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Have we learned nothing? (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
In any other year, the next few months would be some of the most formative of Emma’s life. New classes, newer friends; at the very least, her second term in Sixth Form held the promise of A-Level mock exams. But with the Christmas holiday over and schools shut until at least mid-February, Emma — like thousands of children across Britain — once again finds herself confined to the virtual school gates imposed by her computer.
“They’re just going to kill us all, from the inside.” Emma turned 16 years old in June. That was her response when the Government announced that London and the South East, where we live, would enter Tier 4 restrictions last month. But in the weeks since, as the Department for Education has stumbled from one U-turn to another, her fury has given way to frustration. As to the recent rumour-mill about whether schools would reopen, her standard response has been a cynical eye-roll.
After all, throughout this crisis Gavin Williamson has claimed that the education of children has always been “an absolute priority”. At the weekend, he even proclaimed that “we must move heaven and earth to get children back to the classroom.” Yet the narrative that has dominated the debate over school closures in the past year tells a very different story.
Indeed, of all the most egregious elements of Britain’s chaotic battle with Covid-19, it seems that the weaponisation of education could be the most damaging. From the moment the pandemic gripped Britain, both the print and broadcast media have persistently presented schools as little more than petri dishes, and pupils as little more than germs on legs. As Mary Bousted, the National Education Union’s joint general secretary put it in May, pupils are “mucky, who spread germs”.
In the months since, as confusion and uncertainty have morphed into charged animosity, we seem to be in an even worse position than we were back in the spring. Much of the concern surrounding the impact of school closures has tended to focus on the considerable welfare implications for children from deprived or abusive backgrounds. There can be little doubt that those from disadvantaged households, for whom the classroom both offered an escape and a ladder, will invariably be left worse off by being banned from the classroom.
But as a sociologist and university lecturer, I fear this focus on welfare leaves little scope for discussion about the importance of schools as educational institutions. Indeed, the Government’s stated aim to keep schools open by turning them into mass Covid testing centres suggests that it sees them primarily as an arm of the public health state.
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SubscribeActually this time has presented an excellent education opportunity for children and teens to learn critical thinking skills as well as a healthy skepticism of people in power. It presents a perfect way to explain how easy it is to lose our freedoms and the kind of vigilance required to guard against it. Watching leaders make mistake after mistake should instill an understanding that total trust in elected leaders is rarely a good idea.
Yes, I have said for some months that if one good thing comes out of this it is that the young will have received an early lesson in the evil and incompetence of more or less all authority, particularly in the UK.
The educational establishment has behaved particularly badly – no surprise there. Quite plainly the majority of teachers simply do not want to teach. This is not necessarily a bad thing as most of them seem to know nothing and exist largely to fill the heads of children with progressive lies and nonsense. The behaviour of the wickedly grasping universities almost defies all belief – until you remember that this is 21st century Britain where the higher education system is nothing more than a giant money farm.
You are right but these lessons will be learned by those from homes where there is such discussion rather than in a vacuum.
Maybe. Some teenagers are quite astute enough to grasp this themselves. We have all watched “experts” be repeatedly wrong, refuse to correct themselves, act hypocritically and point leadership in a poorly thought out direction. Perhaps when these teens become “experts” themselves a bit of humility and better personal behavior will result from this example.
Possibly, though it is equally as likely that they learn that this is how people are supposed to behave and indeed how you have to behave to get along in life. Still, I really appreciate your positive slant on the matter and know for sure that my own kids are getting an in-depth lesson in healthy scepticism!
Brexit introduced Generation Y(z) to an abstract notion of sovereignty, lockdown is introducing them to the physical force of the application of sovereignty, what a double whammy lesson. That warrior age cohort is not happy!
I don’t believe younger generations will see lockdowns as a consequence of Brexit. In fact, it may be the exact opposite. The closer the people are to their leadership, the better chance they have of ensuring that it acts on their behalf and holding it accountable when it does not. With the EU out of the picture, the public has a greater chance of holding UK leadership accountable for its actions. No way to blame the EU for a third lockdown.
Yes, a wariness of elected leaders, appointed leaders, and of those leaders who worked their way up after taking a civil service test – that seems quite a sensible value to instill in our young, at least it does to me.
“Actually this time has presented an excellent education opportunity for children and teens to learn critical thinking skills as well as a healthy skepticism of people in power.”
That’s exactly what they get taught when they are in School. That they are victims of ‘those in power’. And their job is to be good little political activists and to protest for ‘social justice’
It’s called Marxism.
Hard to predict the consequences of this, it may not be all negative. Young people with a healthy distrust of institutions that seek to tell them what to do? That have understood that it actually does matter who’s in charge? Resilient and not taking life’s freedoms for granted. They could be the saving of us. But what an awful price they’re paying.
I really, really feel for the young people and the older children. I’m no longer young, and 2020 felt like an age to me. A year’s a long time when you’re young. Heaven only knows how long 2020 felt, and instinctively they know that time’s not coming back. The school trips, the parties, the graduations, the hanging out and growing up together.
The happy highways where they didn’t go, and may not get the chance again.
Yes… they may not get the chance to learn about Houseman and much else.
Now that would be astonishing!
They probably don’t learn about Housman anyway these days – they probably don’t even learn how to spell his name!
However, you are making a time-honoured mistake. J.M. Barrie went to dinner with Housman, only for shyness to deter him from talking to him. He later wrote to him to apologise: “Dear Professor Houseman, I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man. Sincerely yours, J.M. Barrie.” Housman wrote back: “Dear Sir James Barrie, I am sorry about last night, when I sat next to you and did not say a word. You must have thought I was a very rude man: I am really a very shy man. Sincerely yours, A.E. Housman. P.S. And now you’ve made it worse for you have spelt my name wrong.”
Teaching unions have unforgivingly politicised this crisis with the media fanning the flames to cause as much damage as possible. I would love to see the majority of teachers who have pupils interests as their top priority resign their membership immediately.
The crime against the young in this is one of the worst crimes in generations. Poor performing students rarely recover from missed school (which is why it is illegal to take children out of school for personal reasons). They fall behind and then never catch back up, instead becoming failures, and often unemployable, or at least under-employable, for life. These unemployable youth cause immeasurable damage to themselves, people linked to them, and society.
Next loss of the starter job, which were lost by the million, means many youth can not get on the work ladder out of school. The couple years sitting at home does great damage to them. Idle young men especially turn to self destructive or socially destructive ways if work or study is not burning off their high energies. Then they are not learning to work, hold jobs and make money – and often this will cause a net lifetime decrease in earnings.
Next is all students suffer some degree in every thing like socializing to just education.
To wreck the youth, and the middle aged who have their lives and family lives depending on work, and are not at risk to save a very small percent of the old and frail is criminal. It is like being the head of the Titanic and saying ‘Old and frail to the lifeboats, young and healthy, welcome to your watery grave’.
By god If I had been a youth in this I would have disobeyed every rule imposed on my movements. Of course I was a problem child and at school was an endless thorn till the school and I came to an uneasy truce where they left me alone to not do school work or attend wile still remaining a student, and I left them alone. I ended up with essentially no actual education, and so was around the lowest performers, and so know the story.
Some might say that keeping children out of environments dominated by Left wing thinking may help them.
Would completely agree. School curriculum now full of man made Global Warming as irrefutable, promotion of rights with no responsibilities, sex education with little of the emotional aspects covered, lack of financial education, weak to non existent sport/ PE. I could go on, but the fact is that the Left have captured education in UK. Very dangerous and damaging to young people.
How is money created, L.Paw?
A bit harsh on yourself, in a maths class of 13 year olds in a comprehensive school of the nineteen seventies the teacher gave the class a dot to dot exercise from the pages ripped out of her own kids dot to dot book. Not a lefty teacher but a conservative councillor of the future. The guess of the motivation that she did not want that class educated to a level that would compete with her own children in adulthood.
Much more likely to be a left-wing teacher who wanted to create an unemployable underclass who’d rise up and smash ver system, or failing that, vote Labour from envy.
