Well thats no surprise, as your instincts arent far removed from the UK establishments standard cold calculations and how they originally expected to deal with the pandemic and justify a fair amount of death, before the estimates of the sheer scale of probable hospital admissions scuppered their original plans.
If you are 'moderately ok' with over 17000 deaths and over 150,000 hospitalisations since the start of June 2021, in a vaccination era, then you'd not have any trouble justifying the amount of death they originally had in mind when envisaging a 'business as usual with a few concessions here and there at the worst moments' approach at the start of the pandemic. And you've made various posts during various stages of the pandemic that make your attitude towards this stuff now as thoroughly unsurprising to regular readers as my rather different stance is. And I'm pretty sure there have been a number of moments where we would have been treated to further explanations of how you can justify various sorts of and amounts of death, except the figures got too high and became an entirely unsuitable foundation on which you could build such a case without seeming utterly indecent.
And of course when looked at from the classic establishment angle, what counts when it comes to 'proving unsustainable' is hospital admissions, thats what has forced them to concede they have to go further at various stages of the pandemic. And by staying just 'within range' on that metric during this long, drawn out Delta wave, the pre-winter part of their plan was sustainable as far as they were concerned, and not yet proven otherwise once Delta met winter. And now there are some Omicron scenarios that mean we'll never get that question as it pertained to Delta fully answered, although there are I suppose still a few possible scenarios where we might yet gain enough clues about that in the coming weeks.
Theres a second sort of unsustainable when it comes to hospital figures, which involves what would have happened if the levels of infection and hospitalisation were not to shoot up alarmingly this winter, but had kept going at the rates seen in recent months for many more months. Plenty of people can be encouraged to learn to live with the quantity of deaths seen during that phase, even when they add up to quite large totals that I can throw around at moments like this. But when it comes to the establishment and health services, there are big questions about how you'd ever expect to begin to catch up with the backlog and burnout if covid-related healthcare demands remained this high. So rather than just argue with you about theoretical questions involving whether the pre-Omicron plan would have been enough to deal with Delta during the winter season, I'd encourage you to think about other ways that 'learning to live with covid' as a viable strategy needs to be different to what we've seen since June. I dont want to keep locking things down either, but clearly other mitigations were required for reasons that go well beyond courtesy, in order to successfully sustain an approach that involves a big chunk of normal life. I expect this is something we will have plenty of opportunities to talk about in future, when we are not at the moment of facing acute new waves/variants and scary peaks, but rather the constant grind at lower levels. We still dont yet know whether there will be proper equilibrium or at what levels of infection that will be at, how immunity picture and the virus evolves long term, what rhythm of epidemic waves there might be. But I think it would be sensible to assume that covid will have some ongoing degree of healthcare burden that needs proper steps to deal with one way or another, and even those who are comfortable with various amounts of ongoing death will need to deal with that more convincingly than was the case in recent months. Because yes you can get the public not to go crazy about certain levels of death, you can tap into peoples desires to live their lives, but I really dont think you'll be able to sell people on a healthcare system being left in such a worn down and perilous state for prolonged periods outside of those periods involving waves.
I think your characterisation of my position is a little unfair because I've been generally entirely supportive of the lockdowns we've had. In the case of last winter's one in particular I would have liked to have seen it introduced earlier. I also (at the time) felt that it was lifted too soon and too comprehensively - that was based on evidence at the time that suggested the outcome of doing this could have been a lot worse than what's actually happened. In that sense I think they "got away" with lifting it sooner than seemed wise to me, but that doesn't actually change my feeling that it was not the right decision based on the evidence available at the time.
My being "moderately ok" with what has happened since is based on my feeling of what people generally want and accept, rather than what I personally would want and accept. Personally I would have accepted restrictions remaining in place somewhat longer. I personally have been much more cautious about a return to "normal" than almost all of my peers; it's only quite recently that I've started doing things like going to pubs and restaurants. And I've continued on a voluntary basis to wear masks in shops and on transport and so on while the majority of people around me haven't.
It's been discussed in the last few pages of this thread that the prevailing attitude here is way out of line with the prevailing attitude "out there" in the general population. Everything I see supports this. That is of some frustration to me because although I occasionally read stuff on this thread where I feel it's a bit over the top, and I think that some people are living with a greater level of fear/caution than is necessary, on the whole my assessment of what's sensible and realistic is rather closer to the prevailing attitude here than in the outside world.
But what can happen, in terms of public health policy, is unfortunately determined not just by rational science but by what people generally will accept, and my view is that this means that yes, we do have to just accept that this pandemic will be dealt with in a way that involves a bunch of people dying who might not have, had a different approach been taken. And possibly a bunch of people ending up with Long Covid, whatever that eventually proves itself to be. I don't really like this fact, I just think it's how things are, just like we end up societally accepting a level of risk from certain things that I personally would prefer to see dealt with differently (see my endless threads on transport policy).
Another thing that influences my position is my personal judgement on the benefits/disbenefits of lockdowns. Again this has been discussed a bit here in the past couple of weeks. For me personally, I've not enjoyed the lockdowns, especially last winter's, and I've experienced some of those "mental health" things that the anti-lockdown crew like to go on about, some them actually only becoming apparent a bit later, but on the whole I've managed ok, and if we were told right now that we were going into another month or two lockdown I'd not be pleased but I could weather it and accept it in the face of what we currently know about Omicron. But, since June I've talked to a number of people I know, people I had limited contact with during the lockdowns, and it's been clear that some of their experiences were of a time they found much more difficult than I did. That's either to do with living circumstances, or personality type, or both. So I do think that it's easy to underestimate the impact that sustained restrictions can have on some people, if you're someone who can cope moderately well with some level of isolation. Conversations I've had this year have changed my opinion on the downsides of restrictions somewhat. That doesn't mean I think they should be ruled out, it just shifts my feeling of where the threshold should be.
Yesterday I mentioned that I'd been reading a Covid thread on another forum. The mostly unchallenged attitudes on there actually horrified me a bit. They are absolutely miles away from what we talk about here. They reinforced my feeling that "general society" has moved to a position where it's going to be increasingly hard to persuade people to accept more restrictions, although I really hope that they are on the more fringe end of things. Although I was tempted to engage in argument there, I've decided just to leave it rather than letting it wind me up. Maybe I will have the opportunity in a few weeks to go back and quote some things back to people, where they were rubbishing the plausibility of some Omicron scenarios, although of course I hope that those scenarios won't actually play out.
Reading some of the views there was unpleasant and frustrating, because they diverged enough from my judgement of what is right. I understand why you reading me saying the policy of the past few months has been "moderately OK" might trigger similar feelings, and I'm not going to hold it against you for taking a mild swing at me. Basically I think everything you say is completely right, it's just that perhaps I am willing to accept the ideal response being tempered a little further by what I see as pragmatism about what "most" people want. My judgement of that might well be off, of course. I also totally accept what you say about long term sustainability. I have been watching the hospitalisation numbers in the hope that they eventually go into a decline. If that (in the uncomplicated by Omicron senario) had not started to happen then I agree that there's a problem with describing such a situation as sustainable. I agree the health service ought to be reinforced as part of the longer term "learning to live with it" strategy. I have close family members who work front line in the NHS (who as it happens are probably
less keen on restrictions than I am), they have been saying that Covid is not the crisis, the under-resourcing of the NHS is the crisis.
www.gov.scot
