COVID19 thoughts

[Kohinoor]

Hi all,
We've all done pretty well here in Australia and NZ - I do think we both have a major advantage being island nations, making it easier to close our borders.

I'm a bit mixed about this whole "isolation" thing. I see some benefits as we all slow down and think more of "family things" and even re-learn how to live together. I also think the keeping our distance (just 1.5 metres) is not a bad thing either - especially while we learn more about this virus and a possible vaccine. But just how far should we go with the "shutting down of things - beaches, non-essential businesses, gatherings of groups larger than two, don't sit on park benches (even with no-one else around???), etc.

This whole issue around shutting down our economies is worth a second look. I heard this morning that, if we measure "deaths vs economical damage" the figure looks like this:-

For every death, we have 10,000 people out of work. ( x 1000)

If our leaders knew that would be how things would work out, would they have chosen to shut down the whole joint in the first place? And, now that they do know, does it make sense to continue to isolate everyone and risk even further economic damage? Hmmmm.....


Further to that, it seems many die WITH Covid, but do all of these die OF Covid? Are these all counted as Covid deaths anyway? Like, was it Covid that brought on their deaths, or were they about to die anyway? The largest percentage of deaths ARE in the over 70's age group.


Should we be following the Sweden model instead - keep your distance (1.5m) but business pretty much as usual. They have some milder restrictions, but aren't shutting down the whole joint as we are. And their death rate is not much more than our own. Edited later - I was quite wrong about that last comment - the graph I had looked at was a Logarhythmic scale that shows 10,000 as just double the height of 1000 - and 100,000 is just triple the height of 1000 - as such, a country higher up the scale is really WAY higher than it first seems when using this scale. And with further knowledge (using deaths per million people of population) it shows Sweden has one of the highest scores of all. Still, they took the path of keeping their economy alive but this has been at a high cost in deaths within the community. So, let me backtrack - let's not go Sweden's way.

One thing that is galling me is where businesses take their own advice, ignoring recommendations from the Govts - one case in particular is that of "Rest homes" where we have old friends who are almost imprisoned by their care providers. i.e. The management allow NO visitors, not even family. The Govt (Australia) say "Allow 2 visits per day, with no more than 2 visitors at one time".

My thoughts are - older folk need daily interaction so they don't feel forgotten. And via phone calls we learn from one friend that "even the staff don't stay long - just in and out again". So our old friends feel quite isolated. Even phone calls are a poor substitute for "sitting face-to-face". And not just older folk anyway - we are all gregarious !!

With our Covid figures looking pretty good (i.e. we HAVE flattened the curve) isn't it high time we RELAXED our guard somewhat and allowed more latitude? Let's have BBQ's again with a few friends. Even risk allowing most/all businesses to re-open? Maybe remain with closed borders until we have better/faster screening of incoming visitors - but do look to opening them up too, in the not-too-distant future.

What do YOU think? Isn't it time to get back to more normal living?

Koh