The Tiers Of A Clown

Bojo is replacing the existing national lockdown with a national lockdown in name only, by placing the whole of the country, once more, into a system of tiered lockdowns, which will amount to the same thing. The purpose of the change is merely to pretend that he has saved Christmas, and enabled millions of people to get together over the holiday, even if that means that some of them will put their lives at risk by doing so. Once again, the policy, and the narrative surrounding it shows the idiocy of the response to Covid19. 

The national lockdown is bad enough, in terms of the various rules surrounding it, that people have to try to decipher. The return to tiers of lockdown is even worse. Already the TV channels are spending large amounts of time trying to explain all of these byzantine rules, and the adage remains true – if you're explaining you're losing. But why is there a need for all that complexity and confusion? The facts remain as plain and simple as they have always been. 

That is COVID19 is a virus that affects, almost exclusively, the elderly, those over 60, and those over 80, in particular. The average age of death of people with it, is 82, higher than the average life expectancy of people in Britain! In addition to the elderly, those with medical conditions that compromise the immune system are also at risk, but, whereas 92% of people dying are age over 60, the number under 60, but who have underlying conditions is just 7%.

Either way, we know who the people are, who are at risk from this virus, and they are easily identified, as are their households. By contrast, we have absolutely no idea who the millions of people are, who might be infected with the virus, let alone the millions more people who they will come in contact with, at any hour of the day. Yet, rather than focusing on the known people who are at risk, the whole strategy has been based on trying to identify millions of unknown carriers of the virus, and tens of millions of other unknown people they might infect, even though 90% of such people will suffer absolutely no, or only minor, consequences of having been infected. That strategy is total madness. 

A strategy of focused protection of the elderly and vulnerable is not just a strategy that begins by identifying and protecting a limited number of known individuals and their households, but it is easy to explain, and to understand. It has one simple message, and rule. If you or someone in your household is over 60, or has some condition that would compromise their immune system, you are at risk from the virus, and should isolate yourself from contact with it. That is all that needs to be said. Then all attention can be focused on ensuring that all such households are indeed able to isolate themselves from the potential of infection. Some simple measures could ensure that. 

1. The state via local authorities, NHS, etc. should ensure that such households can get necessary supplies of groceries, and so on delivered to their door. For most people, this is not a problem, because that can already be done by online shopping, so its only for those that are unable to do that where any assistance is required. 
   
   
2. Where people require health or social care workers for assistance, the state should ensure that all such workers have the required PPE, and that contact protocols are in place to prevent transmission. That should not need to be said in relation to hospitals and care homes, and yet, precisely because there has been no focused policy, and instead a scatter gun approach to try to identify tens of millions of asymptomatic people has been undertaken, it has been those institutions where the most egregious failings have taken place, and where the virus has run riot amongst the vulnerable. 
   
   
3. Any worker in the group identified, should be entitled to indefinite sick leave on full pay. A simple process of any such worker self-identifying would get around the problem of it being someone in their household, rather than them as individuals, who was at risk. Providing such financial support to those in this category would have been far cheaper than paying out billions in the furlough scheme, alongside the hundreds of billions that will be lost to the economy as a result of having locked it down. 

That is really all that was required. But, the government has failed to convey the message that for 80% of the population COVID19 poses no threat. We still have the ridiculous situation where classes and entire schools are being closed down, just because some pupil shows symptoms of having a winter cold that might be confused with COVID19, even though we know that children are at virtually no risk whatsoever from the virus. Only those children in the at risk group identified needed to be off school; only school staff in that group, needed to be off work, so that schools should have operated more or less normally throughout the whole period. 

And, because the message has instead been conveyed that everyone is at risk from the virus, we have had the idiotic lockdown, and test and trace fiasco that instead tried to identify tens of millions of unknown individuals, each of which was a moving target, rather than conveying the simple message that if you are in the actual at risk group, just isolate yourself. Its not much more difficult than telling people who have nut allergies to avoid nuts and products containing nuts! 

And, because they have failed to convey that simple message and adopt that simple strategy, and instead have put huge amounts of effort, not to mention billions of Pounds channelled, ineffectively, into the medical-industrial complex, we have continued to have people, in the at risk group, being infected, and many of them dying, as a result. The proposals for tiered lockdowns over Christmas are just as absurd. 

The main concern seems to have been to draw up complicated rules that people can use to try to essentially get around a common sense approach. They are designed to allow people, in the at risk group, to meet with other people, not in the at risk group, even though it is absurd for them to do so, because, in the process, they are risking their lives! In other words, the government began by not protecting the people in the at risk group, and basically putting out propaganda to the effect that they were at no more risk than anyone else, which necessitated that everyone have to self isolate via lockdowns, so as to reduce the number of the people actually at risk who then became infected, and died. Now, recognising that large numbers of people, over the holiday period, would ignore the lockdown rules, the government is changing the rules to enable them to do so, but, in the process, is also now actively exposing the people in the at risk group to the possibility of infection and death! 

If you are in that at risk group, it is, of course, your choice, as to what is more important to you, whether you want to create a reasonably high chance that you or someone on your household will die, as a price worth paying for spending an hour with one of your relatives over Christmas, but the government has a responsibility to tell you that is what you are doing, rather than create a series of ridiculous tiered regimes that basically say, its okay to put yourself at risk, within this set of rules. In large part, the reasons given for these rules, and the narrative around them, are designed only to defend the narrative that the government has presented all along about the threat being to everyone. Under pressure of the facts, they have had to modify it to say, to younger people, well you may not be at risk, but you could put your granny at risk. The answer to that, of course, is that it is up to granny not to put herself at risk, by encouraging you to come in contact with her, even if it is Christmas. 

Personally, I find that argument pretty weak anyway. I know that when I was 17 or 18, the last thing on my mind was visiting grandparents. In fact, the only time I was in the house with my parents, during that time, was to eat and sleep. And, the same now. My son and his partner are daily coming into contact with other people, as a result of work, meeting friends, other relations and so on. As a result, whenever they have come over in the last few months, we have met outside. Now, over the Winter, that is not really possible, so we talk by phone or Skype. The last thing I would want to do would be to stop them going about their lives as normally as possible, and if that means they don't come over for Christmas then, for me, that is fine. Its me that is at risk from COVID not them, and so me that has to take responsibility for ensuring I don't come into contact with it, not them. Similarly, my son has a nut allergy, and for that its his responsibility to avoid nuts, and no reason for me to give them up! 

What the government is doing is effectively saying to people in the at risk group, look its Christmas, and we know it would be unpopular to appear like The Grinch. Our ridiculous lockdown narrative means that we have to continue to say that everyone is at risk, even though that isn't true, or we have to say that everyone has to isolate to prevent a known minority from being infected by others, even though that isn't true either. We know that the majority of people will ignore the lockdown rules over Christmas, so we are changing the rules, and as part of that, we are basically saying that the vulnerable can take the risk of infection. 

They are essentially encouraging people who are in the at risk group, and who should, and many of whom would, isolate, instead to put themselves at risk. But, just because the government changes its rules does not change the fact that you will be at risk from the virus, if you are in that vulnerable category. People should be able to have the sense to work this out for themselves, but unfortunately, many do not, because a reliance has been created on the state to tell everyone what they can and can't do, what is and isn't safe. Many will take the government's guidelines on meetings over Christmas as some kind of guarantee that, so long as they abide by those rules, they are safe, even though that clearly will not be the case. Yet, at the same time, the lives of millions of others, who actually are not at risk, will have been curtailed as a result of the imposition of unnecessary restrictions. But, that has been the reality of the idiotic lockdown from the start.