Horrible cold & flu virus spreading that isn't covid - yet no restrictions?!

Death rates have been below expected levels so far this year.
Why do we need restrictions for a cold? Who is going to pay for it? Are you going to sacrifice your pension? Or do we shave a bit more off the education budget? Perhaps you think disabled people can get by on a bit less?

It can do, especially with crap weather.

When Covid first appeared it was new and as we saw had the potential to kill and maim which it did. The vaccine thankfully de-fanged it. When we had restrictions, we saw fewer infectious diseases across the board due to people not mixing as we usually do. Now things are back to the way they used to be people are of course catching all sorts of stuff again. I had some horrendous thing back in late January that lasted until the end of March, not covid as I tested negative. I think it might have been whopping cough given the symptoms I had and the fact that it was doing the rounds. There are quite a few poorly people around now but we don't need restrictions as we are not facing the unknown as we were with Covid.

Are people dying in vast numbers? No? There's your answer.

What area do you live in OP? Where has it spread?

Just wondering as there's no sign in my immediate area (massive village of 17,000+) or local town. I work in a school and shop so have lots of contact with people. In regular contact with all our local family and friends, no one has had a cold/flu bug in last months - in fact, no one has been ill.

AIBU to point this out.

Yes.

It is a fetish now isn't it. Agree. 👍

Are 100’s of people dying from this virus? …..no

theres always going to be viruses, we can’t hide away in fear of getting sick.

DS just used an old NHS test to confirm that he does indeed have Covid. Very faint line but positive so yes, they do still work. He worked through the pandemic and this is the first time he’s had it, it’s a nasty strain.

🤣

have heard that this covid "strain" is not being picked up by testing.

It’s normally called slapped cheek disease or 5th disease in humans.

It’s doing the rounds here.

Deliberately disingenuous.

It's going round here too. Awful cough and congestion, then the head clears and the cough goes on and on. Not a chest infection for most people according to our GP, just a horrible cold/flu thing going round.
I'm sick of hearing myself cough it's been weeks, Dh has it now too.
Recommended for it is Vicks, or Karol type treatments and try to cough it all up as much as you can till it passes.
Makes me wonder if it isn't another variant of covid that isn't detected by the tests they sell at the shops.

Is this a genuine post?

Lockdown is a last resort not a response to a bad cold season !

I haven’t RTFT. Could it be FLiRT?
No one tests for covid anymore so no idea if it would test positive if you had any old tests kicking around. But imagine they would be out of date anyway?

I’ve got it and it’s vile. Definitely not covid although it has floored me for over a week now. Colds and flu exist. People get them and move on it’s fine. Don’t need a lockdown for jt .

I didn’t agree with lockdowns for covid and certainly not for cold/flu

Is flu circulating widely now? In July?

But the lockdowns and restrictions were mainly to stop the hospitals from getting overwhelmed and then vulnerable people not getting the care they needed. I'm pretty sure if the hospitals looked like they were starting to see a sharp increase there may be restrictions again BUT I don't think you're anywhere near predicting that. There's always been viruses/flus etc but not usually too much for the medical staff to cope with

This is very worrying indeed, OP. The new virus seems to have shut down your capacity for critical thinking entirely. I hope that you are able to make a swift recovery.

Yes they are.

Absolutely no need for a lockdown, but that doesn't mean they weren't needed in 2020/21 as completely different situation. COVID back then was a novel virus with no immunity within the population.
I think you just have to accept you don't understand.

Here's the scientific evidence:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1131428/excess-deaths-in-england-and-wales/

Do you not see that the two events are completely different?

COVID brought medical systems all around the world to its knees, and raged through a population with no immunity to it, due to it being a completely novel virus we had absolutely no immunity to.

This on the other hand, is the flu. A virus we deal with every year, yes it'll kill a few old people, and that's sad, but it's nothing out of the ordinary, and so we don't lockdown for it.

I suspect you're being slightly ingenious, and you're trying to prove a point that lockdowns weren't needed for COVID. You might be right, but we'll never know because we don't have a time machine. In 2020 we made the best decisions we could with information we had available at the time. Some of those decisions were correct, some of them were incorrect, but it's only possible to work out which were which with the benefit of hindsight.

umm yeah scroll down and look at the spikey graph. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/weekly-all-cause-mortality-surveillance-2023-to-2024/weekly-all-cause-mortality-surveillance-week-27-report-up-to-week-23-2024-data