So tell your story. You acted out and got left behind in school. Tell young people not to act out, but to humbly approach their teacher to ask to get caught up with their skills. And then not give up but struggle at things a little, everyday. Most children struggle at learning, but they also expect to do homework every day, so they stay on top of things. Tell them to go to the library and read books, even meant for younger children, as an immigrant would, to catch up. God bless you sir.
… as an immigrant would, …
In those indigenous feckless moments of doubt always ask yourself what would an immigrant do.
More like, there are other people around to take a lesson or find solidarity with, who are older than they should be to be studying at that level. Ironic disdain is not a helpful attitude, when one wants to be in a different place a few years down the line.
I gave up trusting the scientific establishment in 2000, when global warming theories were first being proposed. I looked at the evidence for them, found it very faulty, and then watched the scientific establishment , from the Royal Society downwards, suppress any discussion of such issues and announce that the science was ‘settled’.
Since then I have watched in amazement as ever stranger artistic, social, legal and economic initiatives have been set in motion by sections of society which seem to have lost their collective heads. We now live in a world where opinions are made illegal, where raw data is simply ignored or altered if it does not confirm to the latest fashion of thinking, where voting seems to be manipulated, mass rape is ignored, and our elected representatives seem to be powerless to alter policies created by supranational oligarchs and their funded media.
With all of this going on, I really think that closing the World down due to the discovery of a new version of flu is pretty much par for the course……
While I agree with you about debate and norms, global warming theories were not first proposed in 2000. They were being discussed at least as far back as 1955 when von Neumann wrote “Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry’s burning of coal and oil – more than half of it during the last generation – may have changed the atmosphere’s composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit.” and almost certainly much earlier. Predictions were made a long time ago that the world would warm up. And it has. This is a piece of evidence that too often gets ignored.
Maybe, but I clearly remember decades ago, Sir Fred Hoyle having his house triple-glazed during the in preparation for the forthcoming ice-age!
MrsT as a world leader was way ahead on the global warming theories.
Arhennius wrote a paper on global warming back in 1896 and his thinking was informed by earlier scientists’ observations.
https://www.theguardian.com…
Obviously much more has been discovered since then on factors affecting the climate.
I have read this article twice and I am still not sure, if the author has any remedies, or is it just a rant about how unfair life is.
The Government is trying desperately to keep schools open, but it has come up against a new variant of the virus which the scientists say is more easily caught.
What are they meant to do?
They could ignore the opinions of the scientists and try to keep schools open. But would this work, whilst the teacher’s union is fighting to close schools? The recent increase in positive test results in the last week has put the Government in an impossible position with regard to keeping schools open.
So they have decided to close them.
Perhaps you could explain to your daughter, that when the facts change, so do the actions taken have to change. You could, also, try to explain to her that she is in a more fortunate position than many children. As you said in your article, the poor – with little internet or computers at home must be having a worse time.
You could, also, explain that many adults are in great difficulties – think of the small shop owner whose livelihood is threatened.
Or, depending on your opinion, say that you do not agree with lockdown and school closures, but explain to her that must of the population do – and that Governments – in a democracy – tend to follow public opinion.
Vaccinate the Teachers first.
Teachers do not want to be front line workers, Nurses go to work, because they are essential. Grocery workers go to work, because they are essential. We see now that teachers do not see themselves as essential.
Are front line and essential workers the same though? In my view, front line refers to those actually working to combat Covid, doctors, nurses, hospital workers, ambulance drivers, anyone working with or on the vaccines. Essential workers would be grocery store workers, police, fire, teachers.
Why? It’s already been made clear that children almost never get COVID, and that “asymptomatic transmission” of the virus almost never occurs even between members of the same household. Schools already have policies in place that sick students and staff must stay home. So teachers are not at any risk. They need to go to hell back to work. They can wear C95 medical masks if they really feel vulnerable. But stop making the children suffer for all this hysteria over a virus that overwhelmingly affects only the very sick or very old and has a 99 percent survival rate. Denying children the right to attend school, and making them wear masks and “socially distance” when they do attend, is abusive.
You say ‘ the scientists;’ This is the problem. There are multiple views from scientists with Professors Ioannidis, Kulldorff, Gupta and Bhattacharya all having a very different view to what to do compared to SAGE.
The UK Govt and MSM are all pretending as if there is only 1 scientific view.
Excellent article! I am so grateful to authors like Jenny Bristow for advocating for the rights of children. Our nations’s children have been sacrificed for sure and we need much more writing of this kind. I agree that the weaponization of education is the most damning indictment of this government’s handling of the pandemic. However, counter-intuitively, I also believe that in time society as a whole may profit from what has happened. Firstly, the appalling inequalities in our education system have been laid bare in the last few months. As parents become more vocal in their demand for reform the space for massive change will grow larger, and change will come. And secondly, the young generation will not forget what has happened, and nor should they. I hope they will prove themselves more resilient, moral and intelligent when they come into adulthood and will shame the feeble generation which came before them. This may lead to a bonfire of our incompetent and corrupt institutions and replacing our rotting social structures with a fairer, happier and more equal society.
Well said Paul, Us for Them are doing some great work for children’s right to an education during this pandemic
They will be resilient, moral and intelligent if their parents stop shaming themselves, stop their incompetence, and their corruption they try to lay at the feet of government. What actions are you taking for the children at your children’s schools? Or, if you are crying out for children on the other side of town, are you employing those children’s fathers, or bringing your children’s old bicycles and books to them? Have you been leading socially distanced exercise, or runs, or walks in the hour allotted outside of the home, depending on tier? Or can, when bubbles get larger? After all, children gather in groups at schools with an adult.
Alex do you have school aged children? Because I spent most of my time during the last ‘online blended learning’ lockdown sat next to my children doing the job of the teachers! Which sadly left very little time for anything else… NEVER MIND MY OWN WORK!!!!
Exactly right. I was in same position as you. Sitting alongside my son trying to get IT problems sorted so he could join in.
My reply was to the keyboard activist, not intended for you in your position. Best wishes.
🙂 thanks 🙂
School’s out forever, School’s out with fever, School’s out completely – home schooling is in.
The end of an education system that produced brain washed and over-socialised idiot adults.
I’m seriously considering homeschooling my boys instead of letting them start school. I hope there will be many others joining us…
Let us tell ourselves the truth from around the nineteen eighties school attendance has not been about education or socialisation it has been utilised as a collective crèche while the parents went out to work. A babysitter that served the interests of the teaching institutions, employers and working parents not the learning interests of the students. Online/home schooling should have been the norm in 2021 with some of the redundant school estate turned over to socialisation and practical hands on learning, basically a two tier system of online education and real world interaction.
We always flexi-schooled our children till about year 6 (depended on child) and felt that worked well but would love to have had the skills to fully homeschool. Unfortunately I did not but, of course, many teachers don’t have the necessary skills for educating properly at school either so maybe….
I think you just proved your point.
“as a sociologist and university lecturer”
Thanks for the health warning. Actually the university you’re at qualifies only nominally as a university. It started life as a teacher training college in 1962 and wasn’t even a polytechnic before becoming a university in 2005, just like that.
I’m afraid this shows in the quality of thinking on display in the article, eg “a vicious public narrative of ‘Covidiot shaming’…has blamed young people for spreading the virus by daring to go about their normal lives” – it has? I must have missed that. I thought we were all being told to curtail our normal lives. “it won’t just be young people’s education that has taken a bashing. It will be their trust in all the norms, expectations, and institutions of adult society” – will that include their reflexive belief in things they are told by the BBC, the Labour Party, polytechnic sociology lecturers, and climate scientists? If so, then it’s not all bad, is it?
The fact that you disagree with some area of public policy doesn’t mean it’s somehow immoral, or an “attack” on anyone. It just means you disagree with some area of public policy, oddly enough. If you’ve got a better idea, and an account of why your idea is better, let’s hear it.
And that’s not an offer I often make to sociologists.
