Good Luck With This

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• If the incompetent politicians would get out of the way, the virus will spread, may already have done so enough to provide herd immunity so a vaccine will not be required.

  Since the virus is pandemic (everywhere), it cannot be stopped, slowed, or anything else by Human intervention.

  I swear the politicians ‘in charge’ do not understand what the word pandemic means, nor the difference between infection and disease. Vaccine does not prevent infection, it prevents the infection becoming disease. Since for 99% of the population the Wu Flu virus produces no disease in about 50% and only mild disease in the rest, and that those at mortal risk will soon all be culled, what possible use is a vaccine? We have ‘flu vaccines but still every year tens of thousands die.

• It's a strange thing that a country would accept half a million dead to prevent its economy being wrecked & its population being curfewed by foreign invaders, yet will do the same thing to itself over a few thousand having briefly curtailed lives*. There's been a lot of reference to there being a revival of the WW2 spirit, of late. The WW2 spirit had my grandparent's generation doing their best to conduct normal lives under nightly bombing raids, so I don't think so.

  *Since I'm firmly in that demographic, my attitude? WTF? Being dead isn't a problem if you're dead.

  • It's bizarre how nannied we've become. I was only in favour of severe curtailment so that we could get it knocked on the head and I could go on holiday in July. That's gone now, so it's going to be autumn and shitty weather, or everyone rushing for Winter Sun breaks.

    At the end of this, I think the port-mortem is going to be really ugly for the politicians and scientists.

• The government's initial response, isolating the vulnerable and then letting everyone else get on with living was almost certainly the correct approach (e.g. Sweden); however, the political risks of such a strategy no doubt influenced policy.

  Certainly the leftist media, BBC and Guardian would have had even more ammunition to take pot shots at Johnson and his administration if a less panicked and more balanced approach had been taken. However, since they are seemingly always going to do their very best to undermine a Conservative government they'll never be mollified anyway.

  What lesson's can be learnt? Perhaps only that it takes an enormous amount of courage to resist the Piers Morgans of this world and to put country before party, a statesman might but a politician won't.

  • "What lesson’s can be learnt? Perhaps only that it takes an enormous amount of courage to resist the Piers Morgans of this world and to put country before party, a statesman might but a politician won’t."

    There's no conflict between those two things. Look after the country, people will vote for the party.

    But the Conservatives really have no game. Few of them have any philosophy or mission. It's continuity New Labour with a few calls out to the right that they never deliver on. The only significant change in the past decade is because UKIP and Brexit Party threatened them.

• Nobody has ever come up with a cure for any virus.
  Vaccines for colds don't exist, vaccines for flu are of limited use, vaccines can take a very long time to develop and produce and often aren't possible.
  Since the disease is worldwide it would be pointless eliminating it in the UK short of getting herd immunity, unless we are to stop all travel to the UK forever- which would need to include stopping anyone from crossing the channel on a dinghy- and would put an end to external trade.
  This will end when herd immunity is attained, nothing else is possible.
  It ain't the black death, its not Spanish flu, its not even Hong Kong flu.
  Time to stop prolonging the agony!

  • We will eventually cure it, though I agree we should not be compelled to wait at home until it happens (and if so, then why not quarantine until gov't can "guarantee" against all other sicknesses too?). Nobody has done it before, as nobody had crossed the ocean, until they did.

    We've listed its 22,000 genes, we have a fair idea of what they do, we know the exact protein that attaches to a human cell and how, teams are going after this and a few other places to damage or block it, and there may be several cures, from antibodies to ways to make us make our own, to inert chemicals that just happen to gum it up. Then the big peril is one-size-fits-all solutions.

  • "...Nobody has ever come up with a cure for any virus..."

    Not sure what you are counting as a 'cure'. Briefly, there are two approaches: vaccines and treatments. There are quite a few very successful vaccines - those for polio and smallpox spring to mind. And there are quite good treatments for viral diseases - HIV and Herpes Simplex infections both benefit from the recent development of anti-virals....

• "We’ve sacrificed the summer of youth, and indebted the nation, mostly so that a lot of old people who spend most of their days gardening, watching Countdown and doing crochet can have a few extra years of it."
  Those old people you refer to are the same ones who risked their lives to prevent you being called Helmut or Adolf; who risked their lives in Korea to stop the rise of communism; who fought in Borneo to stop Malaysia becoming part of the Indonesian empire, who risked their lives in Yemen and the middle east; and in Northern Ireland to stop that province becoming ruled by the murderering bandits of the IRA. Last week, on the 8th May, you probably sang a song about meeting again, or joined in the two minute silence for the memory of those who gave their lives in the service of the country. Once you'd done that, what did you do? Complain that these old bastards were still alive and were preventing you from going out and shagging some drunken fat bird? Those old people were the ones who helped put men on the moon; discovered some of the mysteries of the universe; built those jets you flew out in on package holdays; made possible the technology which allowes you to send dick pics to that fat bird. The list of what those old people, men and women, did, goes on and on and on. What respect and gratitude for them you have shown and you should be ashamed of yourselves. These 'old people' have earned the right to be old, to watch Countdown, to crochet or to tend their gardens. What have you done?

  • "Those old people you refer to are the same ones who risked their lives to prevent you being called Helmut or Adolf; who risked their lives in Korea to stop the rise of communism; who fought in Borneo to stop Malaysia becoming part of the Indonesian empire, who risked their lives in Yemen and the middle east"

    Bollocks are they. Almost no-one is left from WW2, and most of those following wars were pretty small skirmishes. There's a lot of 80 year olds in homes who had peaceful lives.

    "Last week, on the 8th May, you probably sang a song about meeting again, or joined in the two minute silence for the memory of those who gave their lives in the service of the country."

    Actually, no, I didn't. Commemorating VE day is a vacuous, pretentious, virtue-signalling event. You and I didn't live through it, and most of our eldest relatives barely remember it. There's no collective memory of it like there was when it was last a public holiday in the 1960s. It was mostly an excuse for people to indulge in neighbourhood one-upmanship around bunting and baking.

    "Those old people were the ones who helped put men on the moon; discovered some of the mysteries of the universe; built those jets you flew out in on package holdays; made possible the technology which allowes you to send dick pics to that fat bird. The list of what those old people, men and women, did, goes on and on and on. What respect and gratitude for them you have shown and you should be ashamed of yourselves. These ‘old people’ have earned the right to be old, to watch Countdown, to crochet or to tend their gardens. What have you done?"

    And they got paid and enjoyed themselves doing it. Why do you want the next generation not to be flying the planes, not to be discovering the next mysteries of the universe to keep paying them?

    There was never a quid pro quo to keep people alive long after they are useful to society. None of those people ever tucked money away into the treasury coffers to pay for the £50bn that is spent on over-65s per year or their inflation-busting pension increases. And if I was an old guy, I'd be wanting my grandchildren to be getting on with their lives.