Has the world overreacted re Covid-19
Poll: Has the world overreacted re Covid-19
Total Members Polled: 368
Discussion
gottans said:
monkfish1 said:
gottans said:
HoHoHo said:
To be honest, like many people I know we don’t even know anyone who’s definitely had COVID!
Well a colleague of mine spent 11 days in hospital and many weeks recovering from it, far from mild symptoms. No underlying health conditions, looks after himself, etc.The real problem with Covid-19 is apart from the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions it is hard to predict who will become seriously ill with it, bit of a lottery I wouldn't want to play.
The number of people with no underlying conditions under 65 has been 400 and something. That approx the same number of deaths in car accidents in the same period (in normal times). Several hundred people a year die falling down the stairs.
It would seem you, and many millions of others, are illogically applying extra weight to the risk of the virus whilst happily ignoring all sorts of other risks you take daily.
Accept that if you are in a "vunerable" group that will skew things.
No doubt as cases continue to fall, people will become more comfortable with the risk, how best to protect themselves and others and maybe it will get the same lack of attention the risk driving a car gets. Trouble is we all judge risk differently as you recognise.
You could have argued that in March and April. But its July now. The risks and patterns of infection are clear for all to see.
People dont judge risk differently, id suggest that many dont judge it all!
I do know a couple of things:-
1. I have not had a bean from the government.
2. My main job (ground stability) has slowed up, after a massive pulse of work.
3. My back up job (supply teaching) has died because schools have closed.
I am currently at work on a building site being a physical monkey that moves stone, mixes cement and uses muscles. I'm usually on £500 a day. Now I'm on £100. Sadly, I had no free £10000 or furlough, or any of the self employed helicopter money. I am working as a gorilla because my life outside of the virus is quite expensive. My alternative is to go bust.
Today, I paused between wheelbarrows full of building stone and cement to observe the owners of the £400-600k properties. They looked like tramps. Scruffy beards, scraggly hair, in their pyjamas at 11am. Kids playing outside, dad's not knowing what to do.
Furlough.
These guys are well paid public sector/management types who are on hols.
As someone who is self employed, I am familiar with the get on with it attitude. I have looked up from my workstation and what I see is that we've had this apocalypse and some people have been extremely fortunate and some have had to plough on regardless.
In a crisis, everyone should bear the brunt equally. What we've had is a political assault on the types of people that the state doesn't like. Nasty greedy directors and self employed people taking the piss. By pulling this card, they have actually shot a lot of people in the face. When I mix up another barrow of muck, or hit my head on the scaffold, I am reminded that this perma-holiday lot have had a proper lottery win. The wretched part is that their peasant maids come in to clean up their dirty socks and dust off the dusty things. The maids didn't get a mortgage holiday or the full wage on hols.
Obviously the reply to this is "moan moan moan moan moan, you're just hard done by, fk you".
If the government think I'm paying tax after this debacle, they are very sorely mistaken. They gave me nothing and as a result my accounts will reflect this. Fk them.
1. I have not had a bean from the government.
2. My main job (ground stability) has slowed up, after a massive pulse of work.
3. My back up job (supply teaching) has died because schools have closed.
I am currently at work on a building site being a physical monkey that moves stone, mixes cement and uses muscles. I'm usually on £500 a day. Now I'm on £100. Sadly, I had no free £10000 or furlough, or any of the self employed helicopter money. I am working as a gorilla because my life outside of the virus is quite expensive. My alternative is to go bust.
Today, I paused between wheelbarrows full of building stone and cement to observe the owners of the £400-600k properties. They looked like tramps. Scruffy beards, scraggly hair, in their pyjamas at 11am. Kids playing outside, dad's not knowing what to do.
Furlough.
These guys are well paid public sector/management types who are on hols.
As someone who is self employed, I am familiar with the get on with it attitude. I have looked up from my workstation and what I see is that we've had this apocalypse and some people have been extremely fortunate and some have had to plough on regardless.
In a crisis, everyone should bear the brunt equally. What we've had is a political assault on the types of people that the state doesn't like. Nasty greedy directors and self employed people taking the piss. By pulling this card, they have actually shot a lot of people in the face. When I mix up another barrow of muck, or hit my head on the scaffold, I am reminded that this perma-holiday lot have had a proper lottery win. The wretched part is that their peasant maids come in to clean up their dirty socks and dust off the dusty things. The maids didn't get a mortgage holiday or the full wage on hols.
Obviously the reply to this is "moan moan moan moan moan, you're just hard done by, fk you".