Author lacks imagination. Adult world meets child world in kitchens, football kick-arounds, tinkering under car bonnets, at church, or wherever their family interacts with neighbours and friends. Make sure that your bubble includes people with skills and good outlooks to pass along to children.
As for school being the place where their imaginations are ignited about the wider world”that may have been the case in the days of educational films, yet television and internet resources for children are so good these days. And books! Books have always been the place for a child to find their own secret place to go to, whether under the covers or sitting outside.
Most people I know have someone to shield and take this bubble thing rather too seriously for that. Plus, it’s all very well in the summer, we had a great first lockdown, but much more difficult in the winter.
So those people will be better shielded if they send their children to school? Clearly, under severe lockdown, no mixing will happen, but, under lighter restriction, neighbours mingle in the streets, even when it is cold. Or are all those photos of young ladies in short frocks after a pub visit pure propaganda? Ergo, young people can handle the cold, if they go out.
They should get an hour of socially distanced exercise together, at the very least. Otherwise, if you have a bubble, hopefully your bubble mates can teach a skill to your children. Or families themselves can take up a hobby that will pass on that generational knowledge, of which the author speaks. Cooking, family book reading, gardening, sewing, wood working, or even dancing, writing songs and the like. Teach them old tunes, get them a guitar.
If there is no one in an extended family able to be home with children, or parents are just that dire, then obviously school or rec. centres should hire front line workers to help these children, and assess their home situation as safe or not.
the first lockdown was so great that another is necessary? Okay.
Agree. The last place I look for to ignite my kids interest is their school, which recently has spent more time on BLM indoctrination than anything else.
I was told yesterday that the Uk sends its children to school much younger than most countries. Is that true ?
Because of unusual circumstances I never to school until I was ten (My Mother taught me to read and write). When I went to school I came top in my first year. So I wasn’t deprived reading books in Africa with no electricity. I think the child disaster story from schools being closed may be overblown .
However if they watch screens and dont read books they probably will suffer. If they listen to the media they will be suicidal.
A late start in education did not hurt one eminent clergyman, the astonishing Hensley Henson.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/….
He started school at 14 in a time when most people had left school by that age. He went to Oxford, got a first class degree at 21 and started a stellar career in the Church of England, ending up as Archbishop of Durham and friend of Winston Churchill.
Most European countries start primary education at 6. Finland starts at 7.
But parents can start at any age. On the train in the Black Forest a few years ago, a mother in the row behind me was teaching her very little girl to count. In English.
My wife was homeschooled in the US and never attended public school. She graduated college with straight A’s at the age of nineteen, and was earning close to a six-figure salary in her early twenties. Her parents rationed her TV viewing and read her books from a young age. They were concerned that the public schools system was more about indoctrinating mediocrity over real learning.
I think the problem with modern parenting is that many adults perceive schools as the authority on all learning and, as such, leave much of their child’s education in the hands of others, rather than take on that burden themselves. Schools are so dumbed down now that they cater to the least competent learner in the class rather than the most average or best, simply because they survive on outcome-based funding.
I started school in the UK right after my 5th birthday (I remember there being many crying kids in my classroom on the first day, but I was very brave.) Public school in the UK now starts, I believe, at the junior kindergarten “infant” level, when kids are only 4. I don’t know if it’s compulsory at that age, though. But it seems nearly all kids in the UK are in some kind of school by age 4. A lot attend various nursery schools younger than that. I remember being confused watching the British TV program Supernanny, when parents referred to their tiny toddlers being at or going to “school”. A lot of it is just basically daycare.
All I’ve heard for weeks is ‘close the schools!’ yet now they’re closing them those same people will talk about the cruel decision to close schools as a ‘tragedy for young people’. Seems just like politicking to me. Whatever the government does will not just be wrong but armageddon, genocide, fascism all rolled into 1. I’m fed up with our 24×7 media’s obsession with hysterical headlines, clickbait and catastrophising of absolutely everything, just to fill column inches.
Is this not why we come to UnHerd?
Probably it is not the same people, though 😉
With respect and not to have read all of the opinion’s in your article, my one positive in these eleven months although knowing the pandemic to have caused unspeakable chaos on every level of society and not forgetting the sheer heartbreak for many losing loved ones. I think that children have learnt an invaluable life lesson that could never have been taught and many may not appreciate its full impact right now but in later years it may make them better human beings and empathic citizens of the future. Exams and qualifications are always available into old age if qualifications are required for a job, a career change or hobby..
Love this piece. I work in education (as an additional needs assistant in Scotland) and feel near bereft that the young people I’ve been working with, establishing trusting relationships with and helping settle again into some kind of normality are yet again going to have their education disrupted. I won’t deny it’s been a stressful and anxious time – but rewarding too. It’s hard to imagine the positive impact being back in a school environment had on our teenagers. Hanging out with their friends again, having a routine. Learning again. For me this generation has been truly amazing (I also have a daughter at uni & she was far more mature about lockdown than either of us. Life on hold at 21. All study online. No socialising. Grim.) Nowhere can be entirely ‘safe’. Like hospitals, though, schools should never close and safety and hygiene should be equivalent to a hospital. Teachers and staff have to feel safe and re-assured. Many haven’t and did feel put at risk. So, regular testing, protocols as strict as a hospital and the best quality face coverings/PPE + any other small measures that help should not have to be asked for. They should be provided. Perhaps a more radical approach to how ‘school’ is actually done for older teenagers as well, in order to have sustained it. From a government perspective, making schools a priority meant SAGE reporting the impact of infection spread on education as well as on NHS capacity. That would be a start. Ingrain the importance of education into the collective psyche. Maybe time to expand the SAGE composition to include educators? Finally, why not give every secondary school pupil an additional year of school? Time to make up what’s lost or just to learn more for the hell of it. Acknowledge this generation has been dealt a bad hand. With school closures, them exiting education into a crashed economy and colossal national debt AND at the bottom of the list for vaccination (which makes zero sense to me), we will rue the day we let them down so badly.
I find it infuriating what’s being done to young people. A young special needs adult I work with told me recently that a friend of hers has to quarantine, i.e. literally stay in her room and not even eat or interact with her family, for 14 days just because she was “exposed” to someone (i.e., was in the same room as, presumably) who tested positive for COVID. This poor girl hasn’t even had a test herself; she can’t get one because she has to quarantine. And when she finally gets a test after 14 days chances are high it’ll be negative. This mentally abusive shit is being done to them and at the same time they’re being brainwashed that it’s all for their own good and if they don’t cooperate they could die or cause other people to die. They’re all being taught to be terrified of a viral illness that has, among people of their age, a lower fatality rate than the seasonal flu.
The answer is not only young people but people nearing middle age will never trust the government again. Across Europe there will be the black shirts of fascism advancing as we see the dreadful effects these lockdowns have on younger people’s lives. They are not stupid, they can understand they are very low risk and will fail to understand why we are protecting the lives of the very elderly in ill health who are the main people who are dying of covid. Excess deaths are not huge compared to flu outbreak years but we have a wanton lack of leadership from middle aged and elderly stale politicians who ignore facts and cannot tell the truth and, in some cases, are just blatantly incompetent. Young people may not yet see it all but they will and they will also understand that this is a communist way of running society and that it has not worked.
All very sad but our political leaders have never distinguished themselves in the game of consequences
I have to disagree. I think many young people understand that societies are communities who work together to protect each other. It’s the young who exhibit, when voting and when getting involved in movements including Climate Emergency, Remain (in EU) and Black Lives Matter, greater empathy for people not necessarily exactly the same as themselves and the benefits of co-operation. Injustice was apparent to the young before the Covid Pandemic – economic and social injustice in the form of the gig economy and housing insecurity, the legal system and income differentials and I’m sure they aren’t in any rush to go back to the type of exploitative market capitalism that they were protesting about before Covid. Yes, young people may come out of this more aware of the way they are being disempowered by the student loan system, by the refusal of government to build social housing, by the lack of regulation of employment, by the lack of Trades Unions, by the ridiculous exam system and by the removal of their freedom of movement – but I’m not sure that will lead to fascism. Quite the opposite.
