We absolutely have, the SAGE subcommittee SPI-B employed what are in my opinion some unethical behavioural psychology tactics. The level of nationalism around the NHS is an absolutely masterful method of propaganda, I don't agree with it in the slightest but I do respect the talent of its architects! Ask your average Briton and they genuinely believe the NHS is the best health system on the planet, they'll also be absolutely adamant that this is their own opinion and that fetishising a government department to this degree isn't nationalism.
It absolutely has. I maintain that without social media, which simultaneously provided a way into everyone's thoughts, and also contented people with a feeling of connectedness while living under house arrest conditions of historic proportions, people would have simply rejected the whole campaign of Covid restrictions.
Quarantines and lockdowns have been used throughout history to combat epidemics, with great success. Why do you think that the only thing that made people accept the latest ones is social media?
Your other comment got removed, probably for being overtly hostile and lacking in any objective facts or evidence. Here is my reply anyway:
The IFR of Covid overall is very low (0.4%, by some estimates). If you are under 50, it's basically not worth worrying about. Is that the BS you are talking about? Find me some actual numbers on those things you describe, and not just fear-laden imagery spread in the media and online, or I'll stick to my opinions of who is spreading BS.
My local health district currently is at 75% capacity. It has also treated fewer patients than average every month since March 2020. In fact, my country turned out huge numbers of old folks into nursing homes where they all spread Covid and died while we were shut up in our houses to "protect grannie". Blindly following the "protect the hospitals" mantra has caused huge healthcare issues where I live (UK), and will possibly cause the failure of our socialised healthcare system as we know it. Hospitals currently have single-digit percentages of Covid patients, yet cannot get anyone else treated because of the absurd amount of Covid restrictions. In my principality (Wales), it was recently published that the backlog of cancer patients will take a decade to clear (obviously, those patients will just die).
It was quite quickly discovered that the most effective care for a Covid patient was fairly simple - bed rest, and low-flow oxygen. Healthcare was not limited by bed numbers or equipment.
> Find me some actual numbers on those things you describe, and not just fear-laden imagery spread in the media and online, or I'll stick to my opinions of who is spreading BS.
So you think that the makeshift morgues and people dying in the streets was just a media operation? Hospitals were over capacity in many places, if you have a hard time believing this you really are trying to hard to ignore reality.
All in French, but Google Translate should help you. The column you're searching for is TO (Taux d'occupation, occupancy rate). You can see it's over 1 many times, in many different regions, for weeks at a time. And this is in a country that did heavy lockdowns the first two times, and then very strict curfews (18h at one time). It doesn't matter that for people under 50 in perfect health the mortality rate is minimal - if the hospitals and emergency services are over capacity, those people can't get help for anything. And of course that's discounting the fact that even many U50s have comorbidities.
> It was quite quickly discovered that the most effective care for a Covid patient was fairly simple - bed rest, and low-flow oxygen. Healthcare was not limited by bed numbers or equipment.
And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"?
Your country is an unmitigated disaster managed by clowns. And even they realised that lockdowns are needed after weeks of insisting on the opposite. Why do you think that is?
Which makeshift morgues? Which people dying in the streets? Remember that video from China in early 2020, showing people literally dropping in the street? You can't be talking about that, surely.
>And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"?
Remember how I explained that the total number of patients treated every month in the UK since March 2020 is less than average?[1] It very clearly follows that we were not limited by beds.
>Your country is an unmitigated disaster managed by clowns.
Yet it has a Covid mortality rate per capita of around the same as most other developed countries. Admittedly a little on the high side, although the US has now overtaken the UK in recent months. Certainly about the same as France and Spain.
[1] https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/sta..., click on the link under "Provisional Monthly Hospital Episode Statistics for Admitted Patient Care and Outpatients Dashboard ", and then go to page 2 of the silly web app. Observe how the NHS runs at near 100% capacity, until March 2020, when it has run consistently less than that (and continues to do so).
