Lanark wrote:jackdaww wrote:i am no great fan of governments , but why they would shoot themselves in the foot and cause havoc with the economy and peoples lives
by employing lockdowns is incomprehensible to me .
What part of lockdown are you finding incomprehensible?
They are in use in just about every country in the world and have proven beyond any doubt to slow down the spread of what would otherwise be an
exponential epidemic.
That is simply not true.
Sweden has had fewer deaths per capita than the UK, yet Swedes are not under anything like such a lockdown as in the UK.
I firmly believe even in the UK, it's not the lockdown per se that's helping things, but people's behaviour.
Most people don't even know what the rules are... my mum on a call in november (during that lockdown) proudly declared how she was sticking to the rules, then proceeded to tell me about the nice days out drive and walk she'd had in the countryside with a friend. I tried to diplomatically let her know that strictly speaking that wasn't permitted at that time (but I knew that both her and her friend we otherwise very careful, and being out in the wide open with no others, was hardly putting them at risk - illegal, yes, a danger from covid, no... but that's exactly what I mean... my mum and her friend had made their own, rational assessment and behaved according to that, not the lockdown law.).
It's a well established fact that people when acting as a group tend to find the 'right' answer on average. As sweden shows, as long as people are given the facts, dispassionately, they will collectively make the right choices. Sure, there'll be some who don't give a stuff, but equally there'll be others that go over the top.
We can already see from people's behaviour, that people are responding to the facts. Youngsters are mixing with other youngsters, but older people are self isolating even when they aren't specifically told to shield.
If the government would just trust the public, we wouldn't actually need a legally enforced lockdown. All it shows is that the government doesn't have any trust or respect for the public to make the right decisions.
I think the government are selling the public short.
(And before anyone comes up with the argument that sweden has a lower population density, I say nonsense... we aren't so densely packed that we are forced from population density within 2m of each other... anything over 2m is entirely down to social interactions, not population density. The virus doesn't care whether you travelled 5meters or 50miles to visit someone... and no, packed trains aren't because of population density... that's simply down to the level of 'people per train' for which the authorities decide to provide)
(I would just add, my employer (a global multination) told all of us (globally) who could work from home that we were obligated to do so, even before the UK government made it official; only those strictly needed in the work place have been permitted onto site since before the government locked down, another example of how people and companies can, and do, do the right thing without being told they have to)
