Stan A. Einstein wrote: December 21st, 2021, 11:11 am
In every human activity there is always an element of risk. We are all, in my view, entitled to evaluate that risk for ourselves and act accordingly. It therefore follows if I am prepared to take the risk to my health of drinking a bottle of whiskey every day I should be allowed to do so. However I then have to give up my 'right' to drive a car.
However even sober when driving a car I might make a mistake and kill someone. Which is why this topic keeps going around in circles. The points being made are all valid but meaningless. You see I have no doubt that in the time prior to Covid people were infected with flu at football matches and subsequently died.
There are actually two questions which therefore need to be answered.
The first of which I have repeatedly asked and only Bangitinthenet has answered. How many people are you prepared to see die before you are prepared to give up some of your freedoms? Bangitinthenet gives a figure of 20,000. If you agree with that figure and accept that the annual death toll because of Covid in the UK seem to be about 100,000 then clearly with deaths running five fold above the 20,000 figure, restrictions are in order.
The second question not yet posed by Omicron but perhaps valid as further variants occur, is should a society 'shut down' when the threat is known but the severity of the threat is not? Let's face it governments are going to look pretty silly if society is shut down because a lot of people have a touch of the sniffles. Then again not as silly as if they don't shutbdown and bodies really are piled high in the streets.
There may not be any right answers but at least we should try to ask the right questions?
Brendan, you are asking a question that no one can really give a proper answer for. Any politician that quoted a number of ‘acceptable’ Covid deaths would probably be hounded out of office. It is not a question that can be answered in the present. It only becomes an issue afterwards. Politicians are probably talking about it in private but obviously not publicly.
We come back to the old chestnut of WW2. In that War the UK had 450,000 deaths. This was over a six year (nearly) period. No one at the time complained about civil liberties being eroded. There may have been the odd protest but nothing major and certainly nothing that the Government couldn’t handle.
There are three ways that the government currently uses to inform the public of the UK Covid deaths. If you take the approximation of the three methods of calculation, the UK Covid death rate is currently at 150,000 over a 21 month period, maybe more. If Covid carries on for the next four years, will we have the same number of deaths in the UK that we had in WW2? What will be the fallout of that?
Politicians work in the here and now. The numbers game is for the media and discussion afterwards. I wonder which politician will fall on his/her sword and quote an ‘acceptable’ death number. None, I reckon. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for an answer to your question.