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Covid – some don’t want this crisis to end “It is said that politicians, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.”
– Sarah Napton, Daily Telegraph, writing about how the UK Government appears reluctant to accept that now that vaccines have been offered to all over-50-year-olds in the UK (a group covering 99 per cent of Covid deaths) that the threat has been massively reduced.
It gets harder by the day to resist the view that too many in government, and indeed among the public, rather enjoy the covid pandemic. It gives them the same buzz of imagining what it might have been like to live through a war, and an episode they look forward to boring their relations and descendants about for years to come. Call it also a form of pandemic Stockholm Syndrome.
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All clouds have a silver lining.
Some people have had months away from soul destroying jobs, and on full pay too.
Why shouldn’t they be pleased?
I’ve enjoyed the quieter roads and shopping areas.
Pete, I think it gets pretty soul destroying to be cooped up in a small flat with kids and other relatives not knowing what the future holds.
If people have miserable jobs then in an expanding economy they can always get a better one.
Maybe the idea of furlough is a sort of trial
run for Universal Basic Income, paid for nun” the rich”, a terrifying prospect of large numbers of adults spending much of their days gawping at the TV.
Pete, if a person is on furlough, that isn’t on “full pay” but on 80%. For a lot of people that’s not very much money. Even if their job is “soul destroying “ (that is a big assertion) if it’s a productive task then it’s better than doing nothing useful. People can get pride from working hard, knowing they are pulling their weight in life and delivering value.
Many jobs are dull and a grind, because life isn’t one big entertainment centre. And remember, one issue with work is that in normal conditions, it brings you into contact with others, being in a team, etc. Sure, there are bullying bosses and annoying colleagues, but then again, it gets pretty bad to be bullied for months on end by people telling us to live in fear from a bug with a 99 per cent survival rate for those who aren’t in a vulnerable category.
I know people who are lonely and miserable, on furlough from modest jobs that at least gave them human contact and some self respect. I know at least one who has felt suicidal. He can’t wait for this clusterfuck to end.
It makes me wonder whether furlough is a bit of a preparation for what Universal Basic Income might look like. I am unsure this has been an encouraging development.
After every crisis comes the clean-up and the costings and the catch-up – tedious work, and it has to be done while the rear-view-mirror crisis is less and less helpful to justify why so much is not going so well.
Worse reasons govern some, but these are also present.
With quite brilliant timing, I retired just before this shit show kicked off. I could have spent a year on furlough instead of starting to cash in my pension fund. No regrets in reality though. Although I have enjoyed my job over the years, various changes there meant that I was starting to hate it. Being miserable five days out of seven is no way to live.
Imagine some people genuinely still think this is about combatting a virus.
Dear Mr Pearce
Catallaxy Files have been calling it Melbourne Syndrome since August last year.
I dare say there are a lot of government ‘advisors’ on pretty hefty retainers, some enjoying the publicity and fame, who will be sad to see the end arrive and will do all they can to extend it, cautioning against ever more remote possibilities to maintain the fear.
There is little evidence in the ONS deaths figures to indicate that face nappies and vaccines work.
Is it too early for vaccines to have had much effect?
One point that should be remembered is that the 110,000 extra deaths in the past year have thinned the elderly population who won’t be dying this year, or next or the one after, so the 65+ cohorts should see a remarkable decline in deaths – about 110,000 – over the next few years. Doubtless this mathematical certainty will be spun as a miracle of vaccination.
For what it’s worth, absent a wuhWHOflu2 or a totally unexpected death rate from side effects of a vaccine or two, weekly deaths from now until late autumn should look like any other late spring to autumn period, probably with a modest reduction in deaths among the elderly, and significantly reduced deaths in the 2021/22 ‘flu season.
DP
110 000 deaths?
They just admitted that 120000 deaths with covid was in reality about 90000 deaths from covid.
70000 died from flu a couple of years ago.
Perry is spot on. This is not about a virus.
Its about some Frankensteins monster of the great reset and the imposition of the Chinese social credit system in the West.
Johnson has just admitted that the vaccines have had no effect. It’s the lockdowns that have reduced the death rate.
We also know that is a lie because the lockdowns were imposed after the peak of the death@2019/case@2020 rate. That is the death rate was already declining.