If the government think I'm paying tax after this debacle, they are very sorely mistaken. They gave me nothing and as a result my accounts will reflect this. Fk them.
mx5nut said:
This.
The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
Lord Marylebone said:
This.
The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
It’s a cute image, but there’s a lot of evidence that the virus does it’s thing eventually and that lockdowns either do nothing or just have a delaying effect. This is why almost all countries have a bell curve of deaths in spite of variation of responses. The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
We are in the minority, but us skeptics knew the virus didn’t represent Doomsday as it’s simply not that dangerous to the vast majority of people. There was never going to be an exponential curve of deaths. So I think it’s reasonable for us to say “we told you so, the end of the world didn’t come and our actions didn’t change much.”
Edited by dmahon on Tuesday 7th July 05:42
John Locke said:
A gross over reaction due to scientist worship, and opportunism.
Yes a misplaced faith in the power of science to predict the future is the key factor here. Helped in that fact by the numbers of politicians, and people in the MSM, who have no scientific background. Box said:
All models are wrong, but some are useful
That should be the mentality we should have about all models, economic, climate, epidemiological. Instead they are treated with hushed reverence as if they are the verdict handed down by the Oracle of Delphi. dmahon said:
We are in the minority, but us skeptics knew the virus didn’t represent Doomsday
Always good for a laugh when those without a shred of self awareness claim they are more knowledgeable than actual scientists.Lord Marylebone said:
This.
The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
100% this, the response from such idiots was completely expected.The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
LimSlip said:
dmahon said:
We are in the minority, but us skeptics knew the virus didn’t represent Doomsday
Always good for a laugh when those without a shred of self awareness claim they are more knowledgeable than actual scientists.Lord Marylebone said:
This.
The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
100% this, the response from such idiots was completely expected.The problem with actively working to prevent disaster, is that you then always get idiots crawling out of the woodwork to say “See! Everything was fine! We overreacted”
As someone else pointed out, it’s the same as the millennium bug. Time and time again you get people saying “See! Nothing happened! People worried over nothing”. The reason that nothing happened is because a lot of companies spent millions of pounds and months of work on upgrades and reprogramming specifically so that nothing would happen.
It was never really a problem, except for in the sales pitches of IT and telecoms firms starting mid 1990s. We had already checked to see what would happen as the millenium flicked over - pretty much nothing - but that didn't stop us painting it as looming armageddon, scallywags that we were.
Personally, I think the same is true of COVID. The government overplayed the risks, in part because they genuinely didn't know what would happen. But also because they knew that if ANY SIGNIFICANT burden were put on the NHS it would not cope.
Look at the actions of government insiders to see how worried they were. Yes, Boris got it but he had already demonstrated that he took no meaningful precautionary measures, didn't even know how to wash his hands properly and was (is) a big, fat biffer.
But the government has created a monster, that now they will struggle to tame.
Louis Balfour said:
Well to be fair, the "idiots" were right with regard to the "millenium bug".
It was never really a problem, except for in the sales pitches of IT and telecoms firms starting mid 1990s. We had already checked to see what would happen as the millenium flicked over - pretty much nothing - but that didn't stop us painting it as looming armageddon, scallywags that we were.
A huge number of people (including myself) worked on software that definitely would have malfunctioned if left uncorrected. Again this is an excellent example of the inability of idiots to recognise cause and effect.It was never really a problem, except for in the sales pitches of IT and telecoms firms starting mid 1990s. We had already checked to see what would happen as the millenium flicked over - pretty much nothing - but that didn't stop us painting it as looming armageddon, scallywags that we were.
Louis Balfour said:
Personally, I think the same is true of COVID. The government overplayed the risks, in part because they genuinely didn't know what would happen. But also because they knew that if ANY SIGNIFICANT burden were put on the NHS it would not cope.
Look at the actions of government insiders to see how worried they were. Yes, Boris got it but he had already demonstrated that he took no meaningful precautionary measures, didn't even know how to wash his hands properly and was (is) a big, fat biffer.
But the government has created a monster, that now they will struggle to tame.
But of course if you were in charge you would have had perfect foresight and could have dealt with this situation with no extra deaths and no impact to the economy? Apparently self awareness is even less common than common sense these days.Look at the actions of government insiders to see how worried they were. Yes, Boris got it but he had already demonstrated that he took no meaningful precautionary measures, didn't even know how to wash his hands properly and was (is) a big, fat biffer.
But the government has created a monster, that now they will struggle to tame.
