@JustSomeBloke
Maybe you are not aware, but right at the start of COVID, in order to increase the number of hospital beds available for COVID patients,
the UK government had a policy of discharging elderly patients from hospitals into care homes. The trouble with that policy is that those discharged from hospitals were not first tested for COVID, to make sure that they would not be carrying COVID from hospitals to care homes. The lack of testing before sending patients to care homes was, and remains, a huge scandal, and arguably some people from government should be put on trial for their negligence. Why am I telling you this? Because that policy probably played a major role in accelerating the UK death rate. And as the average age of a COVID fatality in the UK is about 82.4 years, we know that many of those who died would have been care home residents.
Ok, so 'probably', meaning this is likely just an educated guess, there were what? 128k deaths due to old people being released from hospital to care homes. Look, I don't care what or how the issue was handled that made things worse. It just isn't fair to say that Australia used such draconian measures, but saved thousands and thousands of lives, but they didn't handle it right. The plain numbers speak to the results of the different nations and their response to the crisis. Some did better than others in keeping the death count down and most of those did so by completely locking down person to person relationships. In many Asian nations, wearing masks has become pretty much accepted as how lives are lived day to day.
Not Just Coronavirus: Asians Have Worn Face Masks for Decades
As relates to this subject, Governor DiSantis has been fairly unwilling to take such steps as locking down commerce and tourism and the state of Florida has suffered somewhat worse than other states of our nation in covid deaths because of that. Cruise lines wanted to reopen the cruise industry but wanted, for the protection of all passengers and crew, that all cruise passengers show proof of vaccination. To me, a certainly reasonable request in light of the nature of cruising. You have thousands of people trapped face to face in a big boat for days. The hallways are very narrow and the rooms are very small compared to most land based infrastructure. If a pathogen such as covid gets a foothold, as we saw repeatedly with the novovirus, there isn't anywhere for people to go to get free from the carriers. Just as you still see on airplanes that masks are still required even though there are a lot of unvaccinated people. Airlines know that people stuck in a small tube for several hours, not days, are at a greater risk of passing along pathogens. Gov. DiSantis passed a law that made it illegal for a business to add such protective measures. My thoughts???? Stupid!!!
But look, you're free to pass off the increase in U.K. deaths in whatever manner fits with your worldview of things.
Neither of us knows for sure. But there's one thing we do know for certain. Lockdown and oppressive measures don't decrease the number of people who are vulnerable to COVID. After you try and reopen society, they're all still there, waiting to be infected. 'Aha!', you say, 'but now we have vaccines!'. Well, there's a problem with that argument too,
the vaccines don't seem to work as well as initially claimed.
Well, I don't know what it's like in the U.K., but over here on the other side of the big pond, vaccines are proving to be very effective. In fact, most research is allowing the vaccinated to walk around every day living their normal lives without masks or distancing guidelines. Research on those who are now getting sick and dying is predominantly, and when I say predominantly I'm talking somewhere in the 95 percentile and above, those who decided, for whatever reason, that they weren't going to allow themselves to be vaccinated. Do they work as well as initially claimed? Absolutely! Despite your article that states that it doesn't seem to be 'as' effective against the delta variant, it is still powerfully effective. Remember, when making the claim that the vaccines aren't working as well as initially thought,....Duh, the delta variant wasn't one of those that it was tested against when those initial effectiveness claims were made. However, now that the delta variant is here, and the vaccines have been administered it is still proving to be powerfully effective:
The article you posted is all about the delta variant only. That wasn't what the initial vaccines, that began coming out about the new year were tested against.
1. all the vulnerable people have already died of COVID
2. the vaccines reduce the number of vulnerable people
3. the virus mutates until it becomes highly infectious, but relatively harmless
Yes, and of those three options 'vaccines reducing the number of vulnerable people' is still the best. In fact, even option number 1 is based on the disease running out of 'unvaccinated' and therefore less vulnerable targets. The problem with #1 is that a lot of people won't have to die, if they move over to the side of the less vulnerable by choice. For the covid to run out of targets naturally, could take decades. We would all have to get infected and then our bodies develop antibodies naturally. Unfortunately, as we have seen, a lot of people die in that process.
God bless,
Ted