In the US the treatments are absolutely limited by bed availability. And towing around a statistic like "less people are being treated" is the entire point the not shill world is trying to make. Do you know why less people are being treated? Because the beds are full of people with COVID and hospitalized COVID patients take longer to treat than most other hospital stays. So the beds are being filled and not emptied at regular rates leading to less people being treated. Maybe it's extremely different in the UK but here in the US people with your attitude are a huge problem.
To pick out two dates, roughly at each Covid peak:
16 Apr 2020: 3,033 general beds occupied, 3,200 general beds available. 190 ICU beds used, 204 ICU beds available.
25th Jan 2021: 7,840 general beds occupied, 1,459 general beds available. 218 ICU beds used, 49 ICU beds available.
The publicly-available statistics do not support the notion that our hospitals are in dire straights due to sheer numbers of patients, nor the idea that they were full to bursting with Covid patients. As I have said repeatedly, they were emptier than usual.
Further, denigrating anyone who disagrees with you as "shrill" does you no favours.
Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS". As the figures clearly show, at the peak of the first wave, the hospitals were less than 50% full.
The immediate question is - what on earth else has gone wrong?
Has it occurred to you that the statistics for Wales only might not be telling the same story? How were the hospitals in England and Scotland? Considering it would be impossible to force a quarantine between them, a global UK policy wasn't a ludicrous idea. Furthermore, the point of the restrictions was to stop the exponential growth before hospitals were overwhelmed.
> Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS
And many many others did, but don't bitch about it for months on end.
Months? I'm going to be paying for this folly, probably for the rest of my working life.
I thought you told me that we couldn't compare numbers between different countries, what with them being different and all? Wales is an especially interesting case, because we had significantly more onerous restrictions than England (and if I lived in England, I might not have such a strong opinion that the downsides of lockdowns outweigh the benefits).
As you absolutely insist though, here's the data for England:
Because they all feel a need to deny that people willingly participating have both agency and practical intelligence. Agency you make decisions and act on them. Practical intelligence means being able to weigh risks and your own knowledge to make appropriately hedged bets.
And another thing people engaging in prosocial mitigations have seen that they actually work and thus feel a sense of control over the situation. That in particular rankles political and public health leaders, and especially rankles covid denialists.
Has Canada, a territory of extremely low population density, been under strict stay-at-home orders - prohibiting not "to see other people", but just to leave the house? I remember the months-old anecdote of a policeman accusing a driver, while fining him, to have put the community at risk, because in case of car accident he would have forced human interaction. I am not sure - I have little information.
So, right: if that is factual (it is unfortunately possible), to arrive to such degree of irrationality and abuse against clean, linear thinking and good sense, social media can only have a relative weight.
> Has Canada, a territory of extremely low population density, been under strict stay-at-home orders - prohibiting not "to see other people", but just to leave the house
It doesn't seem to be the case - during the Spanish flu pandemic, there was no central health authority and every municipality deal with it however they could, usually by shutting down everything non-essential and mandating masks. However the patchy response resulted in lots of deaths, and thus precipitated the creation of a federal health department.
As far as I can tell, lockdowns that were this widespread and restrictive have never been used before in history ever, the closest examples to them were during the medieval era but were still more targetted and limited in scope than these ones, and the narrative about them always having been used is itself a propaganda tool used to stop people questioning them.
> As far as I can tell, lockdowns that were this widespread and restrictive have never been used before in history ever, the closest examples to them were during the medieval era but were still more targetted and limited in scope than these ones
Yes, because usually up until present day they were used at the city-level, by city authorities. Why? Well, most epidemic-capable diseases came from trade, usually in port cities, hence quarantines and lockdowns of port cities. ( not to mention that countries and their administration were much less centralised, public health authorities didn't really exist)
But today, with air travel, and the much more connected nature of our existence ( people travel for leisure, a lot), combined with the specifics of the virus ( long incubation period, high chance of no symptoms whatsoever, high spreadability), made country-wide lockdowns a good idea.
