To ask what we SHOULD have done during the COVID pandemic

Many school staff fell within the vulnerable criteria or have family who lived with them who fell within the vulnerable criteria. If schools stayed fully open what were schools meant to do with limited staff?

Schools should never have closed. Old people and anyone vulnerable should have been told to stay at home and the rest of should have been able to get on with it.
The rules like only being able to be 5km from your house or only 5 people from the one family in a house and all that shite was ridiculous. Another one was you could only eat in a restaurant if the food was €9.
Having your temp taking going into a gig..the list of crap we went along with is endless.
A major gripe for me was at Christmas when the pubs opened but kids still couldn’t go to school or see their friends. That actually upset me.

Same. I knew that closing the schools was a bad decision. Plus, deeply resented all my friends being on a furlough and bragging about it. I wasn't furloughed as self employed. Still all of us , our children and possibly grand children will now have to pay in taxes to cover that black hole of deficit. Awful government decision. Should only have sheltered - sick, old and vulnerable.

What's with the emoji?

Why are you confused?

I thought that might be a joke? Hard to tell on the Internet sometimes!

Well of course he would confirm it

Seriously? You'd like to live in permanent hard lockdown? Where does your income come from?

But there weren't any tests in Feb/Mar 2020! This is a classic example of hindsight and forgetting what it was actually like at that time. It was a brand new virus, THERE WERE NO TESTS FOR IT TO START WITH!!

So yes, ideally, ever border would've been firmly policed with temperature scanners and Covid testing booths, etc. But airports weren't set up for that until much later on.

They put infected people into care homes

They gave PPE contracts to their mates

Thats two HUGE mistakes

The problem with cold classrooms was, in my DSS’s experience, that they were not allowed to wear coats. Layering with thermals under their uniform worked to a point but scarves, hats and fingerless gloves weren’t allowed. For the children, of course. The staff wore whatever they wanted.

Blimey. I didn’t know the publishing the names bit.

Are you suggesting that the UK’s approach was the best it could have been under the circumstances?

@needhelpwiththisplease
You're right that there were things where adults could do more than children, was totally unbalanced. Only children having no chance to socialise with other children springs to mind.

But the very basic human need of being able to be with other humans, in person, was denied to some adults for far, far too long. It just seems next level, hard to put into words. No hunkering down with loved ones, as you are separated from them all. Just horrific.

ETA: When you strip away all the frills, the most important things in life are love and relationships. Being able to do solitary hobbies is hardly compensation for having them taken away.

@NeighSayers I'm not saying that it wasn't hard on adults but they could do a hell of a lot more than a child

Adults living alone couldn't go within 2m of another human for almost 3 months.
That's huge.
Even solitary confinement in jails is less severe.
That should never have happened.

You have to mix social issues with covid though. That's what determines your response. We spent the second half of the pandemic living in a middle income country where the government response was to let it rip; they didn't have any social structures in place for supporting any sort of isolation, incredibly high levels of poverty and low trust in government. People would have starved to death.

The result was an incredibly brutal 3 or 4 weeks (albeit with a young population and a culture that is outside a lot) and then everything went back more or less to normal, and they got vaccines. No one tested because it was expensive. I'm not sure what was worse, but I've never, for example, heard people from that country talk about long term impacts on children's education.

It was very interesting to compare the two countries and people's personal reaction to it. Of course your pandemic response takes into account social factors like demographics and poverty. If you've got no social support system you can't furlough people for a start.

I’ve never said I wanted to close borders, so I don’t need any experience. I said it is self evidently wise not to let thousands of active cases enter the country with no trace or regulation or quarantine.

I'll answer after this is answered

What is your experience and where does your certainty come from that you dismiss Chris Whitty's confirmation that it was not feasible to use quarantine and close borders as Aus and NZ did?

Why do you think thousands of people with covid entering the country didn’t mean thousands more cases in the country? Even if none of them passed it to a single person…

Look at how controlled Melbourne quarantine was and how many days in lockdown they had due to single cases causing spread.

Why do you think Chris Whitty can get this wrong when he says it wasn't feasible?

Lorry deliveries don’t involve mixing in high density population areas. Delivery drivers are much more controllable

Sure, but in an either/or situation i feel sure what would b have been chosen

@TheKeatingFive they were but there were many complaints about cold classrooms

You can't debate that in isolation though.

A high mortality pandemic would not simply come down to compliance or non-compliance. You would have to factor in how people would behave when they had no heat, light, food, water - as essential services would not just keep running as normal in these kind of conditions.

Yep. And my answer is, some of them probably would and some not, and we'd face big new issues with people even believing official information about death rates, who was at risk etc. There were elements of that last time, but it'd be higher now. Can't see levels of trust getting that high again for a good long while.

And, to be clear, my hypothetical was really just: "would people be more compliant and less blasé if they knew the threat was definitely greater to their own mortality (or their children's)".