forced into a "new way of life" for the foreseeable future.
This is the sort of thing that we should be using the severe lockdown time for - determining an appropriate way of protecting the individuals which we know to have very high fatality/complication rates - the people for whom we're bothering to do this at all.
What I strongly disagree with is the idea that the lives of the healthy should be deleted in some asinine attempt to drag out the (in my view, inevitable) death toll over a multi-year period.
That's not feasible. Those people have families, too.
They can't even realistically do this with the NBA and associated support staff, and that's a hell of a lot fewer people than vulnerable/old people and their support staff.
I, too, wish it were that easy, but it's simply not.
Why not? I don't think the parent meant staff should stay on-site forever.
There can be shifts. Staff on shift get tested or even stay isolated for two weeks, then enter the unit, spend a month on-site and leave for home.
Does this sound like a dream job? Not really, I guess.
Does it sound that different from sailors, long-haul drivers, deployed military personnel and many other professionals who stay away from their families for prolonged period of times?
It has to happen, because people cannot stay inside forever, with all the will in the world.
This is definitional unless you're planning to create a police state and forcibly prevent the young from interacting with each other for years at a time.
Protecting the vulnerable is the only practical solution.
It is not a practical solution because there is no political will to do it and there is not the competency to do it even if the political will was present.
So we have four weeks of quarantine for every month worked. That means we would need double the staff, and also we would have to pay them way more to even find someone willing/able [1] to accept this shift arrangement. This means that a huge part of the inhabitants will be priced out of the nursing home market and forced to stay at home with inadequate care.
[1] Re "able to accept this", for instance, single mothers would not be able to work under these conditions at all.
So now you're in a place where you're intelligent enough, and aware enough, that you follow the rules or you play Russian Roulette with people's lives.
Rage all you want about what could be and reality, the two rarely meet.
The current situation is some sort of distributed trade of mental health for physical health; the brains of the youth for the bodies of the old. It's not a stable state and will break at some point.
Regarding "russian roulette":
Everyone I know who feels at significant risk is doing the whole "don't leave the house" thing.
Care homes are almost certainly fucked regardless.
I tend to think the major impact is going to be amongst 50+ year olds who are in good health and decide that they can't be arsed with staying inside. We basically don't have a way to deal with this issue collectively.
The young are the old, in due time. I'm guessing that the majority of young people today would prefer to grow old in a society that will care for them, that has demonstrated that it will care for them, rather than one that is prepared to "throw them under the bus" to "protect the young".
All of us are young at some point and many of us will grow old. We must be treated fairly in both states. The sensible way to do that in the current situation is to establish some sort of protocol for interaction with each other that will allow economic life to go on, because obviously everyone wants that, but without exposing the vulnerable to the virus. And that doesn't mean locking them up until it's gone, because that is still throwing them under the bus. After all, there is a substantial minority of people with chronic diseases etc that are still young, and have many productive years of life ahead of them. But for the rest, also, there is what I say above: if we throw the old under the bus now, we'll throw the young under the bus also, when it's their turn to be old.
And this protocol must necessarily be a strict form of social distancing and some measure to reduce transmission, like wearing masks. We know that works. Until there is a better solution, that's the best solution.
So there's no point in saying "this can't be done, you'll find me at the pub". It has to be done. And it has to be done for the good of everyone, young and old, vulnerable and strong. There's no point in thinking that "I'm young, this doesn't affect me" and carrying on as before because "it only kills the old and sick". One day, you yourself will be old and sick. And whatever kills the old and sick at that point will get you, unless the young and strong around you take care of you, like we are asked to take care of the old and sick right now.
And if young people don't care for the old and sick right now, they're digging their own graves.
> they're digging their own graves
Digging our graves for when we're old? Yes, we are all going to die, and probably when we are old. I find your framing interesting though, as if it would be the young treating old people like crap by ultimately choosing to get on with their lives as the mental health costs creep up and up. No, it's the virus, a force of nature, that is doing that. Denying our humanity by enforcing social distancing, well I fail to see how this is a objectively moral position, either.
Lockdown and social distancing is fine and good, but it cannot extend towards a year or more, people will not stand for it.
That looks very close to a lockdown to me... (especially in my country with a very high proportion of obese people. There’s probably an order of magnitude more of people living with an obese person.)