Were they a bit too much in some cases? Of course. For instance in France, during the first wave there was a total lockdown, and public places like beaches and parks were closed. There were people complaining in the Brittany region, because they had zero cases ( apart from those transferred to their hospitals), and couldn't use their beaches which are huge and open air. Nonetheless, the risk that the virus "escapes" from hospitals, or that people from nearby regions travel there to use the regional exceptions, and spread the disease further was deemed to be too big. Because, again, many carriers are asymptomatic and the incubation period is rather long.
Ah yes, the asymptomatic aspect of Covid, a disease so deadly most people need to be tested to know they came near it.
How did the "connected" nature of our existence make it necessary to shut down entire countries, as well as the air travel links? My local playgrounds were officially closed until late into 2020 (obviously, I ignored that), as well as all sorts of other places that were obviously harmless. In fact, the worst place to go was hospital, where the infection rate was pretty bad.
It became obvious quite quickly who was at risk of Covid, and I do not understand why patients were not sent home for bed rest with a portable low-flow oxygen kit (as that was found to be the most effective treatment), and the rest of us allowed to continue with life as we saw fit.
> Ah yes, the asymptomatic aspect of Covid, a disease so deadly most people need to be tested to know they came near it.
Wow. Yes, because while you might have zero symptoms, you still spread it, and will probably infect multiple other people ( the so called R), especially without masks and other such precautions. Those people will infect many more in their turn. Among those, some will develop symptoms, sometimes heavy, and it's highly probable there will be people with comorbidities who can die even with abundant care, which isn't a given if hospitals are full from all those with heavy cases.
> My local playgrounds were officially closed until late into 2020 (obviously, I ignored that), as well as all sorts of other places that were obviously harmless
The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all. Of course parks are a better place to be than a store, Covid-wise, but not if you gather in groups.
> How did the "connected" nature of our existence make it necessary to shut down entire countries, as well as the air travel links
People travel between cities, all around the world, daily. Whereas before there'd be a few traders going from Milan to Geneva in the space of a few weeks, now you have multiple daily trains with hundreds of people each. Don't you see how that changes the equation and how that helps spread a virus which is usually without symptoms ?
> The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all. Of course parks are a better place to be than a store, Covid-wise, but not if you gather in groups.
So the idea of the citizen in these - sorry, _decadent_ - societies is not that of an educated, rational and reasonable (with voting rights) agent who will act responsibly and with appropriate proportionate care,
but that of an unreliable liability which will act with the property and wisdom of a problematic child. ("They could go in the wilderness but then they may mingle".)
A few of us will ask: so, where is dignified Society to be found nowadays?
If you're at risk of Covid, stay at home (which is behaviour very common in old folks anyway, during flu season). Frankly, even then your risk is very low. I know several people in their 90's who tested positive for Covid and survived just fine.
>The point of those restrictions was to stop people from meeting, at all.
Yes, the insidious and damaging idea that meeting people at all is dangerous, as we are all disease-ridden carriers of death. When I made a complaint at work that the Covid policies were making the workplace demoralising and miserable, the head of the Health and Safety committe specifically told me that government guidance was to "eliminate conversations". How is this at all healthy for us as a society?
You're also still taking about planes and trains, when I was asking how does that justify being literally shut in my house. Saying that, I understand your point of view. Covid is so bad, that absolutely no risk of passing it must be tolerated, and policy should be set accordingly.
When? Maybe a town or village got isolated, and becaome the "unclean" zone.
There is absolutely no precedent for putting entire countries under effective house arrest for months at a time, and for a disease with such a low mortality rate.
They were more local, more flexible, and were used to combat highly-deadly epidemics such as the plague or spanish flu. Such previous epidemics were more deadly, and were perceived as such by the local population, who therefore probably found the measures more justified.
