I'd prefer to err on the side of caution. If it's being overplayed, cool.

Apparently untrue for suicide:
https://covidfaq.co/Claim-Lockdowns-...88da76a7beb16e

When the mayo group says may. A word I usually don't pay attention to when it comes to politics. I will dump the whole sentence in my trash bin in my head. I pay attention. Because professionals in the health field never make predictions lightly.

I kept my kids from smoking cigs. I'll b e damned if they get hit by this

I think that may means: it happens but rarely. Like on leaflets with drug description. There are usually a lot of mays.

Very good post and it's great that you've acclimatised yourself to the compliance necessary in order to help not spread it and to avoid catching it yourself. With regard to the sentence quoted, you've both identified its similarly to flu and its dissimilarity. In short, it's a lot more infectious, more deadly, and more likely to cause long-term issues after recovery.

Yes, many good points being made on all sides.

@ntubski: The only evidence I have for suicide is local to Ireland, where there are certainly more people thinking about it. The Samaritans and Pieta House are two anti-suicide groups, who have got extra traffic. If you're telling me that's not a worldwide issue, I won't argue.

@rtmistler: My post was largely aimed at steering the last (Now Closed) thread back somewhere near the track, and not making any particular point. That said, it seemed to generate some traffic.

If you are working 100% of the time from home, what on earth are you doing living in the Excited States? Pick a Caribbean island or somewhere that's off Earthquake fault lines, out of the way of most storms, and has a low standard of living, and live the dream! They probably have less Covid too!

On the Closed thread, I feel strongly that nobody should write the word "you" in a post without carefully double-checking the sentence. Threads turn nasty when language is used like: "You are a <negative label>" or "You hold <label> views" etc. Reasoned Debates are won & lost on the facts. Maybe you lost on the facts.

What gets my son is that the economy is being wrecked here 'to no good purpose' as he sees it. Ireland lockdowns have been quite strict, largely because we have low budgets for the Hospitals. Typically, Ireland put in the Health & Service Executive to get value for money. Everyone seems to be a manager, with pay to match; Otherwise employees are cogs in the wheel, overworked & on the breadline. That wasn't the brightest idea ever.

You can actually make out a good case that wrecking economies costs more lives in the long run than a pandemic does. The problem is that we haven't seen it happen yet and we don't know if it's going to happen. All governments are flying by the seat of their pants right now.

In ten years time, we shall know. And perhaps we will be saying: "Lockdown was a mistake. We should have accepted mass mortality, the way we would have done in a war, so that the country itself would survive." Or perhaps not. Hindsight is always perfect.

I think the question is whether the extra helpline traffic actually corresponds to extra suicides (e.g., https://slate.com/technology/2020/11...-pandemic.html). Maybe the only people go through with it are the ones who would have done so anyway (those with mental health comorbidities, if you will). It doesn't look like suicides are shown separately at https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpub...tooctober2020/, so I'm not sure what the situation is for Ireland.

Except we won't really. We won't really know how many would have died if we had left economies open. We can't get evidence from alternate universes. I expect people will still be arguing about it.

Apparently the European Commission has gone stark staring mad! They are proposing to invoke emergency powers under the Lisbon Treaty that would allow them to occupy and take control of AstraZeneca's production facilities. Apparently the Germans in particular are agitating for this. My mother always said that the EU was just Germany's attempt to carry out by peaceful means what she had failed to do in two world wars.

https://uk.yahoo.com/finance/news/eu...145032526.html

They've also just enforced a hard border with Ireland.

https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/sta...08035287920655

And they swore blind all through the Brexit withdrawal process that they were only trying to ensure an open border in Ireland! What a load of hypocrites!

I'm not sure that most people understand why governments have done lockdowns in the first place... If you think it's because they don't want people to die, think again. People die every day, the reality is that, we will all die sooner or later, naturally or otherwise, it's only a question of how and when. You like me will just be yet another statistic, the same as anyone else. I can assure you that isn't what the government is concerned about. The reason is that any health system only has a certain amount of resources available to it. Therefore, if hospital beds are full of covid patients, it denies people with non-covid related conditions treatment, that's what they are concerned about. And if you think it's because they care about your health, you're also kidding yourself. It's because sooner or later there will be an election, and a pile of corpses doesn't win elections. At least the Australian government admitted it, I'll give them that. Your country's NHS is already at breaking point like the US health system because covid is running rampant in both countries.

The economy, apart from the tourism industry and related industries have already come back to a large extent here. So it wasn't all doom and gloom like some predicted.

But that's the problem with people today, particularly some of the people in this and the other covid threads here; they just want to make it political at every turn because let's face it: just talking about a virus is pretty boring, but add politics, conspiracy and all the rest of the BS, that's far more exciting! Even the politicians themselves are getting in on the conspiracies, and let's not ask what "Q" has said lately!

Yes hazel, it is a good case, and I listened to it, though not changing direction.

That's another reason why it's interesting. My son is a talented pro musician and does other work, but all that fell about his ears and he's got plans for the future, but they're on hold too, because from his perspective, the world has gne mad - needlessly.

There is the one remaining point: Covid requires hospital treatment in a good percentage of folks. We have about 2,500 public & 1000 private hospital beds. We've had 200,000 cases out of 4.96 Million. If large waves of cases came, sick people couldn't get attention. Unless folks are locked down, there will be peaks of seriously ill folks that can't be handled. The curves have to be flattened - drastically, in our case. If waves of covid came, we would have scores of seriously ill folks for each hospital bed, and deaths would be massive. I haven't heard a counter argument to that one.

There is also the view that every government that tried a softly softly approach chickened out: The Excited States; Brazil; & Sweden, to my knowledge.

@ntubski: I really don't know if extra traffic on helplines converts to extra suicides. Folks in the field tell reporters but that's poor information. You could well be right. It's people in the field feeding back and month-on-month reports that were rising. Suicides are under reported here anyhow by relatives because of perceived stigma. The family gets the family doctor to write "Covid" on the death cert and they are spared trauma, and an inquest.

https://www.nolo.com/evictions-ban

I figure it is good know for some members.

Actually, now that it's been verified that any commonality between for example the South African variant and the UK Variant (also now in the US) is not due to simple transmission of the same genome variant but rather a mutation arrived at in isolation by different strains. This worries the experts because the only explanation is their must be a substantial evolutionary advantage to the mutation. The UK is freaking out not from paranoia or lust for power but almost entirely because the UK is the most aggressive tester for Covid in the entire world. So they are a bit ahead of everyone else in raw data and analysis. I conclude others will soon follow suit.

Here's a synopsis -

https://www.wired.com/story/worrisom...=pocket-newtab