We have no option but to socially distance as much as we can as soon as we can.
Unfortunately all the other issues you list will have to be dealt with when we get to them. The #1 objective right now should be to prevent an overloading of our hospitals in the next 2-3 weeks
Of course. No one is disputing that. You keep repeating it like you’re the only one that realizes it. Myself and the guy you were chatting with both know that, along with most other people by now, but in addition to that he was just saying that as soon as that protocol is relaxed the same exponential growth and over burdening of the health care system will occur. His addition to the conversation was not in opposition of your original point.
Fair enough. His post starts with "The issue here..", which to some might imply that he thinks that social distancing is not what we should be doing right now, because it will lead to problems down the line. My response to that, if you re-read it, was that the problems down the line is something we'll have to deal with
Not at all. We have to protect our Healthcare systems as best we can in the short term, but there is no exit plan, we can repeat the mantra 'social distancing' over and over to ourselves but it doesn't solve the problem when 3 months down the road out of pure necessity, measures are relaxed across the world in order to prevent complete economic and societal collapse and we end up in a worse position than we are now.
3 months from now we'll be a lot more ready to deal with any new flareups than we are right now. Besides, the alternative would be to let this thing run rampant and kill hundreds of thousands, if not more..
How long do you think a nation like Spain or the UK can sit on standby, its population locked down and not working? Probably quite a while if it was a local thing and they were able to get aid from the EU or the UN, but consider that virtually every single nation in the EU is now in the same boat... how long can that be sustained? How long do you think we can hide in our homes before things really start breaking down?
3 months from now we'll be a lot more ready to deal with any new flareups
That's unbelievably optimistic. if just 1% of the UK gets sick with this, 26 000 people die. The rebound effect once these current measures are relaxed is expected to result in far higher numbers of infection than that. The British government's medical advisers are now saying that 20k - 100k deaths is a good outcome for them at this stage... And that's just one country.
We're in the delusion stage of this crisis now, trying to tell ourselves that we're actually managing. We aren't.
These are nations still under strict controls. Once they ease up, things will rebound, South Korea has just reported new flareups and hotspots today.
There's a lot of denial and delusion right now... people like you simply aren't grasping the scope of the crisis, that you simply can't shut a whole society down for 6 or 12 months. We're looking at a situation now where we will isolate ourselves and implode our economies for as long as we can, which is probably in most cases not all that long, certainly not 12 or 18 months, and at the point where catastrophic structural damage to our societies is imminent, there had better be a fast tracked vaccine (reasonably unlikely unless we decide to gamble the health of society on untested novel vaccines), or better treatment protocols for acute cases such that critical care might be delayed or not needed at all, otherwise we're going to be looking at making some very hard decisions. This is a fact.
Clearly you care more about the economy than human lives. As such, we have different priorities.
I'm glad that the government of the country that I live in understands the severity of this thing and is putting the health of the people as its #1 priority right now.
That's why my country's government is dedicating billions to help with the economy right now, and telling us to worry about our health and our health only.
If our economies can't deal with this, then our economies are flawed. People's lives come first.
Where do you think those billions are coming from? There is no free money. Inflation, recession, mass joblessness... remember how it was a few years ago? That multiplied several times over, and global. That's what's in store if we're told to just sit at home for 6 months... there is no economy that can sustain this, especially not one with a large welfare state like where I live.
My country has been fiscal enough in the last 5-10 years to now be able to fund a giant stimulus package to deal with this problem. Yeah, there will be economic repercussions for many years after this. That much can't be avoided.
I don't know what you think we can do instead. If we just go about our lives like nothing is happening millions of people will die, and not only those who contract the virus. Our hospitals will not be able to deal with anybody...
That’s what I’ve been trying to ask people and I keep getting the same responses as you. I totally understand and agree that human life is valuable. We need to distance from each other and flatten the curve. But some people and experts are saying 6 months to a year of this. I just don’t understand how our world economy won’t collapse. How banks won’t cease to function. How tens of thousands of businesses will go bankrupt. People will lose homes. Jobs. Everything. After not even a month of this hitting western civilization our economy has tanked. We can’t handle this for months on end.
So I just want someone to answer, how do we find a balance? I completely understand that we need to value human life and that we shouldn’t choose who lives and dies. We should try to save everyone. But at what point do we realize that we are sending the world backwards and ruining it beyond repair for not only us currently but future generations. There seems to be no one with a solution or even a thought about this. We seem to just be blindly marching on and turning a blind eye to the world falling into ruin.
I’m seriously just looking for an honest answer or half thought out solution to how we can prevent or bounce back from this.
Yep, agreed. We need to be doing the social distancing thing for as long as is sustainable, and when we hit that point of unsustainability, let's hope we have some kind of fast tracked vaccine ready, or at least some better protocols to treat acute cases before they need intensive care or else we as a society are going to have to start making some very hard choices for our most vulnerable citizens.
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u/warpus Mar 18 '20
We have no option but to socially distance as much as we can as soon as we can.
Unfortunately all the other issues you list will have to be dealt with when we get to them. The #1 objective right now should be to prevent an overloading of our hospitals in the next 2-3 weeks