[Scarlett.]

We don't really have a choice, just like we didn't back during the Spanish flu.

[Samm]

Originally Posted by Scarlett.

We don't really have a choice, just like we didn't back during the Spanish flu.

To be fair Spanish Flu was over 100 years ago, and straight after a long world war with much less scientific advances, you can’t compare the two in certain aspects. The lockdown should continue until safe but because of the world we live in, we are right into possibly looking into the ways a long term strategy could be determined in deciding when possible economic damage would cause greater harm.

Saying all this, the fault still lies within the government none the less. The late response to the virus in the UK, will cause greater economic damage as well.

[user104658]

Originally Posted by Scarlett.

We don't really have a choice, just like we didn't back during the Spanish flu.

It's apples and oranges to be honest. In 1920 western economies were still largely industrial, and it was pre-globalisation, other than the fact that we were still at the tail end of Empire. The effects of a crash of this scale on an economy that leans heavily on City Trading and the service sector are completely unknown. I have a little voice in my head saying, in 100 years when History students are studying the 2020 pandemic, after talking about peak death figures it'll include the line "...and over the following decade the toll of the economic crash was far worse".

When people talk about limitless economic sacrifice "to save lives" they fail, repeatedly, to acknowledge the very simple and multiple-times-proven fact that when the economy declines, people die. We won't know for a long time if the lives saved by lockdown were outweighed by collateral deaths afterwards. It depends on the true extent of the global economic damage.

I get a little stuck on the morals of it all, too, and that's where I have to sadly be really blunt because people don't like to see it or think about it. If we've done all of this to save hundreds of thousands of mostly-elderly lives, and the cost is millions of starving children, then that is a complete and utter moral disaster.

[bots]

Originally Posted by Toy Soldier

I get a little stuck on the morals of it all, too, and that's where I have to sadly be really blunt because people don't like to see it or think about it. If we've done all of this to save hundreds of thousands of mostly-elderly lives, and the cost is millions of starving children, then that is a complete and utter moral disaster.

When society doesn't intervene then it defaults to nature and the natural laws apply with regard to something like a virus - the strongest/healthiest survive. At the moment what we are basically seeing are the laws of nature and us (at the moment) futilely trying to fight against it. All these things are an equilibrium. We are adjusting to a knew equilibrium and we really have no experience of adjusting to such a fundamental change.

We pay lip service to social care, but it really is nothing more in the scheme of things. I think we will go now full pelt to one extreme or the other ... proper social care, or none at all

[user104658]

Originally Posted by bitontheslide

When society doesn't intervene then it defaults to nature and the natural laws apply with regard to something like a virus - the strongest/healthiest survive. At the moment what we are basically seeing are the laws of nature and us (at the moment) futilely trying to fight against it. All these things are an equilibrium. We are adjusting to a knew equilibrium and we really have no experience of adjusting to such a fundamental change.

We pay lip service to social care, but it really is nothing more in the scheme of things. I think we will go now full pelt to one extreme or the other ... proper social care, or none at all

Indeed, I think a level of hubris developed throughout the 20th century where we (as a species) started to believe that our technology had more or less conquered nature; that there was no natural problem that couldn't be solved "with enough science".

We now seem to be being shown repeatedly that this was very much wrong. Oceans full of plastic that we can't clean up, climate change that we're unlikely to get under control, and desperately trying to get a virus under the thumb when realistically it's very unlikely to happen.