Read on Twitter
Talitha Muusse is one of a team of presentors for the Dutch talkshow Op1. This show invites guests and pundits over to discuss the news and current politics, and is hosted on NPO, the state news channel. You can see her profile on here: https://twitter.com/talithamuusse A very long thread:
Since the pandemic started, there’s been a lot of discussion about saving the economy vs saving lives. (I won’t go in about how this is a false dichotomy, I’m just presenting how the discussion is framed). Part of this discussion is whether at-risk-groups and the elderly
should shield themselves, while those who are not at-risk should just continue as if life was normal. For some people this seems reasonable. The economy has been doing bad lately and a lot of these measures (social distancing, curfew, restaurants closing) have been pretty taxing.
It does sound tempting, doesn’t it? Go back to normal while a group of people isolate themselves. Or at least, it sounds tempting if you are a certain type of person with little empathy or understanding beyond your own social bubble.
Because if you just think this a little through, you can see this is madness. Even if you don’t know how many people are in an at-risk-group or are elderly (almost a quarter of the population that we know of, and many people don’t even know they’re at-risk until it’s too late)
even if you don’t know how damaging COVID-19 can be (lasting neurological damage, people stuck with symptoms for months), you can still see that people can’t easily isolate themselves. A person in an at-risk-group isn’t an island, they have family, friends, married, a partner...
Requiring them to isolate themselves means that they usually also isolate with their partner, their children, anyone else... All of a sudden this isn’t just one person, but at least four people avoiding outside contacts. Often this is difficult: they may have work to go to!
Some people live in arrangements like student housing - a lot of people packed together in one space, how can you isolate there?
“Well, we can just take care of that by having them temporarily live in hotels or the like!” Again, this smacks of a statement made by someone with very little empathy for others.
So, we’re going to take these at-risk people, lock them up in a place for months, maybe years, not allowing them to see their family or friends (if you think I’m exaggerating, this happened with homes for the elderly here in NL) while the population goes about its business?
Apart from how callous this is, how inhuman it is to treat people like this, the risk also goes up by a huge factor, because the only thing that needs to happen is for the virus to enter in one careless moment (a nurse with not enough PPE, a deliveryman is asymptomatic...)
and all of a sudden you have all these deaths on your hands. Do you want that? Again, if you think I’m being hyperbolic, all you need to do is look at the staggering deaths in care homes.
Thinking all this out is not so very hard. I’m not a scientist, I’m a motion graphics artist. If I can think this out, then you can bet your bottom dollar that a lot of other people smarter than I am have thought this out. And indeed they have! https://www.johnsnowmemo.com/
They also mention how reality is a lot less simple than people who believe in shielding think it is: COVID-19 is a nasty disease that causes a lot of internal damage to people who get it, including people who did NOT belong in at-risk groups.
(according to some articles, almost 10% of young people develop long-lasting complications from the virus!). Even if it doesn’t kill you, it will wreck you.
It’s like looking at a hurricane and saying that because it didn’t kill anyone in the area, therefore they are harmless!
It’s like looking at a hurricane and saying that because it didn’t kill anyone in the area, therefore they are harmless!
Muusse has been arguing for just this strategy on Twitter. (scroll down, it’s a small thread). https://twitter.com/talithamuusse/status/1359608618778247169?s=20
When she gets criticised, she says this: https://twitter.com/sari32264489/status/1359644650244608001?s=20
Note how she carefully avoids mentioning actual examples. She just says we should think about this, and the moment people ask her how this shielding should be done, she just says ‘other countries did this’ and doesn’t provide examples of succesful shielding. Why no names?
Maybe because people finally know enough about Sweden to know that they were not succesful at all? That the UK is, to put it politely, an absolute clusterfuck? She even goes so far to say this: https://twitter.com/talithamuusse/status/1359658325504372737?s=20
‘it’s as dangerous as driving, so it’s perfectly fine to live with it.’ We’ve been in this for a year. To say this is to either be staggeringly ignorant, or supremely cynical. In the UK more people died of COVID than did during the blitz. https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/uks-covid-death-toll-worse-than-the-blitz-as-global-case-numbers-pass-100-million-mark-c-2036769
These are staggering numbers. To try and poo-poo them away reveals a lot about the person saying this than I probably wanted to know.
So, why am I targeting this specific person? Well, to non-Dutch people, Op1 has an immense reach. It is a channel with a lot of means and a huge platform. It is state-sponsored, much like the BBC is. To have a presentor work there and espouse these views is very worrying to me.
And to be clear, this isn’t just something she is doing in her free time. She is a very open advocate against measures to curb the virus: https://www.mediacourant.nl/2021/02/op1-ster-talitha-muusse-klaar-met-coronamaatregelen-slaat-door/
Views like this will not get us out of this pandemic. It will prolong it and more people will die. It’s as simple as that. People with these kinds of views are no better than climate deniers, no better than people who deny smoking causes cancer.
It is worrying to me that we’d rather listen to these people instead of people who actually ARE in the at-risk-groups. For the last year everyone has been talking about them, but there have been maddeningly few instances of actually talking WITH them.
If we did, perhaps we might have some better strategies for battling COVID-19, instead of the same tripe that has been proven over and over again to not work?
Here is a film of the carehomes, courtesy of @lemonandpeach : https://twitter.com/VloonM/status/1253006113601138690?s=20
I’m going to add a few screenshots in case these tweets are deleted and also because I see I made a mistake with one of the links. I’ll transcribe them so non-Dutch people can use the translate function.
“Toch een poging. Het is logisch dat maatregelen contacten verminderen. De vraag is welke soort contacten hebben het grootste aandeel in de besmettingen. Je wilt namelijk de meest effectieve maatregel nemen met de minste vrijheidsbeperking.”
“Echt zo vaak een antwoord op geweest en in andere landen is het gewoon beleid” (when asked HOW people should isolate themselves)
“Voor gezonde jonge mensen is het even gevaarlijk als in een auto de weg op gaan, valt dus gewoon normaal mee te leven.”
A necessary correction in the first tweet of this thread. The term I meant to use was ‘public broadcast’ and not ‘state news channel’. I had a brain blip and wasn’t fully tuned into the right language! https://twitter.com/m02/status/1359939141681770496