Yes. If we don't treat the old now as we want to be treated when we are old ourselves, why would anyone do us the favour? We work towards the world we'll live in the future, right now, in the present. What we do now, how we behave towards those whose place we will be in one day will determine how we are treated when we are in their place.
>> Denying our humanity by enforcing social distancing, well I fail to see how this is a objectively moral position, either.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? "Denying our humanity..."? By not going to the pub?
I note also that the narrative seems to have shifted a bit lately. A few weeks ago it was along the lines of "we can't keep the lockdown for ever, or the economy will go bust". Now, judging from this thread, it's changed to "we can't keep social distancing for ever because our lives will be destroyed".
Or just because the weather is good and people must go to the pub.
We wouldn't be treating old people badly by not completely shutting down the entire country.
>This is a bit of an exaggeration, don't you think? "Denying our humanity..."? By not going to the pub?
Humans are social animals. Being unable to socialise is dehumanising, yes. It's not just an inconvenience, it's very real and very harmful.
>I note also that the narrative seems to have shifted a bit lately. A few weeks ago it was along the lines of "we can't keep the lockdown for ever, or the economy will go bust". Now, judging from this thread, it's changed to "we can't keep social distancing for ever because our lives will be destroyed".
It's not a coincidence, it's because the human cost is creeping up. You're literally just observing the negative impact of lockdown on people's health, but instead you seem to be choosing to interpret it as a negative and selfish character trait. Lockdown is obviously and trivially unsustainable, but so too is social distancing in the not too long run.
Can you show me in one of my comments where I advocated for "shutting down the entire country"? Or stopping people from socialising?
I'm sorry but I don't have much patience for that kind of conversation. It tends to waste too much time with clarifications and refutations of wrong assumptions.
Here are the HN guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please read them again, or for the first time if you haven't done so already. Especially the one about responding to the strongest interpretation of what someone says.
From our perspective, that's you seizing control of the narrative and handing out minor concessions. The entire country is currently shut down, unless you change a _lot_, it'll still be mostly like that.
Stuff like 'ok, we'll do 2 meter rule in the pub, that's basically the same, right' feels like a complete joke. It's dreamed up by someone who like, doesn't go there anyway, so what do they care? It pretty much defeats the entire point of even going, and beyond that it's obviously not economically viable anyway.
But that's not all - not only are the suggested steps seemingly absurd (e.g. "soon", we can open restaurants, but can't meet family in their homes) - there's not even a real timetable, it's all conditional on Boris' mood! Months in, and we're still talking about "ooh err, maybe well, maybe this, I guess perhaps, but that, but this other thing".
Basically, it feels like not being taken seriously. It gets people's backs up. I apologise if in conversation I've seemed aggressive, but I hope the above explains why.
The virus exists regardless, but how we choose to respond to it is something that I'm not sure democracy is even capable of handling. I guess you could call it a power struggle?
At the moment the only possible method of contesting is to just ignore the rules, but you're not even taking that seriously, you're pretending it away as if people are irresponsible and just want to see death and destruction.
Re the whole old/young split: I think that the pensioner form of esotericn would be on board with my current views. I know that when I'm older I'm going to be more frail; I imagine spending time inside reading, studying, etc (depending on my eyesight), possibly spending time with my partner, perhaps we have pets, etc.
Sure - the theatre, galleries etc are things I'd like to do, but realistically, I wouldn't take the elevated risks of death in order to do them. If no-one does them though, they collapse, and I'm left with shit like Netflix in my old age regardless.
That's exactly how this is different. Most people in the UK or US don't have a starving African kid in their direct family. They do have people at high risk for COVID-19 in their direct family.
> Or, as you say, the other option is that we all throw 5-10 years of our lives away in a massive global recession for some old people who've already had the best years of their lives to live a couple of years more.
I must live in a weird bubble because none of my friends are willing to sacrifice their parents'/friends'/coworkers' lives for economic indicators. Besides, that is a false dichotomy: adapting to new circumstances is not "throwing 5-10 years of our lives away".
This really resonates with me. yet I've seen highly educated good friends go from "shit we need to do something about this" to "I don't care if people die, I want my summer vacation" within two months now. It's really depressing to see.
