Hallucigenia wrote:gryffron wrote:Schoolchildren don't suffer bad outcomes from covid anyway.
What is the basis of that assertion? Because it's not true - try telling
the family of the late Jorja Halliday that schoolchildren don't suffer bad outcomes.
Well the regulator was on the fence for a while on whether to approve the vaccines for children or not.
The concern being that it would be unethical to give children a vaccine in order to protect others, rather than the child themself, and when considering the child themself (not the wider adult population), the regulator considered the risks
for the child from covid to be so low, that it put those risks on a par with the (similarly low) risks from the vaccine, making it touch and go whether it would be ethical to approve the vaccine at all for school children.
Of course there are always exceptions, but it's generally accepted by scientists and the regulators that the risk to children from covid is 'low'.
Shoving a picture of a single, unfortunate child who has died from covid into people's faces does nothing to help have a balanced, rational debate.
I'm pretty sure if someone similarly threw a picture in your face of someone who died from the vaccine or became seriously ill from it, you'd be pretty critical of them for exactly the same reason.
Since the regulator was on the fence whether to even recommend the vaccine to children because of the low risks to the children themselves, then I think it's a very valid point that if the number of cases is high primarily because of infections in school children, and the number of cases making the transfer into adults from them is either low, or at least not translating into a massive risk in hospitalisations, then I think that's a very valid point, and does paint the supposedly 'high' rate of infections in a very different light.
To be quite honest, I'm getting quite fed up with the ever more pessimistic stance a number of people - including scientists - are taking.
I mean, let's get real... the majority of people in the main at risk groups have been fully vaccinated. I don't agree with compulsion (I've happily had the vaccine myself), but the NHS needs to adjust - covid ain't going away.
Last year we created a large number of 'Nightingale' hospitals as an emergency measure. Unfortunately these have now been dismantled, and from what I understand were virtually unused.
Well, covid is here to stay... that's going to put extra pressure on the NHS for sure, but for crying out loud, we've known about covid for 18+ months now.
The NHS is going to need extra capacity. End of story. I know this is going slightly off topic now, but why the heck can't the government just bite the bullet and put an extra 1p on income tax at least in the short term to help both the NHS adapt to the new normal that they will have to cope with, along with all the other things that are falling apart in this country at the minute.
It's gone beyond a joke now.
The NHS is supposed to be there as a public service.
But more and more it feels like we are now here to serve the NHS.
Every aspect of our lives now being dictated by the impact it will have on the NHS. And I'm now getting sick and tired of it.
I'm getting sick and tired of being told intensive care departments are near capacity. Well, every blimmin winter prior to covid we were also being told that.
Why, 18months on, are intensive care departments not now being given the extra funding by now to cope with the additional cases of covid that are inevitably going to 'leak' through an (almost) fully vaccinated population?
The past 12 months or so, the government and the NHS should already have been planning for some incremental extra capacity to cope with covid on top of the flu, etc.
I'd rather pay an extra 1p on income tax to allow the NHS to expand it's capacity to deal with covid going forwards, than the ridiculous position we seem to be in at the minute, where it doesn't feel like there's any extra investment in NHS capacity to cover covid, and instead we're still being threatened with mask wearing mandates and lockdowns.
Our lives are being dictated in order to serve the NHS.
That is completely the wrong way around.
The NHS is a public service, to serve the people. Not vice versa.
Sure, when covid came out of the blue, some short term adjustments to help the NHS were probably justified (though I don't agree they should have been legally mandated), but come on, 18 months on with most of the population vaccinated, and a huge amount now known about covid. Enough is enough.
The balance now needs to be strongly back to the NHS serving us, not vice versa.