Also, the 2020 quarantines arrived at a time where global resource inequalities were at unprecedented levels in human history, and when popular insurrections were growing across the planet (Liban, France, Soudan, etc), so they were interpreted (in my opinion, rightly so) as a political repression measure more than a sanitary measure... which was confirmed by the lack of sanitary measures from most governments, including the French government who during the pandemic cut public hospitals budgets by 800M€, continued to shut down hospital beds while the bodies were piling up, and covered up their failures (such as destroying the national mask stocks before the pandemic) via heavy propaganda campaigns.
Finally, opposition to the quarantines was fueled by how unevenly the measures were applied. Government officials and rich people have been publicly documented eating in restaurants and throwing parties, while common people like you and me were routinely beaten up by the police, fined or detained, for daring to go out and breathe fresh air (which here in France was illegal by decree for most of the 1st quarantine, before that was relaxed).
I don't think social media is entirely responsible for the growing conspiracy theories (Qanon) and other forms of popular opposition to quarantines, but they sure played a role in giving more facts to the population to know for sure the government can't be trusted to protect the local population (at least here in France).
> They were more local, more flexible, and were used to combat highly-deadly epidemics such as the plague or spanish flu. Such previous epidemics were more deadly, and were perceived as such by the local population, who therefore probably found the measures more justified.
Yes, previous epidemics were more deadly, but also easier to contain because:
1) cases were symptomatic
2) incubation period was lower
So the effectiveness of quarantines and lockdowns was much higher and easier to measure ( we have no more visibly sick people, and it's been like this for a week, everything is OK).
> Also, the 2020 quarantines arrived at a time where global resource inequalities were at unprecedented levels in human history, and when popular insurrections were growing across the planet (Liban, France, Soudan, etc),
I can't comment on Lebanon and Sudan, but in France you're flat out wrong.
There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling all through 2019 and were at less than 100k before the protests against the retirement reform, which were sometimes done in coordination [0]. In any case, the numbers for february are at 10-30k protestors, which is nothing for a country of 67 million inhabitants.
> which was confirmed by the lack of sanitary measures from most governments, including the French government who during the pandemic cut public hospitals budgets by 800M€, continued to shut down hospital beds while the bodies were piling up, and covered up their failures (such as destroying the national mask stocks before the pandemic) via heavy propaganda campaigns.
Again, you're flat out wrong. Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added - this is why during the third wave hospitals in many regions were over "original capacity"; in Ile de France we got to ~140% if memory serves me right[1]. Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government[2].
> Finally, opposition to the quarantines was fueled by how unevenly the measures were applied. Government officials and rich people have been publicly documented eating in restaurants and throwing parties, while common people like you and me were routinely beaten up by the police, fined or detained, for daring to go out and breathe fresh air (which here in France was illegal by decree for most of the 1st quarantine, before that was relaxed).
It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.
> but they sure played a role in giving more facts to the population to know for sure the government can't be trusted to protect the local population (at least here in France).
That's funny, because the government's approval was very high during the initial waves, and Macron's is still higher than before the pandemic[3]. Not only that, but he's the first one since Chirac to have such a high approval this late into his term.
Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible ( and obviously i'm not the only one if Macron's ratings are any indication); at any case, they were really trying to strike a fine balance. No lockdowns on the third wave, keeping schools open, financial help, etc.
Agreed, that is a major difference, that affects both body count and popular perception of the virus.
> There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling
Yet many polls agreed the gilets jaunes were as popular as ever. And if you think that dozens of thousands is a low number, can you name any other protest movement that has gathered so many people weekly for over a year? There was also a growing uproar about the new pension reform, the last of which back in 2010 led to the almost-collapse of the government (many petrol stations across the country were already out of fuel).
So my case is not that there was an actual revolution taking place in France, but rather that there were epicenters of insurrection which cost the State en private sector billions of euros: the gilets jaunes, the anti-5G movement, the ZADs, riots against police abuse in popular districts, growing and more coordinated strikes across all sectors. The elites tried to ridicule those movements (such as pretending the gilets jaunes were antisemites), then tried to repress them (including deploying armored military vehicles on the streets of the capital), but nothing killed the ideas so they were growing afraid of an actual revolution. They seized the pandemic as an excuse to reinforce social control on every level and make "acceptable" totalitarian measures while disseminating propaganda that the danger to you and your loved ones is your neighbor, not the State or the bosses. Some kind of anti-social opportunism, as described by Naomi Klein's Shock doctrine.
> Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added
Reorganization is a word like reform, which means very little in itself but works fine in the mouths of neoliberal apparatchiks to downplay their tragic actions and their human cost. Also, you seem to be acknowledging it's possible to cut beds and at the same time expand "emergency ones" to appear like you're doing something good when you're in fact tearing down public service, so my point stands. "Look at this pie i baked just for you (while i was robbing your house)"
There were many health workers protests and strikes before and during the pandemic, denouncing the hypocrisy of the government's measures and exposing their terrible working conditions and the (bad) effects it has on patients. Are you saying these people (who know best because they talk about first-hand experience) are wrong and the government propaganda is right? I'm tempted to believe the health workers i've met who were severely burnt out and depressed (yet did their best every single day), rather than the psychopaths in power.
> Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government
Oh i'm not blaming it on the current government. When i say the government, i liberally mean "those who hold power, whatever their party is". This was indeed a problem with the previous Hollande-formed government, but may i remind you that most of LREM (including Macron himself) were key players of that previous government? Whoever the head of this monstrous hydra, the result for the common people is the same: hard labor and unlimited suffering.
> It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.
On this specific point, you are wrong. The "going out for under 1h and less than 10km from home" checkbox on the laisser-passer forms was added late into the first confinement. For over a month, maybe more, it was illegal to go out just to breathe fresh air, unless you had a pet to walk (another checkbox).
> Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible
Breaking news: according to the french government propaganda in various news outlets controled by the State or private billionaires close to the State (Dassault, Lagardère, etc) i just read, the french government is the best government in the world. /s
Sarcasm aside, the government's actions and hypocrisies have been widely criticized, but the most striking fact about this whole pandemic is that the president single-handedly decided the fate and civil liberties of millions of individuals behind closed doors (the scientific community at large was not consulted, and when it occasionally was, it was ignored): do you think having a single unskilled individual announce surprise securitarian measures every other week on television is what we can call a democracy? It sounds like the very definition of a dictatorship.
Related: why are cops the only civil servants exonerated from wearing masks and getting mandatory vaccines? Why then are reactionary media fixated on the fact that lawless (non-white) proles in the suburbs are not civilized enough to respect the quarantine, and not addressing the elephant in the room? (it's a rhetoric question) It's a feature of authoritarian regimes than their armed hand (the police) needs to benefit from some forms of privileges, in order to keep the status quo intact.
Overall, we may agree or disagree on specific points, but i would recommend you check out more independent media sources every now and then to get a different perspective on things. There's only a handful of nation-wide independent publications left and they're worth encouraging: Mediapart.fr, CQFD-journal.org, reporterre.net. If you're more interested in popular analysis/discourse than professional journalism, i'd recommend medialibres.org, a planet [0] of various self-organized outlets for social critique.
Happy reading
[0] A planet, for the younger among us, is an aggregate of different RSS feeds. It's sort of like Google News, but you can setup your own to track the news sources of interest to you. For example, Planet Debian has a collection of blogs from the Debian ecosystem.
>Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible
Is that because you were relatively unaffected by the downsides of the various restrictions? It can't be because the overall Covid fatality rate is better in France, becase it's about the same as the UK.
No, it's because i think they made the mostly right choices and did around as best as they could given the circumstances and resources they had. Restrictions were imposed only when necessary, and adapted ( e.g. during the third wave there was a curfew, but no lockdown to minimise the economic effects). Communication was good and transparent. Overall I'd say I'd give them a 7.5/10 ( they could have done better, most notably in realising the gravity of the situation earlier on).
