Sounds a bit like Trump doesn't it?

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

A lot of players and sports stars who we would typically slag off do more than we know about for charity globally. Clearly they dont want publicity as it would seem like the big time charlie.

Hope he hasn't seen his Mum and Dad in the past couple of weeks

Living down here does have some advantages. At least you can see them cry.

Whilst footballers get a very bad reputation for being greedy, many of them appear to be exceedingly generous.

Neville and Giggs have given away beds to the homeless in hotels, Zaha giving away homes and a % of his wage to charity every month, Drogba building 4 hospitals in the Ivory coast.

They seem different to rich business owners in that way. One group relised they are lucky, the other thinks they deserve more than everyone else.

Sounds a lot more like you.

Classy.

You have made a couple of assumptions here which mean you haven't really understood my position....Well, at least not in respect to 'herd immunity'.

Firstly I've never supported the 'herd immunity' phrase as it's a very reductionist description of what occurs.

However it's central message was that we have to live with this disease until we cure it. We have done this with all previous diseases. This central point is just common sense and it'll be true for the next pandemic that turns up.....which perhaps might not be as infrequent as we had become use to.

Your projections don't take account of the fact that infections rates are very different in first world countries that have taken different courses.

Regardless destroying the world economy as a response to solve a pandemic, which is nothing like the black death (if it were I'd support this response), whereas the average death age of this virus is in the late seventies. I view the overtly alarmist response as just that..

I have never suggested that measures shouldn't be in place in response to this virus. I'm just not supporting an economic lockdown.

My position is also the position of many other countries. Let's not forget that increasing the unemployment rate also increases deaths as a consequence. The argument that the cure is worst than the disease is one that needs to be had.

In our earlier exchanges I referred you to the different death rates in other countries and put forward reasons why that was. I would have hoped that this would have shifted your thought process as how best to tackle this but apparently you only wanted to obsess on the homogeneous points.....which while I agree with aren't going to make any difference in how we tackle this.

[Link]

I'll state again, Japan isn't in lockdown. It has implemented sensible protective measures but it isn't self harming its economy and encouraging workers not to work.

Again, I'll make the relevant points. Japan is far far closer to China than us or Europe.

Japan has around fifty million more people than the UK. It has Tokyo, a far more densely populated capital city than most in the world including London.....People still working.

Japan has 43 deaths and 865 active cases.
The UK has 433 deaths and 7,659 active cases.

The UK is doing relatively better than most other European countries and yet we have 121 cases per million compared to Japan's 9 cases per million.

The responses of first world countries will be similar while they retain health response capacity. The real underlying reasons for these variations are given in the original video I linked you to......cultural behaviour....hygiene levels around people.

This is the changes that require implementation not lockdowns.....which will not only damage the western economy but prove ineffective once lockdowns have ended unless these requirements have been put in place.

The Chinese responded to threats to its health service by building temporary hospitals. This was an intelligent response and while I don't believe that fully teched up equivalents can be implemented here for several reasons we most definitely could expand upon our health service and invest in it much more over this period and indeed that's what is being done.....Probably knowing that when they release the brakes they need that capacity.

If I detailed what I think should have been implemented as a response that differed then this post would be far longer but the video on Japan details common practice there which I would make compulsory here.

Edited by Stirlingsays (25 Mar 2020 3.10pm)

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