Student Loans are slavery, indentured labour. The fruits of their labour are bought and sold without the possibility of the student purchasing their own freedom. People like you are ‘useful idiots’ encouraging activism about ‘The Slave Trade’ which no longer exists, while conniving with the enslavement of our own children. You can’t make it up!
Maybe you misunderstood my thoughts on student loans? I’m not in favour.
It might surprise you to know that student loans are not loans. They are an excess tax charge. That’s why you never have to pay them back unless you make over £x per year, and why they self-extinguish. Contrast this to the US where student debt is the only type of debt that cannot be extinguished by personal bankruptcy. In a UK personal bankruptcy “student debt” is not even considered as it is not a legal debt.
Where to start with your swallowing wholesale of every left/marxist bandwagon going then hoping the young will go along with you.
Just one of your points alone, in fact rather than your rhetoric, between 04/19-04/20 in England there were a total of 47,965 starts on site of all types of affordable housing (Homes England 08/22/20, source http://www.gov.uk/government/stati.... That may not be enough, but it is not ‘refusal to build social housing.’
What young people will come out of this pandemic with is with largest national debt ever in peacetime, and gradually it will dawn that there is no socialist ‘free lunch’ and they and future generations will be paying it back for decades.
Few young people have tried to buy cars, how many will be able to when all cars are electric and much more expensive? How many have jobs that will be eliminated by climate change authoritarians who insist on the elimination of all fossil fuels? How many young people have had their businesses vandalized by rioters? How many have lost jobs because unvetted refugees had to be accommodated? It’s lovely to be young and inexperienced.
OTOH, let’s not encourage young people to shoot for a social housing goal and/or university qualifications that prohibit them from actually making a living.
Young people who’ve never actually had to work or struggle just to survive are naturally inclined to embrace far-left utopianism because it makes them feel important and virtuous without actually requiring them to give anything up; usually though reality cures them of it by age 30 or so.
I tend to agree although for different reasons. I don’t know that younger people will see lockdowns as an us vs them situation with elderly vulnerable people because most will see the value in shielding elderly and vulnerable people. The lesson they might take from this experience is that one size fits all rarely does. This feels like group punishment to younger healthy people who should have been allowed to go about their lives while the elderly and vulnerable were shielded.
It’s an old and now outdated ideology that the only way to get a good future in life – which reads as good secure job that pays well, home with a mortgage, family etc. – is through attending school and ‘getting an education’. Perhaps this generation will be the ones to explore other ways of having a reasonably good life in widely differentiated ways. And helping each other without requiring ‘good grades’ in order to access apparently limited resources. There’s more to life than work and safety.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. I haven’t met too many people who share this reasoning. It takes an independent thinker to imagine different sorts of education since most have gone through the K-12 system ourselves. I’ve been homeschooling my daughter in the US for 5 years now and I’ve learned a lot about my own preconceived notions.
Not a suggestion of any solution to a near impossible choice between competing benefits. Schools have always been a petri dish and a major vector for disease. Nobody is “weaponising” education. And this paragraph is nonsense. “But as a sociologist and university lecturer, I fear this focus on welfare leaves little scope for discussion about the importance of schools as educational institutions. Indeed, the Government’s stated aim to keep schools open by turning them into mass Covid testing centres suggests that it sees them primarily as an arm of the public health state.” In fact, we are now more aware than ever of what we lose when schools close. Change “keep schools open” to “enable schools to open.” is closer to the truth but the author isn’t really interested if the truth gets in the way of a good polemic.
“Schools have always been a petri dish and a major vector for disease”…yes, disease that children overwhelmingly recover from quickly with stronger immune systems.
Foreseeable consequences are not accidental. There is no credible way in which someone can claim ignorance over the effect that closing schools, or society in general, would have. None. Add to this the increased cases of abuse, overdose, suicide, and so forth, and it’s an open question as to which will yield more casualties, Covid or the response to it.
Don’t expect the lockdown fanatics to have any sympathy for anyone else, or concern for the deaths that may increase elsewhere because of lockdown. It’s the irrational fear of what Covid might do to them (not what it could do to the vulnerable) that drives their self interest.
I believe they want to spread the pain to as many people as possible, if one person has to shield then everyone has to whether it makes sense or not. It’s an authoritarian impulse, nothing to do with science or even covid.
I find the whole thing absolutely bizarre. I’m still at work, exactly the same as last week. I can’t go to pubs, cafes or restaurants, exactly the same as last week, I can’t go to my CrossFit classes, exactly the same as last week, but now my kids are at home getting bored sh*tless while missing their mates who they haven’t seen since before the 2 week Christmas holiday.
Authoritarianism always feels wrong. There’s no way to make this okay when everyone seems to know that it’s not and those who keep stubbornly clinging to it anyway are forced to pretend not to know how vulnerable people could be shielded while allowing life to go on for the not at risk population.
errr, isn’t state contolled education the basis of any system of authoritarianism?
Depends what you mean by education. If you mean teaching math and science, no. Education in the US is mostly under local control rather than state. That’s why you have good school districts and not so good districts.
And I’ve got friends laid up and unable to work because their kids gave them Covid that they caught from their mates at school.
Of course you have. You always do.
Actually studies so far have shown children to be very poor transmitters of covid. Less than 4% of household infections have been traced to children in a 12 country study.
And studies have shown household infections from asymptomatic people to be very rare, anyway. No matter the illness, it’s very hard to get sick from another person who isn’t actually sick, which is why we’ve always managed flu outbreaks by telling people to stay home and stay away from vulnerable people when sick, not by telling people who feel fine to assume they’re dangerous disease vectors.
Those friends will likely survive, just like they’ve survived bad colds and flu they caught from their kids before. My father, having somehow avoided having chicken pox in childhood, caught it from me when I was a kid (which of course I caught from a friend at school) and he was off work for almost a month, so sick he could barely get out of bed. Back then these outbreaks were just accepted as an unpleasant fact of life, not a reason to shut everything down.
Maybe the problem is we are lousy teachers using outdated approaches; and working online has simply exposed our feet of clay. While in the classroom, it is easy to pretend students are not checking out. When students ghost us on zoom it becomes much more painfully obvious they have very little interest in what we are on about. Perhaps that is because, mostly, we are on about very little of any consequence to our students.
None of my children have had zoom lessons ever. The class teacher logs on for 30 minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon for all 33 children in the class to ask any questions… Quality online learning… Laughable
Teachers, but to be kind I should say headteachers and entire schools, have been caught out because parents have had to get involved. I had to shadow my son’s online lessons as he had so many IT problems and found his private school wanting. As my wife is a teacher, we compared notes, and it seems that schools are terrible at storing and reusing information. My son’s school is 70 years old but the teachers create each lesson (which has been taught 70 times before) from scratch and don’t share with each other. Nobody reviews their materials which are full of errors. It is stone age.
Perhaps Pink Floyd got it right all those years ago:
“Hey! Teachers! Leave them [sic] kids alone!”
Are private and free schools going back? If so, the educational discrepancy between these and State schools will increasingly widen. In the US, there has already been a surge in homeschooling. Perhaps, there should be a discussion about the various schooling methods that are appropriate for each child.
I gather that private schools will also close. But some, if not most, will have extensive on line lessons. Probably far better than the majority of state schools. If the parents are paying thousands per term per pupil out of their own pockets, they want to see something for their money
Dr John Lee on Talk Radio
You Tube /watch?v=oUNkmA42NLI
Covid Science Debate: Vaccine Risk and Safety
What about the crime perpetrated against a whole generation of young men (and everybody else too) and indeed Civilization itself (such as it then was) who were slaughtered in the industrial scale killing fields of Europe in WWI. All of those young suckers obediently marching off in the “service” of “god”, king and country.
Anyone who resisted was tarred with the “white feather” of cowardice.
