It's not about following orders.

It's that we live in an age where we are lucky to have a technology that makes it less likely to catch a disease, and reduces the severity of the disease even if you still get it.

I thought if i lived through a global crisis then the worry would be shortages and people rioting and stuff, but I never would have guessed the problem to be people refusing to act in their own best interests.

I'm concerned it equates the the government just deciding there's nothing else to be done for it and basically taking the view that we must now be open at all costs and therefore that the X% of folks who will die to the virus are just an expendable and unavoidable cost of that.

To be really honest it surprised me they didn't take that line originally and instead went for the hard safety approach, as most things in our society seem to work more around acceptable losses so to speak.

Australia is very much following those kinda ideas too now it seems, some of our states are reducing restrictions by the day despite having the worst outcomes.

I guess it's all just different perspectives. My concern is it's sorta fine to say X percent of people have to die and that's just the cost of doing business academically and it sounds fine until my loved ones happen to fall in the X percent. That's my worry.

That's the point though - normally for the rest of our lives that number has been enough - our hospital system is world class and has been easily able to deal with the day to day emergencies - road traumas, emergency surgeries, heart stuff whatever. At the end of the day it's normally not all that often in an average person's life they have to go to the ICU.

But once every 100 years or so a pandemic comes along that wildly increases the hospitalisation rates.

Now I guess in an ideal world the government could have prepared for this happening decades ago, but then what would that have been in normal years like 2008 - a giant hospital waiting around completely empty except for the hundreds of trained ICU staff paid to wait around incase a pandemic happens in the next couple of decades. It doesn't make sense.

So then the next idea would be that when the pandemic was discovered we could build it then - but it turns out rather than just make more beds in a room the reason ICU is effective is the level of trained staff for each patient - so we have to get more nurses - but where can we get them - it takes years to train a new one - and we can't import them as every country in the world is currently experiencing the same problem.

So that's the situation the government found itself in - a contagious disease that is going to increase hospital admissions massively above the levels of our previous world - and no way to increase the hospital capacity fast enough to cope with the demand. So all that is left to them is measures to reduce the severity of the outbreaks..or stager their effects across time so that the hosptials do not become over run.....and the only ways we really have to do that is stuff like reducing exposure to each other with lockdowns, wearing protective gear when we can, and getting people to take vaccines. And to keep researching into better treatments/preventative medicines. That's literally all that can be done.

It massively sucks, but it's not like some evil agenda - it's just that the if we don't - the hospital will be so full that if i crash my car or have a heart issue or something nothing can be done about it - and no one wants that.

I don't really see it as wishing it on them - i see it as telling them what is going to happen. Not because anyone wants it to - and despite a lot of effort to stop it.

I agree it's direct, it's blunt.

It probably represents the frustration people feel and some sort of last ditch effort that if the message isn't sugar coated someone might notice.

Speaking of my own life it becomes frustrating, one of my best mates believes it's all a conspiracy. He's already in poor health. Odds are if he remains unvaccinated he will die. We're on the cusp on another major outbreak here in my city with the new mutation starting to spread. Not only that but he purposely thwarts any efforts to keep safe. He never even finished highschool but he's saying people with Phds in medicine don't know what they are talking about. I try and show him the global consensus - the clear and obvious facts - but then he thinks the media is controlled by witches , and the pope is an alien or whatever this weeks flavour of nonsense is.

Most of the time I engage to try and help him, to not lose him to this, but i'm called a sheep, a half wit, and all kinds of other names. At some point it becomes frustrating. You're trying to save his life, but he's just determined to die horribly. What can you do? The last step is you start laying it out brutally honestly, so at least you don't have to worry that he made the choices through ignorance. You did what you could.

Yeah...my take is that realistically any large scale meeting for any reason including protests of whatever political persuasion is a terrible idea during a pandemic. I suspect the health authorities know that to be the case - but that the problem is that if they had said that about the Floyd riots they would risk being called racist.

So to avoid the kinda 'cancel' style backlash they gave it a pass. But then the freedom stuff while a huge national issue isn't one of the pet topics people are afraid to go against at the moment so they came down hard on it. I agree it's a contradiction though.   

I think as a society it's one of those things where we'll have to find what the balance is.

Like driving - If I get enjoyment out of driving at fast speeds and I don't care if I crash - to what extent should I be allowed to do it when there's a risk to others? We found ways to balance that - we train people to drive, we require some safety measures on the cars, we have limits on how you may drive when other people are around, but then we also set up spaces for people to race if that's their thing.

To me this is kinda a similar thing - we're going to have to find the balance between maintaining our way of life - economically and in terms of freedoms - but also reducing sickness and not endangering other people. It's a tricky one really.