milkcrate_mosh wrote: ↑Fri Dec 16, 2022 2:05 pm
You keep mentioning cancer patients. I was a hospital doctor in early 2020 (now working in oncology). The idea we could have continued offering a cancer service as normal through the early days of the pandemic is a fantasy. We had hospitals filled with ventilated patients with a highly contagious disease, there was no ICU capacity, there was no nursing capacity and offering standard chemotherapy and immunocompromising our patients was extremely dangerous. I remember before the vaccine whole wards of patients contracting COVID and several of them dying.
It wasn't a binary choice between treating covid and treating other things - left unchecked the service would have rapidly collapsed.
A common kind of strawman argument. I have not said "we should have continued cancer services exactly as normal as if nothing is happening". I've said nothing of the sort.
The vulnerable (immuno compromised, the very elderly, those with pre-existing medical conditions etc) should actually have been given a much higher degree of shielding.
Cancer screening for outwardly healthy people should not have been suspended indefinitely, which was the case. This is the big error in cancer treatment that lockdown and scaremongering caused.
There are estimates about how many people this decision will effectively 'kill'. It makes for sickening reading. If these estimates are correct, we're talking about tens of thousands of people who should have been screened for common cancers who are going to die, every year, for the next 4-5 years.
Had these people been screened, they could have been treated and most would have had their lives extended.