What about it? Personally I’m still pretty annoyed about the Norman invasion, but it’s not really relevant to school closures in the 21st century.
I told an Italian friend recently that I want reparations for the Roman occupation. “Veni, vidi, gimme”, I shouted at him.
I’m still waiting for reparations from the British for what they did to my Irish ancestors. Oh, and also from the Danish for their Viking ancestors enslaving Celts.
Yeah, we should have let the Germans crush France, then Russia, annexe most of the Continent into a German economic zone, point a loaded gun at our heads by turning the Low Countries into an armed camp and jumping-off point for an invasion of Britain. We could have then got on our knees and asked the Kaiser and his Prussian warlords nicely for permission to breathe.
I am confused by your post. What would you have suggested as an effective response to the Axis? Was Neville your guy?
Not to mention the 200,000 or so abortions done every year in england and wales alone, that’s 2 million a decade
One of my grandsons is very bright. Went to a top grammar school . Wants to be an engineer . His college has shut down. He is very upset and is reconsidering his future. Maybe no university and doing what my family have always done and that is work for ourselves mostly at loads of different things. . I told him not to worry. He will get by and have a good time along the road.
This country cannot afford to lose boys like him.
He knows I quit university and took to trucking and I feel a bit bad about that example of dumping education but only for a moment.
Not sure why COVID is treated like the Black Death while tobacco products (which kill millions more people per year) are allowed to be sold behind shop counters. Why is there no outrage about that?
Or abortions for that matter.
There still seems to be confusion about “economy versus health”. This is a false dichotomy; and the figures from the USA about how different regions went during and immediately after the “Spanish” flu pandemic mean that this was known to the epidemiologists and knowable to the politicians. And we see now (as we saw then with the flu instead of covid) that the countries with least damage to their economy are those where covid is most under control (East Asia, Australia/NZ). And these same countries also live more normally than the UK or USA do.
Since the UK is an island nation, the UK could have chosen to control its borders and keep covid out. But knowledge of covid at the time was limited and BoJo is almost certainly constitutionally incapable of making a Jacinda Ardern or Scott Morrison type decision.
While lockdowns do work (Melbourne, Australia) they take a long time (about 100 days in Melbourne). And there’s no point unless you also control who comes in and out, not only at the time but also in the future. It is possible for a big economy to do this (Japan comes to mind) but it involves severe restrictions.
I’d be curious to see what would happen if the UK had a referendum about covid: choice 1, 3 to 4 months lockdown and severe international travel restrictions for at least another year, against choice 2, sporadic lockdowns that reduce numbers a little bit but don’t go on long enough to be effective at controlling covid but do last long enough to destroy the economy. The devil or the deep blue sea?
Actually the issue of closing the border came up very early, if you read the NERVTAG minutes from January 2019. It was rejected because the professors on NERVTAG decided that they would rely on health screening done in origin countries by origin authorities without having any idea if it was effective or not. They took this approach for fear of being called racist (they express it as dislike of stigmatising certain populations, i.e. the Chinese students their universities depend on for money).
Unless the whole world went into lockdown at the same time and also closed their borders, a 1,3 or 4 month lockdown wouldn’t work. As soon as you lifted restrictions after the 1, 3 or 4 month period, you’d potentially have people coming in from countries that weren’t locked down and therefore introducing new infection.
Two months ago I would have agreed with this, but the only two teachers in my family, my wife and brother in law, have both had Covid since then, in my wife’s case over christmas. My BIL is 62 and he got it badly, losing a lot of weight and becoming depressed (people seem to always assume that those being deprived of e.g. education will get depressed but believe me a near death experience is also pretty depressing), my wife has never been ill but she had fever for 12 days. The situation in primary schools may be different but in secondaries it was spiralling out of control.
Here is what is really happening with the virus – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_v...
Kids taking a year or two off school is not the end of the world it’s being made out to be. Most will be chuffed not to be forced to attend these mass indoctrination centres.
Thank you for speaking out for kids and teenagers and young adults AS HUMAN BEINGS. I cannot believe there are individuals who support treating kids like domestic animals, contaminated with some germs. As though being human is just biological. Kids are not only being deprived of friends’ love, affection and understanding, of doing something together with other kids, but also of interactions with adults of all sorts, including jerks and assholes. It is crucially important for life-learning to be around as many diverse people as possible. Otherwise, why Covid is so exceptional? why not incarcerate kids in solitary confinements with parents as prison guards, in any case of any infection? Human beings carry bacteria and 359 trillion viruses in them. Surely, it is safer to isolate them from each other, like pigs on separate cages? Where are we going, actually?
A tragedy brought about by wrong government actions, poor media and over-powerful unions. Maybe we should give up on schools permanently and move all teaching online, upsides are many especially as we would need many less teachers, teachers would have reduced exposure risk, the unions could be dispatched as the evil obstruction to education they are and children could all be issued with technology and they would become the most technology aware in Europe.
“They’re just going to kill us all, from the inside.” Emma turned 16 years old in June. That was her response when the Government announced….
As opposed to drowning from your own mucus filled lungs, or dying from multiple organ failure while connected to a mechanical ventilator in a plastic tent?
We have bred a generation of snowflakes. And for the record I am against interventions which directly impact business. It’s just I realise dying from COVID is lot harder than watching netflix for a few months or not being able to go shopping.
The drive to school with the potential result of an accident and of laying in her pool of blood wile EMTs try to get her wrecked body to the hospital to try and save what they can, well that is a greater risk than your above scenario for a 16 year old from covid.
To play the ‘what if’ where every remote contingency is counted would mean we never leave our bed again. Irrational fears make poor public policy.
You make my point for me. She is at no risk, whether in lockdown or at School. But others are at real risk, not from from an existential ‘I am dying from the inside’ due to boredom, but due to a deadly infection causing multiple organ failure.
Yes. And they should be sheltered. Leaving the not at risk 16 year olds to go to school.
And should the 16 year olds with vulnerable parents, grandparents or siblings be put into internment camps or the vulnerable parents, grandparents and siblings of the 16 year olds?
It would be absolutely up to them how to arrange things. People could be supported to temporarily rearrange households within a family or community, and hotels could be requisitioned. At the moment we’re all in the internment camps!
If a 16 year old, or anyone for that matter, lives with vulnerable people, be they parents, grandparents or siblings, then they have to act accordingly. I think this is what some people are missing, there is no one size fits all solution. Locking up 16 year olds who live with healthy 40 year old parents makes no sense, for either the parents or the teenagers. This requires some thought, it isn’t going to be solved with a rule for everyone. If your 16 year old has vulnerable grandparents, they cannot visit them.
What does act accordingly mean? Lock up the vulnerable person in one room while the rest of the household gets on with life? I agree it requires thought, and a realistic look at the numbers. 2.2 million clinically extremely vulnerable in England – 98,000 under 20. Half a million under 50.
And those vulnerable people must be shielded. How exactly does locking up 16 year olds who live with healthy 40 year old parents accomplish that?
If you live with vulnerable people, and you’re 16, then you must recognize that you are different from the 16 year olds who live with healthy 40 year olds. Unless you’re claiming that every, or even most, British families live in the same house with elderly and vulnerable people, then some thought should make clear what needs to happen. I have a neighbor with three children, one of whom has severe juvenile arthritis and the medications she takes make her vulnerable to infection. The other two children and the mother appear to understand why they cannot do things other children and families do these days.
I’ve had Covid. I spent 8 days in hospital with it after having a fever for 4 days and a mild cough for 4 days before that. I would go through it all again if it meant our kids wouldn’t miss out on developing the social and educational skills necessary for life, people weren’t missing early cancer screenings that could prolong their lives and mental health issues and suicide weren’t being caused by isolation.
Shielding of the vulnerable is the key, and it is doable. If it isn’t, why are the supermarkets open? Us working class will still be going to work all through the lockdown. Our borders will still be open to trade and to air and sea passengers – just enough to slow the pandemic, but not enough to get us out of perpetual lockdown.