It seems that for many people, changing anything about their previous lifestyle is already pain enough that they stop considering the impact on others. And this was a person who prides themselves in adapting and who constantly rants about how people resist change...
So yeah, there are definitely restrictions, but "a complete pause on life itself" would be a wild overstatement. If it's different where you are, it's either because the government failed to take effective steps early on and thus contributed to the spread of the virus, or if your society's culture facilitates the spread better than ours in Germany.
EDIT: For completeness' sake, I am worried that many businesses (restaurants, cinemas, etc.) will not be sustainable if they have to operate under social distancing guidelines indefinitely, since their price calculations are based on a certain occupancy rate. But I'm not an expert in this regard, so I'm honestly not sure how this will play out. Maybe rents will drop when landlords realize that this calculation looks similar for every prospective tenant.
I don't think going back to normal is practical, nor desirable. Ref work-from-home, air travel, etc. But for many people, apparently the bar for acceptable is "everything is exactly as before or it's too much change."
Who are you talking about? You and your circle of friends? Large majorities of the public continue to support lockdown measures, in both the USA and the UK.
You should consider that those who are not in denial are looking at the situation with a risk assessment very different than your own, and such people as those currently constitute the majority.
Yes, most people are on board with a lockdown of a few months. Flattening the curve is a sane aim.
If you persist with this idea of deleting social interaction for multiple years, people are going to rightly conclude that you're insane and just want to force your antisocial vision on them.
That's what's causing the antsiness - there's no exit plan, it's all "oh, well, you might be able to have a normal life.. or perhaps post-2020 we deleted society".
If you can't understand that, you're probably in a special situation (either very introverted, or living with family so you already have some social contact).
If you're living alone, then you still have no idea when it will legally be permitted for you to embrace, play games with, spend the night with, kiss, hold hands with - experience humanity with - literally anyone else.
If you're single, all of that _plus_ you now need to fight through a 2 metre social bubble in order to perform basic human functions like, for example, attracting a mate in order to perform sexual intercourse.
All of the above is very silly to me. I honestly think the whole "let's wait for the science" approach misses the point. At an absolute minimum we need a hard deadline of something like "look, in N weeks/months you can go and be a husband again".
People _will_ take a risk of death in order to do the above. If you think this is all about young individuals believing that they're invincible you've completely missed the point - the issue is that a life without those things is _not life_ - 1 year of being a hermit for many may as well just be a deletion of 1 year of the prime of their life, i.e. a >1% mortality rate imposed upon them anyway.
The longer term view on this is people actually starting to worry that perhaps that's just it - their parents had a good life when you used to be able to go out, party, meet a girl, and so on and so forth - and now, oops, that's illegal, sorry, we're doing social distancing for the next 10 years. It's utter madness.
If the Government refuses to address this, and they very much are refusing to do so, then the inevitable consequence will be that people just begin to wholesale ignore the guidelines.
If I had children on the other side of the country I'm not watching them grow from age 5 to age 6 over a video link regardless of what the R number is. There's no political process to address these concerns, other than just doing it anyway, so people will do it anyway.
But you seem to be advocating for abandoning social distancing altogether and just letting everyone do whatever they please, without any rules at all. Or am I misrepresenting your comments in this thread?
You have repeated a few times that there is no exit plan (do you mean an exit from the lockdown or from social distancing rules?). Indeed, there is no such thing currently in the UK where I understand we both live because the current government is a travelling circus run by a band of incompetent clowns (and don't let me get started on the opposition). However, again, that is no reason to advocate for just letting everyone run wild and do whatever they please, regardless of whether it puts others in danger or not.
Other EU countries, many of which had severe outbreaks of the disease, like Spain, France and Italy, have managed to enter and exit their lockdowns and to establish new social distancing guidelines, all in an orderly fashion. Yet other EU countries, like Greece and Germany have managed to impose a lockdown early enough to avoid the worst of the disease and are also now exiting their lockdowns and imposing social distancing measures again in an orderly fashion. It is my undestanding that in every such case, social distancing measures and even the lifting of the lockdown are provisional and can be expected to either loosen up or tighten down in the future, depending on how the pandemic progresses in those countries (and outside) and always with a mind to allow social and economic life to go on as freely as possible which is of course everyone's aim.
