Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

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At the moment we _still_ have no date in the UK for when people will be able to visit their wives, husbands, partners or children if they're not cohabiting.

If you're living alone, then you still have no idea when it will legally be permitted for you to embrace, play games with, spend the night with, kiss, hold hands with - experience humanity with - literally anyone else.

If you're single, all of that _plus_ you now need to fight through a 2 metre social bubble in order to perform basic human functions like, for example, attracting a mate in order to perform sexual intercourse.

All of the above is very silly to me. I honestly think the whole "let's wait for the science" approach misses the point. At an absolute minimum we need a hard deadline of something like "look, in N weeks/months you can go and be a husband again".

People _will_ take a risk of death in order to do the above. If you think this is all about young individuals believing that they're invincible you've completely missed the point - the issue is that a life without those things is _not life_ - 1 year of being a hermit for many may as well just be a deletion of 1 year of the prime of their life, i.e. a >1% mortality rate imposed upon them anyway.

The longer term view on this is people actually starting to worry that perhaps that's just it - their parents had a good life when you used to be able to go out, party, meet a girl, and so on and so forth - and now, oops, that's illegal, sorry, we're doing social distancing for the next 10 years. It's utter madness.

If the Government refuses to address this, and they very much are refusing to do so, then the inevitable consequence will be that people just begin to wholesale ignore the guidelines.

If I had children on the other side of the country I'm not watching them grow from age 5 to age 6 over a video link regardless of what the R number is. There's no political process to address these concerns, other than just doing it anyway, so people will do it anyway.

As before, you're exaggerating the extent of social distancing that anyone is discussing will have to be adhered to in the long term. It makes sense that some aspects of social life, as well as economic life, that are currently restricted will have to be supported with looser regulations if we are to keep to social distancing in the long term.

But you seem to be advocating for abandoning social distancing altogether and just letting everyone do whatever they please, without any rules at all. Or am I misrepresenting your comments in this thread?

You have repeated a few times that there is no exit plan (do you mean an exit from the lockdown or from social distancing rules?). Indeed, there is no such thing currently in the UK where I understand we both live because the current government is a travelling circus run by a band of incompetent clowns (and don't let me get started on the opposition). However, again, that is no reason to advocate for just letting everyone run wild and do whatever they please, regardless of whether it puts others in danger or not.

Other EU countries, many of which had severe outbreaks of the disease, like Spain, France and Italy, have managed to enter and exit their lockdowns and to establish new social distancing guidelines, all in an orderly fashion. Yet other EU countries, like Greece and Germany have managed to impose a lockdown early enough to avoid the worst of the disease and are also now exiting their lockdowns and imposing social distancing measures again in an orderly fashion. It is my undestanding that in every such case, social distancing measures and even the lifting of the lockdown are provisional and can be expected to either loosen up or tighten down in the future, depending on how the pandemic progresses in those countries (and outside) and always with a mind to allow social and economic life to go on as freely as possible which is of course everyone's aim.

I don't understand why it is not possible to do the same thing in the UK or why, like you say it's madness or antisocial etc etc.

It's possible for a short period. It's not possible for years. We won't do it. Really, we just won't. I can't be clearer on this, I consider it pointless, frustrating even, to discuss - it feels like arguing against a strawman - if you think that humans will simply stop mixing for years on end, viewing each other through a screen or far away enough that we can't even smell each other, there are really only two explanations in my mind:

a) you have some atypical neurochemistry which means you don't/can't understand human socialisation properly

and/or

b) you're locked inside with your family and so you can't "feel" the dread that millions of people are feeling right now, wondering whether they'll ever touch another human again

For me, it's an urge almost as strong as the urge to drink water. If you refuse to take that on board and just pretend that people are being irrational because your brain doesn't work that way, you're going to remain confused by this.

If you don't want to go to a language class, a theatre, a gallery, a pub, a cafe, sit on a bus, a train, a restaurant, go on a date, have children play in a playground, work in an office, and so on and so forth, for years, or you want to replace them with some wanky dystopian "social distancing" version in which you sit behind screens, wear masks, and have 10 people in a hall built for hundreds, that's cool, you do you. I'll do it for a few months, I won't do it for years, because that represents the imposition of a >2% mortality rate on me anyway by removing all of the good parts of life. My response to this is pretty much "OK introvert", you know?

That over with;

Of course, I do think that we should, for a few months, attempt to reduce the spread of the virus, via whatever measures are reasonable!

I strongly disagree that the status quo of "you can get on the tube to go and work in a supermarket, but can't cuddle your partner" is sustainable.

There's no guidance. As I've repeatedly said, we need a plan to deal with mental health _right now_. Not next week, not "if the R number goes down", not "if Boris has a good day", we need a date at which it will be legal for people to have autonomy and decide whether they want to take the risk to visit their friends and family, and to make new friends.

Notice, by the way, that you're not giving any concrete plans for this in your post - it's all wishy washy "oh, well, we might do this, or I suppose that, well maybe" nonsense. There's no sense of urgency at all. You're really not understanding that many, many people would rather die than live in a dystopian world in which people treat each other as virons. A few months, sure we'll take it. A few years - completely intractable.

We were urgently locked indoors, the world was turned off, and now our needs are being ignored with this child-like "we're not there yet, darling" fluff.

So again - I ask you - what's the plan for long term partners meeting each other? Family members? For dating? For meeting new friends? Do you have one? You do realise that the Government has literally broken up families so that they can prioritise the flower shop opening?

Or are you going to twiddle your thumbs and moan about people breaking the lockdown whilst giving them zero indication that it's ever ending (and seemingly actually _enjoying_ it?)

When people bottle up mental health issues the inevitable result is a release like a pressure valve.

I see you've moved on to assumptions about how my brain works and other personal characterisations.

What an awful communication style. My mistake for trying to hold a civilised conversation, then.

If you refuse to engage on my points, which you still are (as is the Government, literally completely ignoring the main issue people are having) then you need to justify that with reasoning other than "well I don't care about it, so you shouldn't either".

I don't mean to insult you, it's simply baffling to me that you can just ignore this as if it's a nonentity. My brain is different to yours, yours to mine, however we slice it we need to bridge that gap in order to understand each other.

Again: this shut down is trading some lives for other lives. I don't think it's a net gain, I've explained why, and all you can offer is "just wait" on a loop forever. Waiting 1 month locked in a box as a single person is a 0.1%-1% fatality rate depending on demographic.

And yes, '2 meter land' is the same thing if pretty much all of the joy in your life revolves around being close to other people.

You can engage with that on an honest basis, or you can just pretend it away and watch people slowly stream outside, you know? I apologise if I'm getting combative, but it feels like I'm left with no choice...

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