If you’re serious about this lockdown, then stay in your own home without leaving its four walls and have your food pushed through the letterbox after being rubbed down with isopropyl alcohol. Otherwise this exercise in futility is going to work as well as the last one.
You are a better person than J J that’s for sure. And to think, he/she/it accuses others of being snowflakes, pure projection.
I’ve had Covid. I spent 8 days in hospital with it after having a fever for 4 days and a mild cough for 4 days before that. I would go through it all again if it meant our kids wouldn’t miss out on developing the social ..
Sorry to hear that. But even if you are, it’s unreasonable to expect others to do so. Particularly as some will die. You can easily undertake the majority of education online (it’s been done for years in HE and vocational training, it’s nothing new) and it has no impact on the economy. It’s only for 2 months, its not worth killing people for.
This pandemic is all about making difficult choices. I would rather we kept businesses open and schools closed than vice versa
“It’s only for two months”
Where have you been for the last year?
I’ve been at home 🙂
I meant we only have two more months. We have sacrificed so much to protect the old and vulnerable. Seems pointless now to throw away all of that sacrifice when we only need two more months.
“We only have two more months”.
Where have I heard that before?
If by that you mean all that need to be vaccinated (elderly, those with comorbidities etc.) will have been by then and therefore the rest of us can adopt “herd immunity”, I’m afraid you’re sadly mistaken. Not only will 13.9 million people not have had the vaccine by then (if we go by the rate of those who have received it so far), the vast majority won’t have had the second jab, giving the Headless Chickens of the Apocalypse even more reason for perpetual lockdown.
On top of that you have to factor in that most of those pushing for greater lockdown are not really concerned about the elderly or the infirm, but are absolutely petrified of their own mortality so will push for lockdown and furlough until they themselves have had both jabs.
So, sometime next year then, just in time for the next coronavirus?
We are aiming for 2 million people to be vaccinated per week. Given we have already vaccinated almost 2 million, the majority of the reaminer we should be able to do in 2 months. The first jab prevents hospitalization and death, if not the actual infection. So it will make a profound difference.
Personally I would allow all forms of economic activity to continue, but that is not politically feasible. 85% of the country want the lockdown, including most old people, young people, conservative and brexit supporters. The ‘will of the people’ must be respected.
Given that, the government is taking the correct approach.
I’m not convinced by the “85%” figure. Is that from a survey? How many people? From what area of the country?
And will the vaccination of the old and infirm be enough to placate the fearmongers? Because according to another article on Unherd written by a doctor, there are many people in hospital on death’s door that are 60-65 year old men with no underlying health issues and who were all working until Covid got them. Honest guv.
Every poll ever conducted since the Pandemic has shown massive support for lockdowns and COVID restrictions in general. The public tend to be against measures they think are not severe enough. The 85% I referenced was for Yougov and was published yesterday. Polls always use a random sample that represents the entire country.
Ok, still not convinced. And my following paragraph?
Why would you not be convinced? It it so hard to believe that most people may have different views to you? There are 67 million people in the country. How many do you know personally?
Regarding your second paragraph, I believe we have pushed the limits of what we can do in terms of locking down. So whether the vaccines work or not, we shall need to reopen society. The only possible exception being managing hospital capacity.
I’m not convinced because YouGov have been spectacularly wrong before. I’m also not convinced because polling is habitually used to influence outcomes. Wording is often skewed to increase the chances of a certain outcome. For example;
“If it prevented untold deaths, do you think longer and more stringent lockdowns are necessary?”,
instead of;
“If lockdown caused mass unemployment, an increase in mental health issues, missed cancer screenings, preventable deaths from curable diseases and family and friends being forced apart, do you think longer and more stringent lockdowns are necessary?”
It’s not just yougov, it’s multiple polls conducted since the start of the lockdowns in March. They ask the questions as naturally as possible, that is the science and art of social research. With respect, you are going a bit post truth Trumperian on me. Why would dozens of different private polling companies want to damage the economy they depend on? Or damage their credibility by conducting bad polls?
Is it really so hard to comprehend your views may be in a minority?
Why would multinational companies pay hundreds of thousands of pounds to pollsters if there was a chance they’d get a result they didn’t like?
Why do the media pick and choose the results of polls they use if they didn’t think they would influence people?
Just as an aside, when you say “post-truth Trumperian”, do you mean “post-truth Remainerism”? They’re the same thing, aren’t they? Both anti-democratic, both trying to overturn a democratic result by citing conspiracy theory nonsense. The only difference is the Trump loons will probably have got over their tantrums in a few months.
You are essentially advocating a crude Marxist explanation of society. Do you really believe anyone who commissions a poll knows the answer before they ask for the research? Sometimes the polling companies undertake their own research on questions of interest for publicity. Their entire business model depends on accurate research.
In respect of remain and trump I would not necessarily disagree (I support Brexit)
” Their entire business model depends on accurate research.”
Except, in the case of recent elections, it is rarely accurate!
We’ll have to agree to disagree on the question of wording of polls to influence outcomes and then those outcomes being used to prove public opinion and thereby sway public opinion. I’m as guilty of “advocating a crude Marxist ( why do right wingers use this as their go to put down? It’s as unthinking as wet middle class lefties calling everyone they disagree with a nazi or racist.) explanation of society” as the conservative Peter Hitchens is when he states: “Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not a device for measuring it. Crack that, and it all makes sense.”
He then says that the establishment and the media are responsible for manipulation, based on the misuse of statistics. The overall purpose is to “bring about the thing it claims is already happening” (the “bandwagon effect”). He must be a closet Marxist.
If there are really that many men in that age group dying of COVID I would be interested to know how many of them are smokers, or obese, or both.
IMO, what this boils down to is the middle class’ fear of their own morbidity (and let’s face it, that’s what this is all about – summed up perfectly by “Lockdown – middle class people hiding while poor people bring them things”. People die all the time and as far as I’m concerned, life is not about the avoidance of death – it’s about living it to its fullest. If you want to live out your life hiding from everything that’s fine by me. But don’t enforce that fear on everyone else.
I actually meant ‘mortality’, but ‘morbidity’ works just as well! 🙂
You express that in a frustratingly simply way (that’s a compliment).
I would however point out the sacrifice is only for a limited period. We are not hiding forever. Yes, it’s dragged on. But I think we all know this can’t go on much longer. If we are not out of this by Feb or March due to failure of the vaccine, we shall just ‘take it on the chin’. Boris knows that. This is the last big heave. We’ve sacrificed so much, there is no point in giving up now. We may as well give up another two months.
And our aim was never really to stop old people dying, it’s was to stop the hospitals collapsing. So surely a time bounded sacrifice to prevent hospital collapse is worth it?
Remember, once there was a global pandemic, the economy was always screwed. And if the hospitals collapsed, it would of been screwed even more (nothing to put you off shopping like watching masses of people dying in hospital car parks). There was never a cost free way out of this natural disaster.
The hospitals were never in danger of “collapsing.” All this “Do it for the health care workers” was nothing but a load of propagandistic crap. Yes, they may have been overextended and the people overworked, but that’s the damn job of the health care system. They’re not volunteers. They’re paid to care for the sick, not to make stupid TikTok dance videos or stand outside cheering on crowds of BLM protesters.
I agree we should not be fettishing the health service. We pay about 9% of our GDP for it to service us, not vice versa. Questions need to be asked about it’s effectiveness, performance and competency. Instead of constantly blaming the PM, as if he is personally managing every ward in every hospital in the country. I also agree many in the NHS are left wing so intentionally want to frustrate and undermine the Conservative government (which is the case with most government run public services)
However there is no question that if the virus transmits uninhibited it will overwhelm our capacity to deal with the consequences. We saw that in Spain and Italy. It’s simple mathematics. The statistics are online. As at 3rd Jan, 50 hospitals are currently at an average of 93% capacity. Quite often the difference between 93% and 100% is a few dozen beds. They can be filled very quickly.
