With the narrative about vaccines being the solution changing quite dramatically in the last few days (transmission still possible & they’re not going to help us get back to norm after all) we need to have a grown up conversation about how go forward. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/24/us/covid-vaccine-rollout.html

Whether that means investing in some permanent additional surge healthcare capacity or running campaigns to help people evaluate their own personal risk to better live normally with the disease, something different needs doing.

Also I suggest the pollsters do some actually targeted inquiries with people who are 80 or older. I’m only 42 (but overweight so potentially vulnerable), but I think I would rather run the risk of hospitalisation/death than impose this sort of dystopia on the young.

Also, there could very well be private sector solutions. The critique of the anti lockdowners is that their selfish inclinations run the risk of them depriving NHS capacity from someone more deserving if and when they fall ill. But this risk can be addressed w/ private insurance.

It’s also a weird IMHO opinion to label lockdown defiance as endangering the lives of others from a resource point of view but simultaneously be normalizing obesity as an acceptable lifestyle choice.

On the obesity point, there is a clear correlation between covid vulnerability and obesity. But Lockdown does not help obesity, if anything makes it worse. Many people who are obesity inclined pile on the pounds as a depression coping mechanism or out of boredom.

Limiting daily exercise and making all external and slightly social activity about food procurement only encourages more obesity not less. It would be interesting to not just model the impact of obesity on covid mortality, but how lockdown boosts obesity numbers in that context.