Thinking that you know better than scientists, doctors, medical professionals and time served experts seems to be a particularly British and American problem.
In the case of the Americans it comes from their ‘god given right to freedom’ combined with the arrogance that they get drilled into them from an early age that ordinary American citizens are more important than anyone else in the world.
As for the British, we seem to desperately cling on to some long departed notion that we are a greater nation that any other in the world, and we once had a empire and ‘won’ some world wars, and that this somehow makes us superior to everyone else. This in turn leads the public to think they know better than anyone and are somehow invincible. This attitude culminated in the ridiculous “the British public have had enough of experts” claim by Gove and ultimately Brexit. Because we don’t need experts, right?
Both the US and the UK have rising anti-vaxxer movements, built on precisely the deluded, entitled and ‘know it all’ attitude of the public in both nations.
I’m not a doctor or a scientist. They know better than I do. Therefore if they advise me to do something, I do it.
I suppose some crackpot will emerge from the woodwork to label me ‘a sheeple’ or something inventive like that while muttering about mainstream media.
In the case of the Americans it comes from their ‘god given right to freedom’ combined with the arrogance that they get drilled into them from an early age that ordinary American citizens are more important than anyone else in the world.
As for the British, we seem to desperately cling on to some long departed notion that we are a greater nation that any other in the world, and we once had a empire and ‘won’ some world wars, and that this somehow makes us superior to everyone else. This in turn leads the public to think they know better than anyone and are somehow invincible. This attitude culminated in the ridiculous “the British public have had enough of experts” claim by Gove and ultimately Brexit. Because we don’t need experts, right?
Both the US and the UK have rising anti-vaxxer movements, built on precisely the deluded, entitled and ‘know it all’ attitude of the public in both nations.
I’m not a doctor or a scientist. They know better than I do. Therefore if they advise me to do something, I do it.
I suppose some crackpot will emerge from the woodwork to label me ‘a sheeple’ or something inventive like that while muttering about mainstream media.
The pandemic is still in it's infancy regarding its spread and its hold on the global population.
But the choice whether to lockdown or aim for herd immunity was/is a big call for leaders around the world.
Hindsight versus predictions will be an interesting discussion once it is all over. (Assuming a vaccine or effective drug remedy is found).
But the choice whether to lockdown or aim for herd immunity was/is a big call for leaders around the world.
Hindsight versus predictions will be an interesting discussion once it is all over. (Assuming a vaccine or effective drug remedy is found).
Lord Marylebone said:
Thinking that you know better than scientists, doctors, medical professionals and time served experts seems to be a particularly British and American problem.
On the other hand get ten experts and you'll probably get twelve different opinions back, and at least half of those will be as much about politics as science. And then you'll have the opinions that are totally focused on a single issue to the exclusion of all other considerations - so maybe, you know, some people *do* know better overall that an idea might be stupid. I'm sure living in a technocracy is a warm comforting thought for some but it rarely ends well.
pquinn said:
Lord Marylebone said:
Thinking that you know better than scientists, doctors, medical professionals and time served experts seems to be a particularly British and American problem.
On the other hand get ten experts and you'll probably get twelve different opinions back, and at least half of those will be as much about politics as science. And then you'll have the opinions that are totally focused on a single issue to the exclusion of all other considerations - so maybe, you know, some people *do* know better overall that an idea might be stupid. I'm sure living in a technocracy is a warm comforting thought for some but it rarely ends well.
If a scientist tells me they know the speed of light or how a black hole is formed, and their work has gone through the proper peer review process, I will take their word for it. If a scientist wants to tell me they have exactly modelled society and can predict with accuracy how a completely new virus will behave I need a bit more detail i'm afraid.
Epidemiological models have about the same level of accuracy as economic ones.
John Locke said:
A gross over reaction due to scientist worship.
This thread has shown some very narrow and shallow basis of opinion. I'm not singling this comment out particularly but it amply demonstrates the problem that exists and an obscure belief that genuine expert opinion counts for nothing. Which is ridiculous.At the beginning of December, Covid was a few paragraphs in a zoologist's text book. Three months later it brought the world to a grinding halt. If just a few countries had reacted as they did then you might argue that they did overreact but the fact that nearly every single country on earth imposed similar measures indicates commonality in the support of scientific reason.
The primary reasons for the measures taken was as we all know to prevent the healthcare system from collapse. The speed of spread was profound and this needed to be slowed. Even if you weren't affected, it had the potential to impact others needing the services of healthcare providers.