The current increase in daily hospital admissions (+100% or an extra 2,000 since Xmas ) means for most of those hospitals they will shortly exceed capacity. It’s not really a model projection, it’s baked in, as infections have increased 100% since Xmas and hospitalisations increase inline with infections. The correlation is extremely tight and you can see that from the data. There is also a 2 to 3 week lag.
Fortunately we can start to ship people to regions not yet impacted by the new variant who have spare hospital capacity. But if we had not locked down those regions, the would also repeat the London situation and we would be screwed.
“2 months”? All this BS has been going on for 9 months now! An all evidence has shown that none of the lockdowns have made a damn bit of difference to the infection rate. School and business closures and making people stay home DOES NOT WORK. Even the WHO says so.
Where on earth are you getting your data from? Of course the lockdowns work. In the first lockdown infection rates fell from 100K a day to a few thousand. In the second one the infection rates fell by a third.
All of the data is published online and peer reviewed.
You need to stop following WHO, they are owned by China.
How many vulnerable people are you going to shield and how (taking into account the non-vulnerable people they live with). I’m probably boring people with this question but that’s because I never get an answer.
What answer are you looking for? If you truly want to shield the vulnerable, then a full-scale quarantine is necessary, probably one enforced by men with guns. Further, what constitutes ‘vulnerable,’ are they vulnerable in perpetuity or for the short-term, and what second order effects are likely from a prolonged period of isolating these people from society?
The best of shielding seems to be with elder care facilities, where there is a captive population, access is tightly controlled, and even then, there are the questions of what effect isolation has over time and how to handle employees. People seem to want a perfect solution, but there isn’t one.
Thanks, Alex. I’d use the ‘Clinically Extremely Vulnerable’ category as a starter in the UK (2.2 million people). 38% of these are under the age of 60. 57% are under 70.
Do you take them out of their multi-occupancy homes to quarantine them or do you quarantine their whole household?
If you’re taking them out of their home where are you taking them to?
If you’re quarantining the whole household in situ how do you compensate them and their employers?
Are the men with guns to keep them in or to keep others out?
Your questions above are why your original question goes unanswered. It’s easy to say “protect the vulnerable” or “keep people safe,” but it’s quite the challenge to actually do it. It is one thing to quarantine the sick, but quite another to put healthy people under what amounts to house arrest.
There is no magic bullet solution. Risk can only be managed, not eliminated.
I agree risk can only be managed. And that is the debate we should be having – how, in detail, to manage risk. And be honest about the outcomes of that debate. Crudely, for example, not using real numbers – do we accept a 10% drop in GDP for 100,000 deaths and 500,000 serious illness due to Covid over 12 months? What if 5% drop in GDP would result in 500,000 deaths and 1,000,000 serious illness?
What if a 20% drop in GDP results in 10,000 deaths? Try and work out all the other consequences; deaths and ill health due to lockdowns rather than due to Covid directly need to go into the mix as does the impact on healthcare services. Do we use limited resources on treating young people and accept older people will die? How many should we allow to die and at what age? We should be looking at the economics and the morals involved in all those decisions in every option from pursuing a zero infection strategy as in New Zealand to letting the virus rip until all the weak are dead.
So many people say ‘Protect the vulnerable and let the rest get on with life’ as though that is an answer when it’s just a starter question.
Oh no, not more NHS propaganda!
You and your ilk seem to be on a Wagnerian death mission to terrify us all.
Well it isn’t working. Joseph Gobbles might have been proud of you, but most sane people aren’t.
I respect your own ‘extenuating’ circumstances, but this really is too much.
If this continues your own teenage children will have their prospects destroyed, make no bones about it.
And that’s exactly what some don’t want to do, figure out how the risk can be managed. Rather than think about it, they simply want to overlay one size fits all when it clearly doesn’t. This isn’t a trade off, lives for GDP yet rather than think about how to protect the vulnerable without crashing the economy, they want to pretend that it cannot be done or that someone has to agree that so many lives are expendable. Since no one will do that, nor should they, it will lead to a simple solution of we all have to do the exact same thing whether it makes sense or not.
It’s the household Mark. If you live with vulnerable people, then you must live in a way that protects them.
Exactly, and most people who live with vulnerable people do that already. They don’t demand that schools be shut down, public events canceled, people forced to wear masks everywhere, and workplaces close every time there is a flu outbreak.
How do health care workers shield people in hospital?
How do care workers shield the old and infirm in care homes?
The same way, I would imagine.
You’ve gotten an answer, in fact, I’ve answered it several times.
As an epidemiologist said about the shielding strategy:
Trying to shield the vulnerable whilst there is massive population transmission is like having a ‘urine free swimming lane’ in swimming pool where urination is allowed.
People who live with vulnerable people) i.e. elderly or those with serious illnesses that affect their immunity) already know to try to protect them when they’re sick. When strict hygiene and distancing is observed, household transmission of diseases like COVID (just like with colds or the flu) is low, even when someone in the household has symptoms. With no symptoms, household transmission has been found in studies to be very low, even with no extra hygiene or distancing measures followed. Don’t know if this answers your question satisfactorily, but the reality is, there is a risk of illness everywhere we are, whatever we do, or fail to do. And I think the elderly and vulnerable, who didn’t ask to be forcibly separated from their families and friends, or for their children and grandchildren’s lives to be upended, know this more than anyone else. But no-one in power seems to care about their opinions, or about what they actually want.
With no other transmissible disease have we made our kids responsible for protecting the elderly and vulnerable, at the expense of their freedom, social development and education. Nor have we promoted the highly scientifically questionable idea that “asymptomatic transmission” is a major or even significant driver of outbreaks. Rather, we’ve worked on the scientifically sound assumption that people carrying a virus are far more contagious when sick and thus advised or required them to stay home from work or school, and to avoid proximity with vulnerable people if they’re sick. Never once during flu seasons past (flu being known to be potentially deadly to the elderly, and flu vaccines not effective against all flu-causing viruses) was I advised not to visit or hug my elderly mother even when feeling fine just because I might have been exposed to someone with the flu and thus be unknowingly harboring a flu virus unaffected by the vaccine. And if I had tried to use such a concern as a reason to avoid seeing my mother, she would have said “Don’t be ridiculous.”
Covid is not the first disease to kill people by filling their lungs with mucous. Your rhetoric is hollow.
Then again, even if Covid were indeed the first disease to cause pneumonia, I would still find your argument a little ropey. The existence of nasty ways to die does not mean that we should have no regard for spiritual health.
Remember kids: only one thing can ever kill us, so no solution to that thing that kills us can ever go too far or, you know, also kill us.
People below the age of 60 are more likely to die from the normal flu than they are from Covid, which only becomes more dangerous above the age of 70. The new strains might prove to be different in this regard.
The data I’ve seen for those 58 and over is that there’s 13.5 times as much mortality compared to the flu.
Psychopath – why do you hate young people?
There is a reason why Boomers are said to be the worse generation that ever lived.
I don’t hate young people, what a silly comment. What I hate is identity politics and victimhood. The young today have better living standards than any generation before them. They have more social and legal rights, will live longer, are better educated, will travel more, have greater access to technology, advanced medicine and knowledge.
Their education is free, their healthcare is free, their incomes and housing if necessary are free (via welfare) and youth employment is the highest since records began (as at Feb 2020).
Yet now they have been convinced by the Left that they are an oppressed group of victims and a great injustice has been inflicted against them. Just as the Left has convinced every other Group, whether it be ethnic minorities, LGBT, Transgenders, the Scotts, the Welsh, the Northerners, the Irish.
Steady on! The left have done no such thing. The left have been saying knuckle down, support the vulnerable and get through lockdown, kids. Exams aren’t everything.
The right have been saying get back to school, do your memory test exams to prove your worth but on the other hand don’t listen to your workshy lefty teachers.
The left in the UK,( Starmer, Bridgeford and Sturgeon) have been saying (and doing where in power) lockdown earlier, supporting Marxist union leaders in schools calling for closures and resisting opening schools. Starmer has used his incredible 20/20 power of hindsight to tell the govt what they should have done all the way through, when he’s not kneeling for the BLM anti family abolish Police cause.
