LFHNflightstudent wrote:
Yet, it’s not illegal to smoke… Numbers seem similar, the panic not so much…
Smoking is a choice! If you want to kill yourself by smoking, go ahead. If you want to kill yourself by infecting yourself with Covid – go ahead!
It’s all about protecting others who don’t have a choice. It is not a coincidence, that these days in most countries we require to wear masks and/or close down the places, where smoking (at least in Germany) has been banned significant time ago.
Or to put it more direct: If you stay away (or at least stop exhaling) from/in all places where you are not allowed to smoke, it is pretty likely that you are Covid-compliant in most countries!
Well, time to buy Amazon stock… The french PM just announced that Supermarkets will now be banned from selling “non essential items”… as ever whats essential to one person may not be essential to another, so I suspect that Amazon will profit again.
My father just died of lung cancer. He was a non smoker.
annoying these facts I know… But they are facts, not every lung cancer patient is a smoker, secondary smoke kills too. Is that your choice?
up to 650.000 people die of the common flu – each year. This year so far, this new and improved strain of Corono Virus has killed 1.2 Million… double that. Lets say we get to the end of the year with 3x the number of dead…
Worth all this hassle over? How many flu dead have been reported as COVID?
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
Yet, it’s not illegal to smoke…
Unfortunately. I wonder why smoking and the sale of tobacco is still allowed while similar substances are rightly banned. Ah right, the state takes in a lot of tobacco taxes… so the money once more is more important than human lifes.
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
But they are facts, not every lung cancer patient is a smoker, secondary smoke kills too. Is that your choice?
Yes, there are facts. And obviously not only smokers die from lung cancer.
But as said before: We have banned smoking for almost all public indoors places for exactly that reasons. We also have banned the use of asbestos in most civilized countries, we take care of air quality (not at the drastic speed of Covid measures but the sources also don’t spread this fast).
If you stop exhaling (this is how you put others in danger when you have covid) at all places where smoking is forbidden, you should be about fine for Covid. That is fact as well.
If you think, smoking (and avoiding lung cancer from passive smoking) is a good comparison, you would not complain about shut down of shops. You are not allowed to smoke in shops for many years now – aren’t you?
LFHNflightstudent wrote:
Lets say we get to the end of the year with 3x the number of dead…Yes absolutely! Just imagine what it says about this disease if despite all the measures we are taking globally it still causes 3 times as many deaths as flu? Just imagine we hadn’t done the measures …
Worth all this hassle over? How many flu dead have been reported as COVID?
Or even worse: Just imagine what would happen if 5 years from now we figure out that we wore masks 3 months but it had now effects! How devastating! My life would be totally wasted!
Malibuflyer wrote:
If you think, smoking (and avoiding lung cancer from passive smoking) is a good comparison, you would not complain about shut down of shops. You are not allowed to smoke in shops for many years now – aren’t you?
Not smoking in shops has not killed many of the shops/restaurants etc. this lockdown unfortunately has had catastrophic effects. Let’s say by the end of the year 2 Mio will have died. Tragic, no doubt and any single one is one too many. But at any cost? When 80 pct are over 70? Still at any cost. We are talking 0,00026 pct of world population… vs 0,000009 for the flu. At what stage is it justified to take away people’s freedoms, lives and futures? 1mio dead? Half a million? Or whenever you manage to create enough panic?
Lest we forget, the cost in the UK is the collapse of the NHS with the consequence of some who would have survived without too many complications or becoming too critical, as well as others for who there were not available beds, or who became infected while in over crowded hospitals.
I think it is all to easy to look at a single issue, being a percentage of elderly people dieing, but I think this is too simplistic. It is the impact on so may other people when a health service collapses that has to be considered.
Other options might arguably exist if the health service could cope with whatever number of COVID patients present and perhaps some countries have this luxury, but the forecasts in the UK and I suspect in the rest of Europe is this is not the case.
I am fairly sure that all countries will try to not repeat what happened the first time round: reserve all hospital resources for CV19 patients while shafting everybody else.
Apart from any practical aspects (you get a huge backlog of non-CV19 work) this is morally wrong. CV19 patients have no greater right to life or to treatment than all the other components of a normal hospital workload.
For example I have some routine monitoring blood tests, stuff like PSA, every 6 months, and in March 2020 they got cancelled 1 day before due date. The sods just cancelled all tests! I got them done privately and they were bloody expensive at some £400 – mainly because the companies selling the private ones focus on the corporate market and bundle several (largely unrelated) tests into a bundle so as to extract maximum money. Now, ask yourself how many Joe Publics would splash out £400… Perhaps 1%. Actually most people who have tests barely know what the tests are and have no idea what the numbers mean. Of course it doesn’t cost the NHS £400 – probably about 1/10 of that. It is really easy for people to fall through the cracks in the system, because most people are simply not proactive regarding their health; if their GP doesn’t push something, the patient is unlikely to push it until a leg or something is about to fall off.
The first wave suffered from a lot of “single issue campaigning” which is cynically effective in driving the political discourse but it probably never achieves anything useful.
Peter, yes your moral point is an excellent point, and this is absolutely the problem if it were allowed to rip and why doing so is morally not defensible even if you believe a percentage of mortality in the elderly is an acceptable cost.
Only if you accept a lot of other people will die young, old etc., many of who might otherwise have reasonably routine conditions but neverless require hospitilisation to prevent death could it be argued any health service could be allowed to become overwhelmed. The same is true regarding the arguments of protecting the economy, fine if you accept this as a cost.
Unfortunately to argue one is mutually exclusive of the other is not realistic, and this is why this line of argument concerns me.
