Quote Originally Posted by Mike T View Post
I follow some Acute Medicine Consultants on social media - they report that between a third and two thirds of the acute admissions in their hospitals are Covid or probable Covid. Sharing with two other households over xmas? No thanks.
As Chris Whitty said: "Would I encourage someone to hug and kiss their elderly relatives? No I would not...If you want them to survive to be hugged again."
I would go further - don't even share space with them inside - spend time on zoom, or socially distance outside.
The Government must have worked out how many illnesses/admissions/deaths the three household/five day rule will cause - but they are not telling us.
And if we were able to know in advance not how many but who.... Would we consider it then. The only way we accept these kind of risks in normal life (driving, climbing, crossing the road etc) is because we don't know the identity of those who are going to die until they actually do. We can perhaps identify some people at greater risk of premature death in advance - smokers for example, or solo rock climbers. So we can choose to mitigate those risks by not smoking or not soloing. But these still aren't guarantees you won't have a heart attack or a belay won't fail on a trad climbing route. So I think that like everything else in life we take a level of risk we and those affected by our actions are reasonably prepared to accept. So mixing over Xmas? I'm not sure what I'm comfortable with but our two adult sons both live alone so we are more likely to see them than my 89 year old mother.