This is now the key point that needs to be hammered home to anyone getting lockdown fatigue. Your mental health issues will pale into insignificance when your overtaxed medical system sees you dying of easily curable things. When the ICU is full and lots of doctors are quarantining with covid lot's of things become fatal. Even if not fatal how about waiting weeks to have your broken bones set etc and what about all of the people who suffer when elective surgery is cancelled.
Also, spare a thought for the health care professionals that have to deal with the bloody mess caused by the rest of us. How'd you like to go to work each day to care for people with a deadly but preventable disease. What would your mental health be like if you had to decide who lived and died?
We can't under any circumstances stuff our health care system.
Basically, Sydney needs to HTFU. Melbourne did 200 days under lockdown but Sydney can't do a third of that without making noises about giving up.
All valid points but it's not just 'mental health' that's giving people lockdown fatigue. It's the fear of winding up on the streets because they can't cover rent/their mortgage. If your basic needs of food and shelter are threatened, you aren't going to give a shit about how hard it is to get a bed in an ICU. Lets be honest, are any of us regularly donating to food banks? Diverting a portion of our wages to people we know who're out of work? No, we're not, so why are we shocked and appalled when out of desperation they start joining up with the tinfoil hat wearing fuckwits protesting on the weekends?
Speaking from personal experience I've always been concerned about what happens when COVID gets into a workforce like my own. Working and living in close confines while trying to maintain complicated and fragile equipment that tends to go bang spectacularly when things go pear-shaped, it's not really an ideal environment to let an infectious disease run around
However more recently I've started to see the effects of what 16 months of the extreme caution approach has done and it's fucking scary. Essential inspection and maintenance on Major Hazard Facilities across Australia has taken a massive hit because protocols and border controls have meant that it's just not possible to get the manpower to site. Meanwhile the supply chains and onshore technical support have also been crippled.
Petrochemical plants, LNG terminals, Oil Rigs - none of these things were designed to be run at skeleton crew levels for long periods and if one does go bang because of fatigue, inexperienced personnel or materials/parts shortages, you're looking at a potentially catastrophic loss of life and untold environmental damage.
Throwing off the restraints and saying fuck it, isn't the answer. Not at this stage anyway but continuing with the Zero Covid At All Costs, 'kick the can down the road a bit further' mentality wont work either. We need to be actively dealing with this and adapting where necessary and that means learning to live with it.