The other less known but valid reason is that we knew nothing about it. For all we knew (or know), it could be rendering an entire generation sterile or slowly developing into something far worse that could emerge in years to come. It's thus critical that its spread is slowed in order to enable the time to learn about it.
The truth is that only history will be able to determine if we did the right thing or not.
StevieBee said:
At the beginning of December, Covid was a few paragraphs in a zoologist's text book. Three months later it brought the world to a grinding halt. If just a few countries had reacted as they did then you might argue that they did overreact but the fact that nearly every single country on earth imposed similar measures indicates commonality in the support of scientific reason.
Countries locked down because other countries had already done the same. Meanwhile Imperial released the results of their model to the media which massively overestimated rates of hospitalisation and significantly overestimated deaths.There was very little scientific about it, just following the herd.
dmahon said:
It’s a cute image, but there’s a lot of evidence that the virus does it’s thing eventually and that lockdowns either do nothing or just have a delaying effect. This is why almost all countries have a bell curve of deaths in spite of variation of responses.
We are in the minority, but us skeptics knew the virus didn’t represent Doomsday as it’s simply not that dangerous to the vast majority of people. There was never going to be an exponential curve of deaths. So I think it’s reasonable for us to say “we told you so, the end of the world didn’t come and our actions didn’t change much.”...
The "delaying effect" being the government's clearly stated objective at the outset, remember.We are in the minority, but us skeptics knew the virus didn’t represent Doomsday as it’s simply not that dangerous to the vast majority of people. There was never going to be an exponential curve of deaths. So I think it’s reasonable for us to say “we told you so, the end of the world didn’t come and our actions didn’t change much.”...
A lot of the bulls
t since has been knee jerk reaction to MSM/Social Media caterwauling. LimSlip said:
Louis Balfour said:
Well to be fair, the "idiots" were right with regard to the "millenium bug".
It was never really a problem, except for in the sales pitches of IT and telecoms firms starting mid 1990s. We had already checked to see what would happen as the millenium flicked over - pretty much nothing - but that didn't stop us painting it as looming armageddon, scallywags that we were.
A huge number of people (including myself) worked on software that definitely would have malfunctioned if left uncorrected. Again this is an excellent example of the inability of idiots to recognise cause and effect.It was never really a problem, except for in the sales pitches of IT and telecoms firms starting mid 1990s. We had already checked to see what would happen as the millenium flicked over - pretty much nothing - but that didn't stop us painting it as looming armageddon, scallywags that we were.
Some software needed to addressed as it was hugely date sensitive. Some didn't.
The problem was, as is the problem now with Covid, it was impossible to tell what fell into which camp due to the hysteria drummed up.
The human condition - we all love a good disaster movie. And the media love nothing more than to provide one It sells copy. Hence much of the absolute b
ks we've all been fed in the last 6mths on this, the prior 4yrs on Brexit, 18mths in 1999 on y2k etc. Etc. Etc.As Covid eases back we're on for a heady mix of Covid and Brexit.
Next year it will be "austerity by any other name". Then we'll just have to keep digging for more disaster.
Murph7355 said:
You are both right and wrong.
Some software needed to addressed as it was hugely date sensitive. Some didn't.
The problem was, as is the problem now with Covid, it was impossible to tell what fell into which camp due to the hysteria drummed up.
The human condition - we all love a good disaster movie. And the media love nothing more than to provide one It sells copy. Hence much of the absolute bks we've all been fed in the last 6mths on this, the prior 4yrs on Brexit, 18mths in 1999 on y2k etc. Etc. Etc.
As Covid eases back we're on for a heady mix of Covid and Brexit.
Next year it will be "austerity by any other name". Then we'll just have to keep digging for more disaster.
I might just do what we were going to do to systems if they did look like falling over. Turn the date back to one with the same year format. If 2021 turns out a bit pants I might just got back to 1993. I've already started growing the floppy hair.Some software needed to addressed as it was hugely date sensitive. Some didn't.
The problem was, as is the problem now with Covid, it was impossible to tell what fell into which camp due to the hysteria drummed up.
The human condition - we all love a good disaster movie. And the media love nothing more than to provide one It sells copy. Hence much of the absolute b
ks we've all been fed in the last 6mths on this, the prior 4yrs on Brexit, 18mths in 1999 on y2k etc. Etc. Etc.As Covid eases back we're on for a heady mix of Covid and Brexit.
Next year it will be "austerity by any other name". Then we'll just have to keep digging for more disaster.
Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff