Thread by @MichaelRosenYes

Just in case there are people who want to make me into a lock down zealot, I'll just say that I don't know anymore than any other non-expert whether that's the right thing to do now, or whether it should have been better some time ago. That's for real experts.

What I am much more clear about is that if test, trace and isolate, along with masks, wash and social distance had all been in place in March and continued to be in place, we would have and could save lives and #longcovid

A crucial factor to feed into this is the relative success or failure of medication for people who get Covid. Word of mouth from a consultant told me that in the early stages, they had great difficulty in figuring out how or why this virus works in the body and what could beat it

The point is that doctors all over the world are pooling their expertise in limiting the deadliness of the virus. Any measurement of our likelihood to die or suffer from the virus is now relative to whether patients receive the best known treatments - or not.

What is also clear is that in amongst the medical considerations, a set of 'ideas' has emerged to do with such things as: over-70s are less worth living than under-70s; people with 'underlying conditions' can be presented as 'nearly dead people' so 'deserve' to die.

Further to that, the 'herd immunity' without vaccination, continues to circulate, with people who are not virologists peddling 'ideas' that a number of deaths (how many?) is a necessary loss to save the rest of the population. This is both ruthless and truly unknown.

This virus's ability to maintain its potency and/or mutate, + our ability to create antibodies against it (or the mutations), in the short, medium or longterm are still unknown. This means that 'herd immunity' without vaccination is or would be a terrible gamble.

The dividing of the population into people who are 'hardly affected' by the virus and people who ultimately it hardly matters if they are severely damaged or killed by it, is at its core a fascist idea: segregating us into 'real' people 'lesser people'.

This last idea also says, in effect, that it doesn't matter if the 'real people' infect the 'lesser people'. It doesn't matter because the 'real people' are much less likely to suffer damage or death, so it's OK. We can't have 'society' if we think or behave like that.

Personal lives fall apart, the vertical ties between the generations are broken but also the social ties, to do with how we care for each other as a society, also fall apart. These ties gave us the NHS and free education for all, social welfare and could give us much more.