People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.

Why not stop the spread of the virus, as a way to both prevent further fatality and disease and to avoid future lockdowns, now? People's welfare, mental health and general stress levels do much better under elimination strategy. 

These are very difficult times, for everyone.

And leading into the spread of the virus, and the disease, there was a surge of chronic stress induced by a culture of acquisitive competitive 'meritocracy' grounded in free market fundamentalism exacerbated by 'Austerity' policies mandating vast cuts to social welfare, health and social care programs based on a series of outright lies about fiscal policy and fiscal possibility pre-existed the pandemic. 

Allowing the virus to spread led to repeated lockdowns which added to the stress the more vulnerable among our population were dealing with. Stopping the spread, as Vietnam, New Zealand and a good number of other countries chose has demonstrably led to much better outcomes, on every available measure bar international tourism.

Why are the English Government and others wilfully ignoring the widespread evidence that is right before our eyes, the evidence that 1.8 billion people are being protected by elimination of community transmission strategy. 

How could they all ignore something so blatantly real?

The UK governments, the UK Press News Media, the Labour Party front bench, The Churches, the Green Party , the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National Party and all broadcasters of TV and Radio refuse to bring that evidence up for detailed discussion. 

What is that?

How could anyone let that slide?

This is to me where the government position is weakest.

They cannot argue all that evidence away without lying or making up stuff .

That is why they dismiss it out of hand, refuse to discuss it. They can’t handle it safely for their objective, because any acknowledgement of that evidence undermines their positions, and their policies.

Why do they dismiss Elimination of Community Transmission?

I think it is in part because doing so requires that the state resources and empowers local government to support all the people to stop the spread, to be helpful, to prioritise help for the local population to take best care of one another and that is too close to socialist practice for neoliberal free market fundamentalists to allow. That cat must remain in the bag.

How does the language of  'freedom' and 'restrictions' emerge to dominate the public discourse, that is to say the discourse published by official news media, mirrored by leading politicians and pundits. What does it seek to 'stimulate' in significant cohorts of the population?

Where the evidence leads is that stopping the spread of the virus in the community offers the best chances of freedom preserved, and allowing the virus to spread reduces all our freedoms, not least when the spread of infection runs out of control, impacting services visibly. For the English government that visibility is about optics, not people's welfare. 

It's not a good look, denial.

In my view Sir Keir 'less with the evidence' Starmer is daily betraying the working class he purports to represent by not bringing that evidence up every time he sits opposite Johnson, every time he speaks to the press. He is also betraying everyone else.

Just one short sentence is all he needs to say "Elimination Strategy is working for 1.8 Billion people" and  "You do know that spread is placing them at greater risk than their own governments are." 

I even have a pithy slogan for him.

"Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love!" 

One breaths worth of words, at the start or end of every briefing, statement or public utterance. Such a small effort, for such a huge benefit.

Never in the field of population level health care has anyone avoided so small an effort in order to avoid so huge a benefit to so many whilst blatantly supporting a government that is causing immense  deliberate harm whilst pretending to be a political opposition. Not quite as pithy as the Churchill original.

The dynamic of the slow spreader Governments, the English, Brazilian, Indian and other NeoLiberal Free Market Fundamentalist  governments who for whatever reason have chosen to allow spread of the virus have literally made the virus more dangerous and the populations they govern more vulnerable on very front. 

What drives that kind of policy decision making, most recently articulated by Savid Javid, the English Health Secretary, as not 'cowering before the virus'. The little bully. 

"With income distribution at current levels, roughly half of the working population in both the US and the UK would be unable to survive without external help. Most people regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, and they view providing the help as an intrinsic part of a civilized society.

To a market fundamentalist, though, these people are simply not worth what it costs to keep them alive. Their existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden.

Market forces, they say, are meritocratic – and the problem is that these people have too little merit.

Ira Sohn, Professor of Economics at Montclair State University, has pointed out that with technological advances, many of these people (i.e. people who have to work for a living) will no longer be needed at all:

The prospects for adopting labour-saving technologies in many of the labour-intensive sectors in the economy are improving annually: self-checkout at supermarkets, self-check-in and -out at hotels, self-ordering and bill settlement in restaurants, self-administered health diagnostic tests and so on all translate into a reduced need for workers per dollar of gross domestic product on the one hand, and fewer total workers along with higher levels of GDP on the other.

Horses were used extensively on the farm and in transport in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe, but once mechanization and electrification were implemented, and the railroad, automobiles and buses became commercially viable as transport alternatives, owning horses became a hobby of the rich, and the horse population declined quickly and dramatically.

The same can probably be said about humans in the 21st century: we just don’t need that many of them – and, in the rich countries, they are expensive to ‘produce’ (prenatal and postnatal care), ‘assemble’ (nurture and educate), and ‘maintain’ (from adolescence to death). As technology continues to become ever more capable and most humans, frankly, do not, there is less and less need for workers to produce the goods and services required by society.

source : https://99-percent.org/what-is-the-market-fundamentalist-agenda/ 

Does that fit the dynamic of the current English Government's policy direction?

There is a good case for Elimination strategy countries to impose sanctions on the spreaders, for reckless endangerment.

The 'try to control a slow spread' countries are more dangerous to the people than the virus needs to be. 

It is a try out, as in it is a trial, as in a well-dodgy experiment based on a fallacious position - ignore known evidence and let's see what happens.

They are exacerbating matters on every front, deliberately. Worse they are taking a huge risk because we know that the virus's evolutionary pressure will find ways to escape vaccines precisely because it is allowed to spread.

 

And it is the spread among the vaccinated who have not yet met the virus where that evolutionary step will occur, not among the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated have already generated variants out of our various conditions. Proving that the virus can interact with different environments and make changes that increase it's ability to thrive.

Suggesting to the vaccinated that they should go out and risk contracting the infection in order to assure economic recovery is a nonsensical suggestion. The economy would be in much better shape adapted to a successful elimination of community spread strategy.

Tourism, for example, does not have to be international.  There are plenty examples of tourism consumers and providers successfully adapting to the current situation, where people take their holidays more locally, putting cash back into their own economies.

All live events and hospitality industries do much, much better under elimination strategy.

Health care does much, much better under elimination strategy.

Everything that affects ordinary people's welfare, mental health and general stress levels does much better under elimination strategy.

Remember each of us is not safe until all of us are safe. This applies to this virus as it does to the matter of climate change, for example. Or poverty. Or air pollution.

Stopping the Spread is spreading the Love.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Grooming others vulnerabilities is as low as it gets, in terms of everyday abuse of power."