I am nearly middled-aged myself and living in the countryside and remote-working for years already, so I am not very inconvenienced. But I want restrictions lifted so that people in their teens and twenties can have their big festivities, courtship rituals, etc.
The COVID lockdowns have been the biggest betrayal of youth since May '68, and their loss of freedoms offends me more than the deaths of the old.
I'd be more worried for those who work festivals, events , bars , restaurants, etc. Millions of life have been destroyed.
I like to put it this way , the worst thing that's happened to me since Corona started, is I no longer have places to meet people. But the folks who staff those places , bars , concerts, etc ,are out of work.
Not very fun to be jobless when rent is still due and your kids still need to eat.
You may not have many empathy towards the older population who is endangered directly, but perhaps the many who will not have place in hospitals due to the flood of COVID patients, causing many many indirect deaths.
Maybe that's you, and that's your choice. But what about all the young people who do not want to stay home and make sacrifices for the sake of older people? My sympathies are with them.
> perhaps the many who will not have place in hospitals due to the flood of COVID patients
One solution to this is to triage COVID patients away from intensive care, so that those beds remain available to the bulk of the population. This is the approach that Sweden chose, for example. So, no, I don’t see this as a reason to place limits on the lives of young people.
I wore a mask, I social distanced, I refrained from gatherings of more than 2 people. I followed protocol during the time of crisis and I did so willing and zealously. Your ad hominem attack does little to disparage my argument or my thinking on the subject.
This pandemic has been deadly because it was a virus humans didn't have immunity for. I wonder why people find such a thing to be so hard to accept?
Necessary measures were taken AFTER the fact.
You cant unring the bell around the neck of a horse that already got out of the barn and boarded a ship thats already sailed. I realize people died and loved ones were lost and this is an unmitigated human tragedy but the urge to find someone to blame isn't helpful.
Continuing the current practices in dogmatic fashion for some unspecified period of time isn't the answer. Vaccination is the answer. Immunity is the answer and at current that seems like a realistic possibility. Things can always go to hell again at any moment from some new threat and thats a fact of life.
Basically there are two groups of people: one group (let's call them 'young people') are not very unlikely to die or suffer from this disease but are very inconvenienced by the various restrictions. Your "We did what we had to when we needed to and the need for such measures is demonstrably coming to an end." really illustrates that. You're unilaterally declaring it over because you're tired of your freedoms being impinged and you're ready to move on. Meanwhile the science doesn't support your view.
And that brings me to the other group (let's call them 'old people'): these people are much more likely do die and don't have that much scope for protecting themselves reliably. Or maybe they can but they have been led to believe in the attitude of the 'young people'. They pay the price for people not wearing masks, not taking the disease seriously and acting recklessly.
And that's the insidiousness of it. One group plays, the other group pays. It reveals something discomforting about our society which we think is highly civilized but really is so casually indifferent to other people's death and suffering.