Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
The problem is that by the time Omicron started to bite in the UK there was mounting evidence from South Africa that it simply wasn’t as serious an infection as previous variants. This was pooh-poohed on here by certain posters who seem to have no concept of disagreeing well with those who hold a different view than their own. The mere suggestion that we might learn something from elsewhere in the world was rejected as some sort of Bullingdon club plot and South Africa’s relatively younger population held up as somehow self-evident proof that we could learn nothing from them. I think it ought to have been obvious that whatever the demographic differences things simply couldn’t be so different that we couldn’t risk taking serious note of what was going on,
The data from the last 4 weeks demonstrates that South Africa told us everything we needed to know about Omicron, and just how far we actually needed to trash Christmas and New Year in fear of it. The obvious over-reaction in Whitehall and particularly in the devolved administrations will come back to bite us all on the bum if we have to go through all this again because people will be less willing to believe another cry of “wolf”.
Personally I’d love it if some people on here were a little less quick to use the pandemic as a means of demonstrating their supposed moral superiority. And no, I don’t think that means we can’t disagree; I do think it means we need to stop attributing craven self-interest or ideology to those who view things differently.
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Yet Her Majesty's most glorious Government produces data that indicates the third dose of the vaccine (some 18 million mRNA doses since the start of December) is having the impact of significantly reducing the risk of both symptomatic infection and hospitalisation.
(Page 25)
https://assets.publishing.service.go...nuary-2022.pdf
The so-called "over-reaction" is far from obvious, even if the worst case scenarios never came to pass through voluntary behavioural changes, school closures limiting transmission, more working from home, etc.
There was no rush back to the pre-pandemic economy in the days of 30,000 infections 100 odd deaths in October. It's fantasy to imagine that six figures of cases and 300 odd deaths a day will bring back the halcyon days of 2019.