Great article. Thank you.

You said "Taking the pragmatic approach that ‘we are where we are’" before you argued for keeping key social venues closed. This seemed to contradict what you said further up in the article about protecting the vulnerable but allowing society to carry on as normal. I can only assume what you mean by "pragmatic" is that the government would not accept opening up everything, even if vulnerable are isolated/protected, because they are so invested in their groupthink ( https://www.aier.org/article/pandemic-response-is-our-vietnam/ ) ?

Your comparison to deprivation of liberty safeguard (DoLS) orders was very interesting. Having some familiarity with the similar use of the MHA to take away a person's liberty and hold them in a psych ward, this is exactly what the total "lock down" reminded me of. Our liberty had been decided upon by a couple of doctors (which is what you need under the MHA) based on the presumed dangerous of an untested for virus which "we must carry". Much like the presumptions made about "chemical imbalances" when someone simply presents with types of traumatisation which then has some presumed "dangerousness" if not "treated". At the very least this approach violates, as you suggest, time honoured legal practices and protection of liberty.

Yes

I too am grateful for your comments.

Sadly as a clinician working in a large London GP practice I am surrounded by hysteria and pro Lockdown views +++ by my colleagues (interestingly the slightly older GPs are perhaps ironically less hysterical). My view has consistently been that the cost of Lockdown is too great and I am genuinely upset to see the terrible short and long term price (both mentally and economically) that our young people (amongst other groups of course) will pay, including my secondary school aged children. I do not say this lightly as I have a spouse who works as an anaesthetist and friends who work in ITU and I am fully aware of how busy (and they are exceptionally busy at the moment) the units are in London and elsewhere.

I recently wrote to my MP trying to explain my views and highlighted the following examples (yours are more clever than mine!) of areas of risk we live with in every day life and manage this risk in order to allow civil freedom e.g. in the year ending 2018 there were 26,610 people killed or seriously injured on the roads in GB (reference Gov.uk) - are we going to take cars off the road in order to minimise harm to (probably younger) people? Or are we going to ban fast food and sweets and chocolate beacuse people are becoming so obese they are increasing their risk of all kinds of disease (including Covid)? The answer is of course no because the balanced argument says there has to be freedom to make decisions. So I am grateful to hear your similar views.

One last point I have felt passionately about over the last 10 months which I think has been missing from the agenda in primary care/government has been the drive for health promotion in order to educate people how to reduce overall risk of all lifestyle modifiable disease. This bothers me.

Thanks again.

So interesting to have views from GPs. If only we could have a sensible national debate about how to cope with Covid and infectious diseases, including short term measures to reduce the pressure on the NHS and how we can improve our resistance to respiratory viruses. For the sake of our mental health the scare-mongering and blaming has to stop.

Sadly as a clinician working in a large London GP practice I am surrounded by hysteria and pro Lockdown views +++ by my colleagues

I wonder if there may be some way health workers like yourself and our GP friend here can gather together and present these views to the powers that be? From your positions, you have more credibility in the eyes of those who make decisions and less likely to be dismissed as selfish and irresponsible.