Well, Yes.
Two lessons to be taken from all this:-
(1)Despite the best education money can buy, a dunce is still a stupid dud.
(2)You have no choice, but to die sometime.
The PM’s tragi-comic assertion that the vaccination programme had no effect and all the “good news” (in previous years known as getting over the peak in vulnerable and elderly deaths during the winter flu season) was due to the second lockdown – unlike last years ineffective lockdown which was of course a completely different thing.
I say ineffective since nothing has changed my belief that lockdowns only delay achieving herd immunity and, once they cease, the virus will continue to spread through an unvaccinated population. Yet still he lies and lies.
‘… now that vaccines have been offered to all over-50-year-olds in the UK (a group covering 99 per cent of Covid deaths) that the threat has been massively reduced.‘
The ‘threat’ was 99,5% would either not get the disease or mildly. Vaccination will not alter that. So there was no ‘threat’ in the proper sense of that word relating to a population, to reduce by any beneficial degree.
Furlough… maybe ‘only’ 80% of normal wage, but people have not had the same expenses, nor the same opportunity to spend money. Besides time has a value.
Many people (including myself) got their jobs destroyed.
When I pass the long lines of people at Food Banks I know it is only a matter of time before I am part of such a line.
“Get vaccinated and we can go back to normal” – so we did, and now the goal posts are being moved (as we all suspected they would be).
“Build Back Better” “Great Reset” – world “governance”, “Covid Emergency becomes Climate Change Emergency” – we all know the drill, the plans of “Stakeholder Capitalism” (Corporate State) and “Sustainable Development” (totalitarianism – total control from the cradle to the grave).
I have often seen international officials being interviewed and saying we must have a “Collective Vision” for “food systems” and just about every other aspect of life – totalitarianism and on an international scale.
It is not a conspiracy because it is all out in the open – indeed they shove it in our faces, and shout it from the roof tops.
I am remined of how baffled I was at the things Mr Biden said in 2020.
Refusing to rule out “packing” the Supreme Court, boasting of how he supported “Trans Rights” for EIGHT YEAR OLD CHILDREN, saying “look in my eyes, I am going to get rid of fossil fuels” (in America – not China, the PRC was going to be allowed to dominate the world), and on and on – everything he is now doing was not hidden, it was openly boasted about.
At the time I thought “does he want to lose?” – but then it became obvious that he did not care what he said, because he knew (in advance) that the election was going to be rigged. Mr Biden could have said “I am going to torture your children to death, after letting Hunter use them” and he would still have got “80 million votes” just not from 80 million voters.
If there is nothing (nothing at all) that ordinary people can do to stop something happening – why not openly tell them what you are going to do?
Covid Emergency, Climate Emergency, on and on – to world governance, control of every aspect of life from the cradle to the grave.
True some brave souls are standing against it – but what can really be done to stop it?
Our international masters (government and corporate) think they are at the “gloating stage” where they can actually tell us that what is left of our liberty is going to be taken away and watch (enjoy) our horror and despair – and they may well be correct.
Still we must battle on – perhaps there are things we can not see, things that may lead to victory in the end.
When a doomsayers prediction fails to come to fruition, the clever ones buy more doom. If the world doesn’t end on April 15 this year, it’s because of a “glitch” in my “algorithm” which I’ve found that should have been calling for the end of the world on April 15 of NEXT year. Which explains why we still have seasons.
The lockdown-lovers are either on private incomes or, more likely, work for the public sector. Either way they get a guaranteed income, generous “sick” pay and lavish pensions, often for doing nothing of any use or nothing at all.
The lockdown-haters are people who have to earn our own living and pay for theirs.
[…] Also, too many people now like it. […]
Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather!
Additional booster vaccination required within twelve months.
Nice little earner they’ve contrived for themselves there.
Katy. Far too much of a generalisation.. I am retired, have a decent pension and am doing nothing. I also own a house with a garden. I hate lockdown with a passion because of what it is doing to people and our way of life. To say that I am disgusted and repulsed by the way this Government, which I voted for, has behaved doesn’t do proper justice to how I feel.
I think your attitude to lockdown may depend as much on the sort of person you are and the way you look at the world as on your personal circumstances.
