To find all this COVID chat reprisal in the news so depressing

not all of Australia had ‘masks outside’ and certainly not for extended periods.

But what we did have was a very low rate death toll compared to very many countries.

It was obvious from the coffins piling up in Italy what was going to happen. An Italian friend told me our Prime Minister was a lunatic.

I totally disagree.
I think we should have had no lockdown at all.

The children I work with are still affected by lockdown.

What do you imagine would have happened without lockdown? The NHS was pretty overwhelmed as it was. You only have to look at the statistics to see that lockdown worked.

But we weren’t working from the prepped plan. That’s the whole point.

Many people also died ‘with Covid’ and not ‘of Covid’, too. If I recall correctly, any deaths within 30 days of a positive test were classed as Covid deaths, regardless of the actual cause?

the key issue: the UK already had a plan to deal with a pandemic but it wasn’t implemented fast enough and quickly abandoned. Sweden followed a very similar one, schools largely stayed open, they were no worse off and in some stats show better. And the decision-makers broke their own rules. And yes, I think it’scimportant to rake over it because (1) “benefit of hindsight” is overly generous; and (2) “benefit of hindsight” informs a better approach to the next pandemic.

Ah no, PANDA had a very comprehensive view of what ‘clinically vulnerable’ meant - it went way beyond what you might think of ‘obvious people’ like the elderly but extended to many different groups too - all of whom would have a much higher chance of poor outcomes if they caught covid. The argument was that governments put all their resource into protecting those people (including yourself) rather than paying
22 year old otherwise healthy Gary, to stay off work (on 75% pay) for 18 months.

Obviously, they had to act on the info they had at the time but given the amount of socialising the government apparently did, it would seem to me they knew early on that for ‘average Joe’, the risks of covid were very small.

I think you did mean it.

I think you hoped everyone would agree with you.

If it had happened thirty years earlier things would have been sensibly managed without the apocalyptic horror and uselessness

What's your evidence for that? We were working from a plan that had been in place for decades and regularly updated. Lockdown is the standard protocol for pandemics, witness the fact that it happened all over the world. Thirty years earlier we would never have come up with an effective vaccine so quickly, if at all.

Sadly, I think people wouldn't now.

And that is why the fuck up by Johnson's government was so disgraceful.

They threw public trust in the bin and laughed while they did it.

This view has a very narrow definition of clinically vulnerable though.

You are thinking of a "clinically vulnerable person" being some elderly person in a home somewhere, nearly dead and doesn't really matter anyway. Which is a fucking awful way to think about a fellow human being and also completely and utterly wrong.

I'm clinically vulnerable. You can't tell by looking at me. I work, I take the kids to school, I go to the shops, as well as go to the hospital.

We walk among you 🧟‍♀️

I think if we had a pandemic like the1918 flu which hit children and young people worst, that the whole would lock down so fast and with very little argument.

Yup. And if you think back, what you are saying here is exactly why the scientists were urging people to help stop the spread.

Yep it was a Cummings campaign anyway, which worked as well if not more than his previous one.

Have you actually engaged with what's in the report? Because it doesn't just talk about the inevitable chaos that naturally arises in a situation where everyone is dealing with a new threat and nobody knows what's going on. That level of dysfunction is to be expected and can be forgiven.

However, the report details the impact of a toxic culture in Westminster, a PM who consistently failed to take the threat seriously and an abject failure to apply learning that should have been gained from the first phase of the pandemic to subsequent waves.

No they wouldn't.

Lockdown is a policy for a functioning society. It also requires a significant minority of people to be willing to work outside the home and keep the bare bones functioning. A 30% death rate, assuming you're talking about something fairly easily transmitted otherwise nobody would be that bothered about it, would mean we didn't have either of those things. It would be like something out of a zombie apocalypse.

I don't doubt that many people in those circumstances would like to be locked down, in that they'd be delighted to stay at home whilst other people ensured they were fed, watered, had access to basic services and weren't being looted. But it wouldn't be one of the options available to them.

There is an interesting discussion to be had about what sort of disease might lead to the population being willing to lock down again at some point, but there's no point using examples where society would collapse. It has to be something that scares people enough to willingly change their behaviours, but not enough for the people driving the food vans, working at the petrol stations and keeping basic utilities working to be too scared to carry on working.

What government are you talking about here?

And if you can name one specific government that caused a worldwide epidemic, why the need to test a lockdown ?

Why the need to do anything that you are suggesting ?

It wasn’t “batshittery” for the 223,000 families who lost loved ones.

I wonder how many more lost their lives not from Covid but because of Covid? All the cancer tests and treatments that were delayed. All of the essential operations that didn't take place and people died waiting. All the routine screening that didn't take place. I wonder of it was worth it?

Many many elderly folk accelerated into frailty due to lack of mental stimulation and exercise, not being able to get out and see family or have visitors, being too terrified to leave the house and so did no exercise. I think the NHS is now picking up the pieces of this and plays a major part into why we are seeing the overwhelming burden on services today. I say this as a Nurse who worked all the way through it and has been in the NHS for 30 years. I think COVID measures failed way more than just those affected by COVID.

Johnson was the boss. If you are having parties at work it is because the boss allows it encourages it.

If we didn't lock down at all then who would be running the hospitals, sewage plants, schools, food distribution, emergency services council etc? A lot of those staff would have been older, obese and have some health conditions, it would have meant expertise was at best missing in time of crisis (they'd be seriously ill) at worst they'd have been dead too.

Youngsters weren't as vulnerable but they could hardly keep services running. Johnson is a lazy shit for brains prick who should have got his act together a month sooner (feb half term) and never ever opened pubs and restaurants before schools. Cunt.

Yes it’s a bizarre enquiry which seems to deliver very little v the cost and time. Sweden seemed to do that part better too.

I agree with you and a lot of very respected epidemiologists and scientists (who made up a group called PANDA) agreed. They pushed for ‘focused protection’, locking down hospitals, care homes and offering advanced protection to people who were clinically vulnerable but otherwise, allowing Covid to take its course through otherwise healthy individuals. The biggest surge of deaths happened at the start when the government stupidly allowed Covid to run rampant through care homes when from the outset, the government’s first priority should have been protecting the most vulnerable.

The argument was that if you were to do a cost benefit analysis, the deaths and misery caused by suicides, mental health issues, the loss of businesses etc, the ‘ends did not justify the means’. Not saying I agree with all of it but back then and even today it wasn’t possible to have a rational discussion about it without (bizarrely) being labelled a bigot.

And for what it’s worth, my mum died during Covid lockdowns - not because she had Covid but because she didn’t get the treatment she needed for another condition. I also know of several people who were massively harmed by not being able to access clinics because many things were put on pause. Even nationally, children and women died at the hands of their abusers because they were trapped in homes or social services scaled back on in-person visits and kids weren’t in school so their bruises weren’t noticed in the way they might have been. So many, many consequences from this time period.

I am really sorry for every loss of life but to me, lockdowns were a very blunt instrument and probably caused more harm than not locking down. I would still argue for the PANDA proposed model - ‘focused protection’ for the most vulnerable.