Yeah, it’s not like you need to pass them to go medical school or anything.
Ugh, it was satirical comment mirroring how sceptics of lockdown and school closures are treated in the media. “So do you want granny to die?” Why are you so selfish?” etc etc.
I too loathe victimology but I also loathe the rhetorical “drowning in mucus” stuff. Frankly, I love the fact that school ar e closed (will be homeschooling mine for certain anyway, it whole thing just makes it more acceptable.
And dying from COVID is apparently quite difficult for most of us. Some of us actually like being productive, rather than vegetating on the sofa watching substandard entertainment. Being close to pensionable age as I’m sure you are, you will no doubt enjoy gawking at a screen in some care home soon, unable to leave. I don;t know of any young people who think they are opppressed by being young, but a quick fact-check (God I hate that term):
“young today have better living standards than any generation before them.” Locked indoors, unable to see friends, or even go to a restaurant. You know what they say, you can be rich and still desperately unhappy. .
“They have more social and legal rights”
Except to go to school apparently. Or go out at all.
“Will live longer, are better educated, will travel more, have greater access to technology, advanced medicine and knowledge.”
Live longer? How do you know? Better educated, definitely not. Travel more… how? Greater access… maybe, I mean smartphones have gotten so good these days.
I am not quite sure why all the back and forth about 16 year olds seems to be focused on those who “have it all” and are just spoiled snowflakes. There are far more 16 year olds here in Portland who do not fit that pattern. They are from homes who not only don’t “have it all” but hardly have anything and are those who will be see the results of these lockdowns for years to come.
I keep up with the daily deaths here and almost without exception they are in the over 80 group – some are 102 – who also have “underlying medical conditions”. One wonders if the real problem is that we just don’t want to admit that 102 year old grannie – and by extension those of us in our 80’s – are probably vulnerable to many things besides covid.
There are no deaths from COVID among normal young people. Except, perhaps, one or two who were killed by being ventilated. The good news about COVID, is that the number of deaths from breathing difficulties in the general population has been HALVED, by the widespread abandonment of the lethal and unscientific practise of mechanical ventilation. You, are the snowflake.
“There are no deaths from COVID among normal young people. “
That was the point of my post. I think you misunderstood it. Young people should not be complaining because they are forced to use the internet instead of attending school.
And I agree ventilation was a clinical mistake (but of course people are still dying of COVID).
ANOTHER mistake? It just never ends. Now we can just add that to the following:
a) Maintaining open borders, especially with China.
b) Absence of testing at ports and airports.
c) Lockdown #1
d) Furlough scamming
e) Sending the sick to carehomes
f) Cancelling all surgeries apart from COVID
g) Destroying actual shops, giving Amazon yet more income.
h)
PPE shortagesPPE supply corruption issuesi) Lockdown #2
j) STUPID TIK-TOK VIDEOS (with official sanction)
k) Beating of lockdown protestors
l) £10,000 fines in blatant violation of English law/tradition
m) Encouraging snitching on a nation-wide level
n) Destroying vast sectors of the economy.
o)
Eat Out to Help Out schemeNOOOO stay indoors don’t eat out that much!p) Banning of Christmas festivities for the first time since Oliver Cromwell.
q)
algorhythmic grade resultsjust make the grades up!r) Incoherent Tier system
s) Moronic clapping for the NHS
t) Social Distancing
1 metre2 metresu) Masks are
badgood! Wear them anyhow!v) Lockdown #3
x) Professor Pants-Down and general hypocrisy among the leadership and their advisors.
x) Complete constitutional mayhem, fiat-government
y) Allowing migrant invasions while Britain remains in lockdown
z) And let’s not forget the shortages of toilet paper!
Oh no, I’ve run out of letters. And just remember kids, it ain’t over yet!
aa) PCR testing farce, false positives of up to 97%
ab) Delayed testing meaning that results are meaningless anyway.
ac) Ventilators killing people who never needed intubation
ad) Domestic and child abuse skyrocketing
ae) Suicides and mental health problems skyrocketing
af) Churches and voluntary societies disappearing
ag) The general loss of freedom to simply show your face to other people and smile
ah) The desperation and loneliness of the elderly and disabled (at least they don’t have COVID!!!)
ai) vaccine rushed through production with little to no regulatory restraint
aj) Sever reactions from aforementioned vaccine, including and up to death
ak) Future promises of a COVID passport, culminating in compelte loss of liberty
al) Cash to be abolished (probably)
am) “health corridors” that change depending on time of day
an) Quarantine periods for
14 daysno wait it’s 10 days nowao) Countless funerals and weddings ruined or eveen cancelled altogether.
Come on people! You know there are even more! Shout out and add to the list.
It was a clinical mistake (by hospital doctors) to use mechanical ventilation. But they only knew that in retrospect. Basically that is how science works in respect of new diseases. Trial and error. Anyway, it had nothing to do with Government policy.
The same goes with many of your complaints. They are mixture of mistakes by various organisations, not just the government. And again, many were only mistakes in retrospect. Furthermore, they were mistakes undertaken by almost every country in the world. They are not UK specific, no matter how much you would like them to be.
Love the use of ‘normal’. So different from the ‘abnormal’ kids with curable cancers.
Yeah the normal kids with curable cancers that your approved harsh lockdown denies treatment to. You really don’t get it do you?
Comment of the week, thank you!
I do get it. I don’t want the hospitals to be full of people with Covid, or the Doctors who treat children to be off work with Covid, so that kids with curable cancers can be treated.
That’s why I support reducing transmission and if that involves lockdowns, so be it.
But it’s been demonstrated time and time again that lockdowns don’t work. Why do you then insist on continuing to beat this dead horse?
Yes yes Mark we all see how #righteous you are. You knew exactly what he meant, don’t try to be cute.
Language is important. Not trying to be cute. Just pointing out that it’s easy to casually write people off because you haven’t thought about them.
No Mark, it’s you that hasn’t thought about this. It’s you that wants a one size fits all when that clearly has not worked. It’s you that demands everyone be managed exactly the same way.
When did “normal” become a bad word? It is normal for a young person to be strong, healthy, and resilient. So yes, a young person with cancer is not normal; that doesn’t mean their life is worth less, or that they shouldn’t be protected. Enough with the language policing.
As opposed to drowning from your own mucus filled lungs, or dying from multiple organ failure while connected to a mechanical ventilator in a plastic tent?
And is this happening to many 16 year olds? And is this really the only possible alternative to not getting the virus at all?
Snowflakes are the ones who take as gospel the idea that Covid is the new black death and go out of their way not just to shield themselves from human contact but to also demand that others do the same. You can’t have it both ways.
As opposed to drowning from your own mucus filled lungs, or dying from multiple organ failure while connected to a mechanical ventilator in a plastic tent?
And is this happening to many 16 year olds? And is this really the only possible alternative to not getting the virus at all?
No, it is not happening to any 16 year olds. That’s my point, they should not be complaining. It is happening to many people over 65. And the snowflakes are the ones who pretend its not, because they are unable to comprehend something bad has happened
their lives have been turned upside down but they shouldn’t complain? Why not? Since what you outlined is not happening to 16 year olds, then it makes zero sense to keep them in perpetual isolation. What IS happening to young people is an increased rate of abuse, overdose, and suicide.
Yes, something bad has happened, mostly affected very predictable and specific populations. But you don’t deal with that by intentionally harming another group of people.
I did say he was a psychopath. And almost certainly a boomer. It’s all “How dare anyone have a problem with this! I’m at slight risk therefore you can’t go to school. Just watch your Netflix you pigs”
The projection these people do is mind-boggling, he actually calls young people selfish for wanting to go to school and being aware that they are at no risk. They should be “grateful” for not being at risk in fact.
It’s abuisve gaslighting of people who have no say in any of this, so they rely on the wisdom of their elders. But the elders have all gone insane.
What is with the Netflix obsession? It’s like he works for them or something.