Katy. Far too much of a generalisation. I am retired with a decent pension and do nothing. I also own a house with a garden so in so far as anyone can be said to be unaffected by the lockdowns it is me. I hate lockdowns with a passion because of what they have done to people and our way of life, and to say that l am angry and disgusted with what this Government, which I voted for, has done doesn’t do proper justice to my feelings.
I think one’s attitude to lockdowns may depend as much on the sort of person you are and the way you look at the world as on your personal circumstances.
Whilst I think Katy Hilbert is broadly correct, I must also agree with David Norman. I am a wealthy chap whose means of support has not been meaningfully impacted, yet I am incandescent with rage over these lockdowns.
I just went to Wikipedia – the Czech Republic, poster child for lockdowns and mask mandates, is no longer top of the international table for Covid deaths per 100 thousand people. It is no longer at the top of the table – because they have removed the country from the table.
I can not even accuse them of lying – as they have just removed the Czech Republic from the list of countries, they have not faked the figures.
Sometimes I do not know whether to cry – or to laugh.
Paul, *always* add a link even if you just cut and paste it. Actually the poster child is Slovakia, who have taken this to the insane extreme in terms of scope & enforcement.
Perry – my point was that the listing is no longer there.
And it was the Czech Republic (not Slovakia) that the BBC and so on went on about as model to follow.
Dear Mr Marks @ April 16, 2021 at 6:16 pm
Czech Republic is still listed, but along with 11 other countries the deaths per 100,000 population show ‘nan’ – whatever that means (not available now?).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
Worldometers call Czech Republic ‘Czechia’. Click the column header to sort; Czechia is second in the deaths per million stakes.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
DP
The Czech Republic is back on the table – at the top of the Covid deaths per hundred thousand of population.
I did check Slovakia – it also has a higher Covid death rate than the United Kingdom.
As Dr Tony Fauci would say, Slovakia has “done everything right” – crushed civil liberties, smashed the economy, and produced a very HIGH Covid death rate compared to all the countries that did NOT do these things.
One question remains – are the international establishment (such as Tony Fauci and his corporate and government pals) absurd clowns, or are they psychopaths?
Perhaps they are both.
Briefly turned on a film (no link) made in 1992, animation, supposedly a miniaturised Australian lumberjack (although he speaks with an American accent – not an Australian one) and a fairy (a flying one – not a homosexual, the character today would be homosexual and nonwhite) working to stop evil Big Business destroying a forest. As the film was made by a Big Business corporation (for the brainwashing of children – under the guise of entertainment), it was a useful reminder that even way back in 1992 (the year the “legally non binding” Agenda 21 was signed) the madness was growing.
James Hanson (American government scientist) was on oath before Congress in 1988-1989 swearing that the coastal cities of the world would be underwater by now – but the media do not notice that these establishment science predictions turned out to be false.
It is the same with Covid 19 – the media ignore the fact that ALL (all) of the nations that did not lockdown have a lower Covid death rate than we do.
In the United States the media attack Florida and praise New York over their response to Covid 19 – this is far more insane than a miniaturised Australian lumberjack (with an American accent) and a flying fairy, working to save “the last forest” in 1992.
By the way the same main political parties who claim to love the environment also demand endless new roads and housing estate – which they want the taxpayers to subsidise. Still the hard core Greens are a least sincere – it is not just “nasty old men” like me who see the utter hypocrisy of ranting on (endlessly) about loving woodland and then supporting taxpayer money subsidising roads and housing estates, where the woodland is.
I am eating some bread produced by Greens right now – there were loafs of bread outside a house (lived in by Greens) yesterday with a “free bread – please take some” sign, so I did one loaf). Their principles are not mine – but they do live up to their principles, and I respect that.
Back to politics….
From Climate Change Emergency to Covid Emergency and then back to Climate Change Emergency again – or perhaps both, remember “new variants”.
Viruses do indeed mutate – but this is normally to less (rather than more) lethal forms, but with a bit of help……, still it could all be bad luck. But I still find the predictions “the next virus will make them….. it will make this one look like a caress” and the SMIRKING disturbing.
I am not a kindly man – but even I do not grin when thinking about the painful deaths of vast numbers of human beings that have done me no harm. Nor do I know, in advance, that they are going to get a disease that was unknown when I was speaking.