MORE TO LIFE THAN WATCHING TIME PASS
THERE’S more to life than just watching time pass. Several influential people in Britain are now talking about Quality Adjusted Life Years, or QALYs, and suggesting that Covid-19 lockdown regulations and lockdown have done more damage to humanity than the actual infection.
Human life, these professionals say, consists of much more than just staying alive. Life consists of interacting with other people, loving, sharing, trading, learning. We lose most of that in lockdown.
A friend in Simon’s Town told me there were seven parts of his life he had been forced to abandon since the pandemic rules came into force.
These included activities like playing in a band, meeting friends for a drink, visiting family, taking his wife to a restaurant occasionally, playing tennis and so on.
Some people are now suggesting that the world has exaggerated the effects of the pandemic out of all proportion.
The actual death rate from the infection has been quite low. In Britain, they say 0.9% of infections actually result in death. In Italy, where the infection rate is much higher, the figure is 1.9 deaths per 100 infections.
It seems Covid-19 is safer than crossing a busy street. On the other hand hundreds of thousands of QALYs have been lost in the same period.
Young people have lost years of schooling, parents have lost touch with children, businesses have closed, leaving once productive people jobless and often homeless. Factories have closed.
Social gatherings and sport events have ceased.
The world sits waiting unhappily and unproductively.
For what. Death? Technically we claim to be alive. We breathe. We eat. We read. We stare out of our windows. We grow older. That’s it. But is it really living? Most people seem to enjoy a little danger in their lives. That’s why they climb steep mountains, surf huge waves, go hang gliding, race each other on bicycles or enjoy scuba diving.
In all these activities part of the fun is knowing what precautions to take. We know what precautions to take to avoid the risk of infection. Wouldn’t life be a little better if we were allowed to take our own precautions and get on with life?
Or do we choose to sit wrapped in safety and cower in fearful isolation waiting for life to pass us by?
Last Laugh
A man walked into the local police station carrying a dead cat and plonked it down on the counter. “Somebody dumped this cat in my front garden,” he said angrily.
“Very well, sir,” said the duty sergeant, “please fill in this form giving your name, address and telephone number and if nobody claims the cat within three months we will return it to you.”