To ask what we SHOULD have done during the COVID pandemic

The amount of children who died as a result of abuse from parents, stepparetnts, care givers was despicable and many of those children were known to social services.
Abusers would use covid as an excuse to not allow social workers in the home to check on the children.
Domestic violence cases went through the roof and more women died at the hands of their abusers.
I'm not sure what the rise in child sexual abuse was but I imagine significant.
Ultimately we locked victims in with their abusers and that to me should never ever happen again.

I think covid was very tough to navigate because it was unknown and people, healthy young people died due to covid so I do think there needed to be a shield of protection for the elderly and vulnerable. But it was catastrophic in the way it was handled. Instead of politicians trying to help their pals profit, money should have been used wisely and advice from people who had some answers taken.

I think any child known to social services, even prehistoric cases should have had to have attended school as a bare minimum but I'd have had the schools opened and only vulnerable students or those with vulnerable parents battling illness or themselves really vulnerable should have had been allowed to home school.

Everyone I know secretly agrees with me on this.

Rate the sacrifices of the young as much as the rights of the aged and dying.

Schools stay open, children not sacrificed on the altar of the old.

Why? We don’t have the right to ruin children’s health and education to - possibly - prolong the existence of invalids who’ve already had a find old life.

Our Govs (possibly not this one) are at the mercy of any screaming tabloid headlin. Eg care homes not being protected - but residents not being allowed visitors, the same thing in hospitals, was a shocking thing but it came about when headlines claiming that residents were being put at risk by hospital admissions and the gov didn’t care about the elderly.
the same with threats about businesses going to the wall which resulted in money being thrown at them and crazy rules for eating out.
In the end schoolchildren suffered. They don’t have a voice when it comes to headlines.

1)I think there should have been UK wide rules. It was crazy that Scotland/England /wales/ni were all trying to be the 'best' at responding. Whilst health is devolved, I think there needs to be a clause for crisis moments.
2) Boris clearly never wanted all the restrictions, as heard in his comments about the elderly and his manner by partying. He should have stuck to his guns and led by what he truly believed.
3) overall I think saving a minority of the population has not been worth the long term impact on kids and the economy. Although I realise this comes across as heartless.
4) we had the opportunity to behave like new Zealand as an island and shut borders from Feb 2020. Just before the lockdown a family member was hanging out with delegates from china.

So, I think there should have been provision for the vulnerable but essentially the rest of us should have got on with it. My friend was living in Sweden at the time and the difference was huge!

The bubbles was a nonsense though. Not allowed to mix during the day but if you had a sibling in a different bubble, and most of our children did, then off you go and get into a car with them. Or in the case of secondary schools, all get on the bus together. Even in school - everyone is using the same toilets as kids from other bubbles so how does that even work? There wasn’t a TA in each class (not enough adults for that) so if a child wets themselves you get pulled from one bubble into another to sort them out. Bubbles were done because it looked like the govt were doing something but they were utterly pointless.

When Covid got into our school it ripped through every single bubble despite complicated, annoying, time consuming and ultimately pointless precautions at school. Because children weren’t in the bubbles once they got home.

I think schools did need to close initially while people figured out what was happening. Maybe a few weeks. Remember st the start they had no idea what was happening or what might happen- all they had was the images from Italy of people dying and hospitals overflowing. Schools could have opened after the May half term for example, once they’d had time to properly assess it. But we need to be realistic- whatever they said about increasing safety measures, it actually doesn’t work in reality.
So we needed (need?) to be clear that if schools were open they were open as normal. Not ‘schools can open with increased safety measures.’ There aren’t practical increased safety measures that really make a difference, certainly in primary.

All the advice (whether to stay at home totally, wfh, rule of six, social distancing, mask wearing etc ) should have been advice rather than crossing the line into compulsion. That would have allowed people to make their own judgments of risk for their own health.

I agree totally it was cackhanded bollocks, but the virus was already here by then, and there were no real checks possible at that time, so there was no point.

The government didn’t know what we were facing. They didn’t know what percentage of people would die, they didn’t know how it was transmitted at first, and they didn’t know which groups of people would be most likely to die. We could have been facing a second or third virus mutation that was many times more deadly and where children were the most vulnerable.
For me, the government were not strict enough at first and then too strict later when more facts were known.
I know so many people who are told their malaise/ disabling symptoms are caused by ‘long covid’. We don’t know the real toll of this virus or the vaccines.
Lastly, I think we got off lightly. At some point a Spanish flu or Ebola type virus ( accidental or deliberate) will sweep the globe and take out large numbers of us. Hopefully we have learned something from COVID and that something is NOT to downplay the risk.

Not sent covid patients to nursing homes. Provided adequate PPE. Told elderly and vulnerable to Isolate and supported them to do so with bubbles and home deliveries etc. Taken the risk more seriously in the beginning. Had actual grown ups in charge.

Yes I think this was a mistake though. Idiots are always going to idiot; persuasion and explaining is better than forcing and banning. But Johnson was a complacent fool who saw us all as the little people.

For me this is definitely right at the top of the list. I recall Chris Whitty in one of the very early press conferences saying, “firstly the great majority of people who get this virus, irrespective of age, will recover from it and most will have a mild or moderate illness that won’t require hospitalisation.”

As someone has already mentioned things like the “tiers,” especially when you have/had so many people travelling in and out of them every day for work etc. This is especially so when the areas in question are actually quite small.

