"We may have to live, and learn to live, with this virus in the long term, and certainly for many months to come – if not several years" warns Prof Van-Tam https://t.co/JOewdLESUl pic.twitter.com/PxGw0GcjTI
— ITV News (@itvnews) May 18, 2020
The government in the United Kingdom is officially introducing the idea that the lockdown lifestyle is the new normal.
Boris Johnson has warned that a vaccine may never come, and now the Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England is telling people that we should all learn to live the solitary confinement house arrest lifestyle because the virus is here to stay.
ITV:
The UK is “absolutely” preparing for a second peak of coronavirus, despite a “definite and sustained decline” in new cases, the deputy chief medical officer for England has said.
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, speaking at the government’s daily coronavirus update, said the risk in new peaks will only be truly averted when a vaccine is found, but he added “we can’t be sure” that will ever happen.
“We may need to live and learn to live with this virus in the long term and certainly for many months to come, if not several years,” Prof Van-Tam said.
Social distancing had worked so far in reducing the spread of the virus, he added, but warned there may be an increase in cases when the season changes.
“It may well be that the autumn and winter conditions provide a better environment for the virus to then do its work again.
“So we have to be very cautious about that and plan for these kind of health care surges that we hope we don’t need but we want to be ready for them if they happen.”
He said people, including himself, had been “hoping and praying that this virus will just go away” but warned only once there was a vaccine that is “really capable of suppressing disease levels” will the country be “out of this”.
He appears to be openly saying exactly what we predicted: the bizarre measures will be partially lifted in the summertime, then come back in full in the fall.
They’re designing an intermittent lockdown, where people live in a permanent state of social distancing and isolation, with few smaller periods of relief in-between. These lockdown relaxation periods could turn permanent if an effective vaccine is found and everyone can be effectively immunized, they say, though that appears to simply be giving people something to look forward to in order to justify the containment. It provides an illusion of eventual finality, when in actual fact, governments are not ever going to give up these new mechanisms of control.
By the end of March, Harvard people were already talking about “intermittent social distancing” lasting for years. Now they’re hinting that that’s what they’re going for, at least in the United Kingdom.
In case this doesn’t sound insane already, consider that coronavirus is about as dangerous as the flu, and that save from closing schools and banning mass gatherings, the lockdown is proven to be useless in slowing the spread of the virus. When they started the lockdown, they said it was intended to prevent too many infections from happening at once (“flatten the curve”) in order to allow hospitals to treat everyone, but now they’re acting as if the idea is to keep people from ever contracting the virus.
Coronavirus is mostly killing very old people, so why can’t they just build some nice quarantine complexes for the most vulnerable groups and leave the rest of us alone?
It would be cheaper than preventing everyone but the so-called “essential” workers from working.