And Riley can absolutely fuck off when it comes to this:
She said: "We really need to consider, are we just frightening people rather than giving them the confidence to get on with their lives? We're close to just worrying people now."
Oh we are close to that are we? Fuck off, people arent stupid enough to fall for this unless their agenda already points in that direction. Because those who are not so inclined are more than capable of seeing the hospitalisation figures for themselves and reaching their own conclusions. Which is probably why some of the fuckers with this agenda would like to see some of the daily data fade out, dont worry people with actual data and the full picture, suppress it!
Personally when it comes to how I think about the appropriateness of my own messages of concern and whether the 'frightening people' thing is really so undesirable, comes down to things like what the actual hospitalisation figures look like, and whether we are at a stage where we actually need the fears of the population to stay in place in order to moderate behaviour and thus stand a chance of coping with a particular wave.
And since it is currently unclear to me how much behavioural changes of the masses may be required in order to get us through the coming autumn and winter, there is no way I would want to start putting such 'relax and dont be afraid' ideas in peoples heads at this particular stage. Which also means that I will seriously question the agenda of anyone pushing hard to rush, rush, rush back to a sense of normality, free from fear. Not to mention that a fear-free agenda is a delicate matter, if you push for it too hard and fast then you run the risk of achieving the very opposite effect should the shit hit the fan again in the coming months, and articles like that one will seem even more ludicrous than they do today.
If the UK had been able to stick to its original plan a in the first place, rather than u-turning mid-march 2020, I'm sure we would have been treated to and endless stream of such justifications and framing all the way through the pandemic. There would have been no shortage of experts ready to come out with this shit, dressed up in reasonable, rational terms, but no less deadly and absurd. Not that the pandemic makes me think any less of such experts because I was already well aware of where their sense of balance and ability to justify the unjustifiable can lead, long before this pandemic arrived.