A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great,…

A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great, a variety of ailments there, but not enough to prevent her living a good life, albeit at a slower pace. She wants to celebrate it with family and a handful of friends. /1

She’d easily meet the criteria of ‘vulnerable’ that minimisers use. And we’ve all seen them utter reassuring words for the past 3-4 years about protecting the vulnerable. So, my question is - how can she celebrate her birthday, without catching Covid? /2

Something her doctor says would almost certainly kill her. Say 30 people are invited, with the current amount of spread in the community, it seems unlikely they’d all be free of Covid. How does this event or her life more generally function without her living in isolation? /3

Very many of the people she’d like to celebrate with haven’t been masking or taking any precautions, and she doesn’t want to have that argument with them, because they’re often drunk on the Kool Aid of getting back to living their best lives’. /4

The removal of PUBLIC protections means people like her are on their own, battling not just the virus but also the people who will quite happily bring it into her home, regardless of the consequences. She absolutely isn’t happy to sacrifice her life to allow Covid to spread. /5

She’s one of the faces of what I call the new lockdowns. Locked in her home, to stay alive, because governments and businesses will do nothing to control circulation of a lethal virus in public spaces. Removing public controls privatised lockdowns. /6

The vulnerable (and that can be any of us) have to lock themselves down, to avoid infection. The public space becomes a sewer of filthy air, which gutless politicians cowed by a tiny handful of extremely vocal cookers do nothing to mitigate. While business ignores WHS. /end