Stealing The Next Generations Time

The younger generations are increasingly railing against lockdown and social distancing rules ....

Scenes Like This Becoming More Common ....

And do you know what? .....

I don't really blame anyone under the age of 40, or even under age 60 of any group, for this temptation to break the coronavirus rules. Now don't get me wrong, I don't condone it, but I understand it ... we can't go on in this half-life forever, or really even much longer, if we want to preserve our way of life. The whole social distancing system is in danger of collapsing, in an uncoordinated disobeyal by some groups to adhere to the rules. 

What are younger people supposed to think, when the hospitals are apparently so on top of this now (treatment and ventilators etc), that we have closed or mothballed many of the 'Nightingale hospitals', and the emergency mortuaries (all largely unused). When, despite fluctuations in the daily rate of the disease being uncovered, the death rates seem to be low and stable?

Covid-19 Kills The Old Not The Young .....

Also lets be brutally honest here, whatever else we can say about it, Covid-19's a disease primarily of danger to the very old, and or, the infirm. The mortality rate for people under the age of 45 is nearly minimal, and in fact even under the age of 75 its still comparatively small. The majority of deaths involving COVID-19 have been amongst people aged 65 years and over (46,351 out of 51,879 as of 17/08/2020 ONS figures). So if your in a low risk group, the sense of threat from this disease is going to also be low.

Daily Death Rates Have Dropped Significantly .....

..... Plus the daily death rate for the virus amongst all groups is now very low, when compared to the peak stages.

Life after all is for living, and therefore for the younger majority proportion of the population, and not for trying to keep older people on the planet for another 18 months or so, by curtailing the life for everyone under the age of 60. I know that there are sad exceptions to this, but the ONS figures show the death rate for under 50's contracting the virus in the UK is very small .... and I am not too old, to be able to recall being in an age group that would have seriously chafed at any lockdown being applied to it.

But we didn't do lockdown during the Hong-Kong flu that killed at least a million (probably a lot more, but counting in the the third world would have been minimal back then), worldwide in the late 1960's, early 1970's. So the world didn't stop, schools didn't close, jobs weren't lost, and life continued pretty much as normal, even with the higher death rates that resulted amongst the older population ... incidentally, I would like to bet that the death rates actually dropped below the normal annual average, in the annual period immediately after that pandemic ran its course.

Telling younger people to 'dont kill granny,' by risking catching and transmitting the illness, only has a limited impact ... they might care about their own granny, but not necessarily someone else's, and in all cases not to the extent that they want to curtail their lives forever.

Social Media Driven Demands For 'Action' Usually Get Bad Results .......

Whilst in some respects, the younger proportion of the population, have only themselves to blame for the extent of the social distancing and lockdown rules that were applied, because the official response was the first in history that was partially, or even wholly, driven by the media whipping up an hysteria, and this then fuelling a social media fire-storm of ill informed demands for tough action.

Still, I do understand why, now that the immediacy of the threat has worn off, for a generation brought up on MTV (so attention span of 3 minutes), they have now had enough of lock downs. As I said above, I don't necessarily condone this attitude, but I do understand and sympathise with it.