And as i said, the approval rating of Macron and his PM during the initial waves, Édouard Philippe, are much higher then before the pandemic, and literally unprecedented for a French president since moving to the current system ( 5 year mandates, etc.). The last French president with a similar approval rating was Chirac, and he passed away last year.
Comparing fatality rates between countries is complicated for a number of reasons ( weather, organisation of cities and families, customs ( e.g. french people used to kiss each other on the cheek when meeting, even complete strangers), age distribution, hospital capacity, medical reserves, etc.)
Yet France did no better in deaths per captia, than the "shambolic" UK, or Sweden, where life seemed pretty tolerable, nor most of the other EU countries, in fact. (Nor many developing countries that did very little to contain Covid, but I'm sure we will both agree we can't really rely on those figures).
It seems to me there is very little clear link between how a country responded, and the overall death count.
As i said elsewhere, comparing countries is complex due to a varietyof differences. The closer they are, the more fair rhe comparison will be. Sweden did much worse compared to its neighbours in a similar situation.
Well, you obviously were in a somewhat-privileged position to consider they made the best choices. For most of us, the quarantine was a hardship, especially for numerous families (many poorer people live with less than 5-10m²/person), people in situation of house abuse, persons with addiction problems or even with mental health issues (among which loneliness and depression can only be worsened by quarantine).
Also worth noting, while the richer classes were in their villas ordering food delivery service, the rest of us often had to wait in line for over an hour (the supermarket only took 5-10 people at a time) sometimes only to find empty shelves without toilet paper or pasta.
Then, because the hospitals didn't have any resources for the flow of patients, they actively triaged patients before they even reached the hospitals. There are many accounts of people dying or getting close to death because the emergency services refused to give them services, because they had strict directives to only care for people with specific symptoms.
Then of course, there's the "essential workers". The indispensable tiny hands of the capitalist machines. These have been the most exposed to the Covid and have ensured that private corporations such as Amazon profited more than ever during the pandemic, yet saw exactly 0 benefits from their hard and hazardous labor.
We could talk about food security. That official State-financed food banks (such as Les resto du coeur) closed their doors, at the same time that undeclared work came to a stop due to the confinement, leading the most precarious among us to actual famine. Many city halls and local non-profits had to improvise to deliver basic food for survival to millions of people, because the government and its vassals failed their job.
Finally, the government, to my knowledge, did not requisition the many resources at its disposal. I read that story about a clothing workshop from Paris who had to insist with the prefecture to be turned into a somewhat-official mask-producing facility.
So, what did the government do? Apart from tearing down our lives and profiting (in capital) from it? Apart from their theater plays on television to let us know there is no danger (yeah, they Chernobyled us again), masks are useless, and a strong racist police is the only weapon against the virus?
Typical. Those still exorting us that lockdowns were worth it, are those who did not feel the ill effects. Personally, lockdown as I experienced it here in Wales (which was particularly draconian and frankly absurd at times) was absolutely brutal on the social and emotional health of my family and those closest to me. I know one young family in particular who I don't think will ever be the same again. Combined with the almost complete lack of subjective evidence, as I go about my days, of any kind of deadly pandemic, you'll forgive me for my opinions.
Edit: Not forgetting the financial repercussions, which I suspect as a helpless taxpayer, will burden my family for the rest of my working life. The UK has already imposed a whole new tax, to try and dig the NHS out of the hole it is in.
Weren't there a lot of fearmongering whoppers of budget black holes, economic collapse, shortages and famine, increased risk of war, etc., coming out of remain? How do you judge which side lied more?
More like - Brexit has highlighted the state of our crumbling and badly-run domestic HGV industry, now that there isn't a pool of Eastern Europeans prepared to do the work for lower wages. Personally, I'm excited to see an industry given such a chance to redeem and re-structure itself for the better.
I didn't say there would be no positives or negatives to either side, I said there were lies from both sides. Which there clearly were.
I just find it strange that people think one side has the high ground because they didn't lie to the public quite so much, according to people who lied to the public.
