Mental health problems?

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Apparently that is the excuse when they argue to spread the virus further... which is ironic, because it's inevitably true that they must be batshit insane that they're willing to risk death for some supposed mental health. For f**k's sake, I lived with tons of mental states... all inside! What a revelation!

Holy s**t am I fed up of people. You could bet there would be people willing to go to a beach even if it was the Yersinia pestis plague. f**k humans. f**k people!

Fear drives us. It leads to stress. Unvented stress can lead to anxiety, distress and mental health issues. At the moment there is a lot of fear associated with the COVID-19 coronavirus. Because it is a new virus, it is unknown, it is a novel coronavirus. But many aspects of this virus have been uncovered and fits better into the known category.

For most of the population, the virus if one becomes infected, produces a small personal threat. The vulnerable are the older adults and people of any age who have serious underlying medical conditions. This has been known almost from the beginning.

More recent studies have show that the virus transmits primarily indoors and not outdoors. Therefore spending time out in the sun on a beach carries very little risk. The breezes quickly dissipate the viral loads and the ultraviolet radiation in sunlight destroys the virus particles.

I don't think it's easy to know where the right balance is. For the individual, it's an awkward dilemma about whether to go to great lengths to avoid a very small but incalculable risk of something very nasty happening.

Few would call it insane or selfish to drive a car and thus risk killing somebody and to add to the pollution that kills and harms the planet. We tolerate a somewhat cruel social order, I think, so it's perhaps only to be expected that many people will care little for protecting others. People are being forced back to work, often via public transport, thus subjecting themselves to the risk of being "cornered" by too many fellow-passengers, work colleagues, customers etc. If all that is deemed OK, why shouldn't a citizen have a day out at the beach? Cabin fever can become very hard to tolerate for some people.

Not that I feel much of an urge to take any chances at all myself. As a pensioner I don't need to go to work. Where I am, I'm allowed to go where I please, and I choose to go out for walks. The place is very sparsely populated so contagion risk is practically zero. My partner is medically in the high-risk category and I have no health insurance, so the stakes are quite high. I feel very little need for ritual holidays at the beach or for social gatherings. I don't see having a pint in a pub or a Big Mac at a fast food cafe as central to my existence. I'd like to perform music again with my friends, I'd like to see them, but I don't like the odds, and I'm reasonably content to wait till the coast is clearer. The Internet makes it easy to bear.

I think we may be heading for a second spike. I don't think the government is doing enough to fix the pandemic - too slow to lock down, too swift to unlock, dishonest about the risks they've foisted onto us, and unwilling to contemplate switching to a command economy to avoid the recession they're exacerbating by compromising public safety with the demands of the free market and business. The mass media is largely preaching the same biased message. So whatever they say, I'll follow the available medical science and make my decisions based on that and whatever pressures I get subjected to, which as I say, aren't much for the time being. I wish everybody would do as I'm doing, but they won't, and to some degree I have to respect their right to make their own decisions unless it becomes clear that they're more certain to kill somebody by passing on the virus or by catching it themselves and hogging scarce medical resources.