To ask what we SHOULD have done during the COVID pandemic

There was no option available that didn't involve people dying unnecessarily. The only thing we got to do was choose which deaths we preferred.

@taxguru I was being sarcastic. You need international agreements to "make pay" an entire country for things like causing a pandemic. Without it I do not see how they can do it. Who do they pay to? Every single country that had dead and disabled by LC and economic damage?

You would need a way first to agree how and what happened? Man-made or natural source? If natural you could argue it could be classed as an "act of God" ie unfortunate but could have happened anywhere. MPox, Ebola, Bird flu are scratching at the doors.

Something like an internationally recognised court would be needed to establish first how and what happened? Then you need to internationally agree what reparations should look like? Impossible. Look at the infected blood or post office scandals. Victims still not had compensation decades on. If a country cannot manage to compensate its own citizens how do you make an entire country, that is by the way a super power, like China pay? It is an utterly simplistic and naive suggestion.

Again, 10000 beds would have helped.
Letting Covid rip would not. What do you think would have happened to other healthcare with more covid patients in hospitals?

Depends on the "damage" caused by trying to protect.

Your car tyre example is a good one actually. What if trying to avoid a pot hole to save a tyre, you crash into a lorry and write off the car? You can't just look at one side of the "equation", you have to look at other potential consequences too.

Re the NHS, what about all the people who got their treatments delayed, many of whom will have suffered, some will have died, many will have lost their jobs or incomes due to protracted delays in diagnosis and treatment.

Nice idea in theory for the NHS to virtually close down for anything other than Covid, but in reality, lots of hospitals weren't badly affected, and could have carried on doing a lot more routine work, operations and treatments than they did.

Also a dangerous precedent. What happens if we'd done that but the next pandemic was caused in the UK? We'd be completely bankrupted for ever more if we'd had to pay compo for everyone else in the World. Likewise any other smaller country besides the USA or China. Just because it was China and they "could" afford reparations, doesn't mean we should have different rules for them. Such rules and compo obligations need to be based on cause and negligence, never on how much money one party is perceived to be able to afford!

In a situation where not protecting it means many more dead, don’t you think it’s a good idea to protect it?
I mean, I don’t exist to protect my car tyres either, but I tend to avoid potholes and broken glass anyway…

You would prefer people to die unnecessarily?
Wow.

Of course it would gave helped to have had the extra beds the Tories refused
Covid inquiry told Treasury blocked NHS bed request https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gpwz3qyr0o

OldJohn
Perhaps not what we SHOULD have done during the COVID pandemic but now we should be forcing China to pay the full cost of the pandemic. It started there and they failed to contain it. They have a huge economy and so should pay for this. It seems that it was either produced in a laboratory or spread due to poor hygiene at a market. In either case make them pay"

This kind of idea makes a great Daily Mail headline to sell copies but practically impossible to do. As they say "nice idea, in theory".

Unfortunately, yes. What we did was far worse.

@taxguru vaccines need something like 85-95% of the population inoculated to reach "herd immunity" stage and be effective in halting infections like polio. Sadly as we later found out, with Covid mutating so fast it escapes herd immunity. Our only chance was to hope for the virus to mutate into a less deadly form and to keep inoculating the most vulnerable groups every time a new variant took hold.

This is true, the NHS is not an end in itself, it's only there to help us. Whether the NHS was overwhelmed or not isn't really the issue. The issue is the number of deaths that would have resulted and whether preventing them was worth the costs and other consequences of doing so.

Because people modified their behaviour. We have seen the pictures in Italy. We got scared. Look at the carnage Covid did in South America like Brazil where Bolsonaro was a Covid denier. That was a true Darwinian experiment. Dead bodies decomposing at home for days where they died because there was no help in hospitals and morgues were full to capacity and there was nowhere to put the dead bodies.

We should have done what New Zealand did

We don't exist to "protect the NHS".

Infection rates were already falling before the lockdowns. People were already starting to moderate their behaviour, avoid large gatherings, avoid cramped indoor spaces, etc., just from watching the news and seeing what was happening in other countries.

It was the height of stupidity to still have lockdowns when infection rates and death rates fell to very low levels, and to come out of lockdowns so slowly. It was as if they were trying to eliminate covid by long unnecessary lockdowns, which was pointless when we still had open borders, and lots of places/people that had to remain open couldn't social distance!

Not all hospitals were "struggling". Some were, but lots were pretty quiet as they'd also stopped lots of other treatments/services, so some were basically ghost towns with tumbleweed blowing down their corridors, as they, too over-reacted and cancelled virtually everything which turned out to be an unnecessary over-reaction, and again, far too slow to start re-opening once it was obvious they weren't being over-run.

And if Covid had been allowed to go unchecked almost the public moving about, where would the additional patients gone for treatment? The hospitals were already struggling during lockdown.

But even then, people were arguing that "essential" food was only basics and that takeaways, cafes, burger vans, etc should have stayed closed as "hot food" wasn't essential as people could make their own at home!

I do remember those discussions on social media. Very ignorant and privileged. The reality is that some people do rely on food that has been prepared by someone else for their nourishment. And these people are disproportionately likely to be vulnerable in some other way: chaotic, MH issues etc. I was very glad takeaways were allowed to stay open.

It is a horribly complex dilemma, but my sense looking back is that we put too much value on the lives of sick and elderly people at that time at the expense of the economy and the lives of future generations. The policy seemed to be dominated by epidemiology without much thought to economics and inter-generational ethics.

People should have been able to make their own decision r.e. their health. If you're at risk, you stay at home, double mask and take all these extra precautions.

You would prefer allowing people to die because there aren’t enough ICU beds/ventilators? That seems more of an imposition on freedom to me…

I find the idea of imposing on peoples freedom as a tool to manage NHS capacity a highly offensive proposition.

Some restrictions were too strict, but at the same time it did slow the rate of infection down which helped the hospitals a bit. Just before it exploded here there were stories in Italy of being complete overwhelmed with too many patients. I don't think things got quite as bad here.

Of course it isn’t easy. Nobody ever suggested it was.

Problem is who decides on what is "essential"?

Will the government properly support ALL businesses and self employment in the future if they, again, stop them from working and earning a living? How can the country afford it?

Can the entertainment and hospitality industries afford to be banned from operating again? It's easy to say pubs, fairgrounds, restaurants, etc aren't "essential", but they are to the staff working in them and their owners.

You're also back to the stupidity of supermarkets being forced to block off aisles of non food items as they were "non essential" yet otherwise fully open for food etc which is essential.

But even then, people were arguing that "essential" food was only basics and that takeaways, cafes, burger vans, etc should have stayed closed as "hot food" wasn't essential as people could make their own at home!

So you see, even the word "essential" has very different meanings for different people. Nothing is easy!

I worked in person a fair bit. I get it. Even more reason to reduce non-essential contact to keep numbers low.

Edit: and once the vaccine was available, the numbers didn’t go up again at the same speed. Even before that, they went up from a lower base after a lockdown. I still think travel was handled badly.