elbows
Well-Known Member
I find it so hard to be brief but I'll try by just chucking a few things out there to start with, rather than trying to cover everything comprehensively:
Some reading between the lines is required in order to see the full u75 picture. eg a lot of the people who have gone closer to normal behaviour arent active in the pandemic subforum, or dont want to stick their head above the parapet. At least not at the earliest opportunity, especially when previous stances that we could go back to normal were demonstrated to be premature.
Plus:
We have a ridiculous number of ongoing cases, and there are still very real concerns about our healthcare systems ability to cope.
We simply have not yet gone beyond the phase where government has to rely on people modifying their behaviour in order for the system to cope. And its only been a few months since this was demonstrated quite vividly, during the period when 'freedom day' was delayed and people were asked to do their bit.
Likewise things like the booster jabs requires that people still take things rather seriously in order to achieve reasonable uptake.
Some people are trying to compensate for what they see as terrible government handling of the pandemic, and behaviours of other people that they consider problematic.
My personal conclusions for now: Its normal, its expected, and I expect this picture to change further. I have no doubt that another big chunk of society will move further back to normal with the passage of time so long as we have a greater sense of the system coping and case numbers being more under control. I expect that if we get through autumn and early winter without a big spike and/or too high a level of grinding pressure on the NHS, more people will start to move on. I know I will.
As for comparisons to the personal risk from flu, thats a messy subject and I will probably argue some of the details of that in later posts. In any case attitudes towards personal risk are often wildly imprecise and in this pandemic its been about far more than that anyway. And it is quite correct that peoples sense of risk shoots up if the broader NHS is under threat, since this creates many opportunities for indirect pandemic danger to an individuals health. Unknowns about long covid add to this lack of confidence about personal risk. Unknowns about waning vaccine immunity add further to this, especially for those deemed vulnerable.