Wales introduced “local” lockdowns from September 2020. I think an example from that time illustrates the stupidity of many of the restrictions. Everyone remember how garden centres were open for most, if not all of the time? I met a friend at a garden centre that’s only just within the boundary of one city. In fact the welcome road sign for the neighburing city is a few feet away from the garden centre. My friend lives 4 miles up the road from the garden centre in the neighbouring city. We were going to have a coffee in the garden centre’s coffee shop after looking around and buying a few bits. However, we couldn’t because my friend’s postcode was for the neighbouring city. As a reminder she lives 4 miles away. I came from 16 miles away but my postcode was in the city this garden centre is technically in. If I’d have been on my own I could have gone in. The poor member of staff was so apologetic and said they were actually turning more people away than they could allow in.
End result was I went back to my friend’s house for a coffee. I have no regrets for doing so either.

MP's only taking 80% of their salaries, to share the pain they inflicted on the rest of us. Then we might have felt a bit more than we were "all in it together".

Mindless sheep obeying the rules set by the government!!! Ok to vomit theft or murder then! I know a huge amount of people who didn't "obey" the rules,my neighbours had a birthday party in lockdown. Local barbers were open, doing hair in the back yard. Both my DD were in retail, one, one of the big supermarkets the other a large well known toy store. I was shocked at the number of people not wearing masks, when they were mandatory. I looked after my dgks while my DD worked, obeying all the rules, I stayed outside,or downstairs, with the door open.I worked for the NHS, nursing for many years, I saw colleagues seriously ill with Covid, older folk withering away after spending 2/3 years isolated. Was very shocked to meet the new local vicar,who told me Covid didn't exist! I'm not sure anything different could it would have helped, maybe more people would have died, maybe less. I was always very careful, I have done barrier, reverse barrier, isolation,seen the virus and bacteria under the microscope, but 5 jabs in and last September, caught COVID,no underlying health issues and was ill for 2 months. Ended up under lots of different consultants, completely deaf in one ear, and still waiting on seeing a consultant.

That’s not a question to fling out there unless you’ve got some evidence?

Would you really base an important decision, like a vaccination on some vague notion you might have read somewhere about diabetes or Glandular Fever?

and yet you people are calling the rest of us mindless sheri.. right?

See, this is what I mean. You have given this no thought whatsoever, have you?

Young people live with the old and vulnerable. The old and vulnerable need the young and fit to care for them.

Or were you proposing that anyone old and vulnerable should have been locked away to fend for themselves?

Not locked up parks and removed swings that have not been replaced since.

We needed a government that took serious things seriously.

It was a mess.

It was cackhanded bollocks from start to finish. We are an island. We should have looked across at Italy, seen what was heading our way and closed our borders. Locking the entire country down and leaving the airports open with virtually no checks on anyone coming through was nuts. Boris Johnson and his band of merry idiots chose the worst of all worlds with every decision they made.

I was in Ireland for part of it and you had to stay within 2km of your address and the Irish police were actually enforcing it and stopping people on the roads. You also couldn't buy clothing and the police were also in supermarkets guarding the clothing sections 🤣 the Irish government went absolutely batty altogether. Had I been in charge then I definitely wouldn't have gone quite that far.

Can’t help thinking that rules had to be more stringent to make up for these ‘enlightened’ individuals who were bent on breaking them 🙄

To answer your question, OP, the government should not have spent all that money on buying fake PPE from their mates. They should have spent our money on upping UK PPE manufacturing capacity for proper FFP2 and 3 respirators for healthcare staff, and on making/buying surgical masks and recommending their use over fabric face coverings.

Probably with hindsight the (effective) masks should have been recommended and promoted, not mandated, so the people who couldn’t wear them were not vilified and the people with no scientific understanding and/or the desire to “stick it to the man” could crack on and be goats if they wished, while the rest of us were somewhat better protected.

Instead of throwing money at their pals who wanted to have a go at making ventilators, they should have funded actual ventilator manufacturers to manufacture actual useable ventilators. They could also have spent some money on fitting schools and hospitals with HEPA filtered ventilation to reduce the concentration of virus particles in essential and crowded places, or at least have developed some guidance.

They should not have lied and made stuff up about the law. There was never a limit on the length of time that could be spent outdoors.

They should have “followed the science” instead of just saying they were following the science, and should have explained as soon as it became obvious (April 2020, if not earlier) that COVID is airborne and handwashing, though important, is a poor control measure.

There should have been no vaccine mandate, just a programme of encouragement.

Just for starters.

Hasn’t there been a rise in Type 1 diabetes in children due to virus triggering that?

Long COVID is an issue, and yes people can get long term impact from other viruses eg glandular fever but I don’t remember everyone getting glandular fever in a class and multiple times

That's an impossible question to answer now . Hide sight is amazing. I do think the schools should have stayed open but at the time no knew anything about covid and it was deadly according to at the time reports.

@Overpayment so say young mum was medically vulnerable so she stayed home. What about husband and children, they carried on as normal?

It's very difficult to say.

At the beginning it was killing high hundreds of people every week and we didn't know for a long time how dangerous it was

The other thing is if we'd kept schools open more teachers and children would have died as there was no resistance to it

My DH was not vulnerable (head teacher) THEN (ran 40 miles a week and was super fit) but very unfortunately is now with long covid and had his childhood asthma back since he caught COVID (2 months before the vaccine).

There's a likelihood that if all the schools had been in at the beginning a lot more children and adults would have died due to the high viral load

That doesn't happen now since the virus has mutated and so many are vaccinated

I'm not prepared to have lost more children to this (nor my lovely DH)

We literally didn't know WHO was vulnerable then, we do now

But we still lost children who had undiagnosed conditions, and some who had minor conditions, and some very sadly where it was just bad luck