I don't understand why it is not possible to do the same thing in the UK or why, like you say it's madness or antisocial etc etc.
a) you have some atypical neurochemistry which means you don't/can't understand human socialisation properly
and/or
b) you're locked inside with your family and so you can't "feel" the dread that millions of people are feeling right now, wondering whether they'll ever touch another human again
For me, it's an urge almost as strong as the urge to drink water. If you refuse to take that on board and just pretend that people are being irrational because your brain doesn't work that way, you're going to remain confused by this.
If you don't want to go to a language class, a theatre, a gallery, a pub, a cafe, sit on a bus, a train, a restaurant, go on a date, have children play in a playground, work in an office, and so on and so forth, for years, or you want to replace them with some wanky dystopian "social distancing" version in which you sit behind screens, wear masks, and have 10 people in a hall built for hundreds, that's cool, you do you. I'll do it for a few months, I won't do it for years, because that represents the imposition of a >2% mortality rate on me anyway by removing all of the good parts of life. My response to this is pretty much "OK introvert", you know?
That over with;
Of course, I do think that we should, for a few months, attempt to reduce the spread of the virus, via whatever measures are reasonable!
I strongly disagree that the status quo of "you can get on the tube to go and work in a supermarket, but can't cuddle your partner" is sustainable.
There's no guidance. As I've repeatedly said, we need a plan to deal with mental health _right now_. Not next week, not "if the R number goes down", not "if Boris has a good day", we need a date at which it will be legal for people to have autonomy and decide whether they want to take the risk to visit their friends and family, and to make new friends.
Notice, by the way, that you're not giving any concrete plans for this in your post - it's all wishy washy "oh, well, we might do this, or I suppose that, well maybe" nonsense. There's no sense of urgency at all. You're really not understanding that many, many people would rather die than live in a dystopian world in which people treat each other as virons. A few months, sure we'll take it. A few years - completely intractable.
We were urgently locked indoors, the world was turned off, and now our needs are being ignored with this child-like "we're not there yet, darling" fluff.
So again - I ask you - what's the plan for long term partners meeting each other? Family members? For dating? For meeting new friends? Do you have one? You do realise that the Government has literally broken up families so that they can prioritise the flower shop opening?
Or are you going to twiddle your thumbs and moan about people breaking the lockdown whilst giving them zero indication that it's ever ending (and seemingly actually _enjoying_ it?)
When people bottle up mental health issues the inevitable result is a release like a pressure valve.
What an awful communication style. My mistake for trying to hold a civilised conversation, then.
I don't mean to insult you, it's simply baffling to me that you can just ignore this as if it's a nonentity. My brain is different to yours, yours to mine, however we slice it we need to bridge that gap in order to understand each other.
Again: this shut down is trading some lives for other lives. I don't think it's a net gain, I've explained why, and all you can offer is "just wait" on a loop forever. Waiting 1 month locked in a box as a single person is a 0.1%-1% fatality rate depending on demographic.
And yes, '2 meter land' is the same thing if pretty much all of the joy in your life revolves around being close to other people.
You can engage with that on an honest basis, or you can just pretend it away and watch people slowly stream outside, you know? I apologise if I'm getting combative, but it feels like I'm left with no choice...
Also, that's the risk of dying. Serious illness that can do long-term damage is another issue. I'm not sure how common that is supposed to be.
The people will stop caring, they've already stopped caring.
They're not the ones who are going to die. The realization is dawning that it's only the old that die.
Much like the starving kids in Africa, it's rapidly becoming a "Well, it's tragic, but I can't see it" problem.
Note I don't know how I personally feel about this, I think this is just the reality of what's about to happen in Western democracies.
I think the old will ultimately be chucked under a bus. We'll get lots of tragic stories about care homes and a whole load of hand wringing, but no-one will actually care all that much to bring in another lock-down.
Or, as you say, the other option is that we all throw 5-10 years of our lives away in a massive global recession for some old people who've already had the best years of their lives to live a couple of years more.
I think we've got to start hoping beyond hope for a magic cure, or that basic social distancing kinda keeps r below 1, so we don't have to look ourselves in the mirror in 5 years time and have to face the reality of what we just did.