To be depressed that lockdown would happen again tomorrow if there was another new disease

Well, I agree that the way our country, specifically, did lockdown was very harmful.
The countries which took decisive prompt action actually fared better on both mortality and economic indices. EG countries like New Zealand and South Korea. If we had taken similar action, we could have saved £billions but instead we had to deal with Boris's drawn out half-arsed shambolic approach which was exactly the worst of all the possible worlds.

I think our best chance of relying less on lockdowns would come from ordinary people really understanding how a new Disease X might be transmitted, and being willing initially to assume it might be transmitted in several different ways (until it becomes clear which are the main ones). If we then adjust our behaviour accordingly and voluntarily, in the early stages, then there would be a chance that transmission could be slowed anyway with less rigid measures.

The trouble with covid is that, at the time, lots of people argued against lockdowns not on the basis that the virus needed action but there were better ways, but by claiming it needed no action at all. As a result, as a population, we're not that much more educated than we were before the pandemic when it comes to how to prevent airborne transmission in our homes - other than by excluding people from those homes via lockdown rules. This makes us much less well prepared for the next pandemic than we might be otherwise.

I don’t disagree with you particularly but I find that enquiry statement odd. Melbourne quarantined everyone who entered with strict protocol and still they had nearly the longest lockdowns.

Perhaps when they make conclusions like that looking at how Covid spread in other countries would be useful.

I guess they may have been talking theoretically? Like if a country were to invest more heavily in those measures than any do at the moment. My main point was that lockdowns are often necessary and usually effective if done right. Do we have a disagreement here I'm not sure.

But your argument against the idea that people would lock down again for a worse disease is... that they would so terrified they'd all be indoors anyway, but this time including all the key workers. So, a de facto lockdown.

Or are you saying that people wouldn't follow a lockdown because they'd need to do some post-apocalyptic looting? If so then of course that could happen, but it's not really the sort of non-compliance during covid that some people are proud of and some would feel ashamed of.

People wouldn't just ignore the need to reduce contact with other people and just all mix - they'd be terrified to mix with other people and yet be forced to risk it for food. It would be nothing like the type of socialising non-compliance some people boast of here, and there's no reason to think that the people who say they wouldn't do that, actually would.

If a highly contagious Disease X took hold and had a mortality rate of even 30% rampaging through the population people may have a different view. 1 in 3 dying from infection would be really scary and to not put to finer point on it there would be a society break down and under those circumstances we will have either civil disorder or military control.

Too many people are assuming another outbreak will be another Covid. That’s a dangerous assumption.

I think some people have invented an alternative narrative for what happened in COVID and honestly believe that that packed wards and ICU units with one nurse per two beds (or worse) were made-for-tv government propaganda films and real hospitals were empty.

Ot they forget that we actually had an oxygen crisis despite lockdown, and several hospitals lowered their SAT levels for supportive oxygen from 92% to 88% to avoid running out.

And, don’t forget, the very high survival rates of younger people often depended on basic supportive hospital therapy. Who knows how many 40 and 60 year olds would have died without hospital access. And don’t forget, the second lockdown was in winter, with bronchiolitis circulating, so babies were also competing for oxygen and ventilation.

COVID was, and is, a strange illness. For some it is ‘just a cold’, others get really ill. And I myself have had both versions, with one infection raising my resting heart rate for months afterwards.

You will never manage novel viruses of any severity at all without some form of contact reduction. How severe that is will depend on the infectivity, morbidity and medical resources available (in the UK, we don’t have many).

Hopefully we won’t see another pandemic in my lifetime. And, hopefully, when the next one comes, vaccines will be available within weeks.

They could have been avoided? Not even Melbourne and Auckland avoided them through quarantine.

Perhaps Sweden method would have been better idk but I do know you need more than quarantine to stop the spread. See above cities

Yes, there needs to be balance, but 'hysterical'? Give me a break. It's not hysterical to challenge a perspective one considers selfish.

If the next pandemic is another respiratory virus that mostly kills the old and vulnerable, I cannot see any country choosing to follow the total lockdown model again after all the issues the last one created; instead there’ll be a focus on shielding the vulnerable.

But if it’s a haemorrhagic fever that kills 50% of infected people within days or that particularly affects children and young people, with no cure and only supportive treatment, there will absolutely be another lockdown and we’ll all be at home, locking ourselves away and complying e.g. a mutated strain of Ebola that has become more transmissible.

The enquiry says that the government did too little too late and that lockdowns could have been avoided if they'd taken other measures promptly, such as track and trace and quarantine. I agree with both of those points and neither of them suggest that lockdowns don't work, or that they aren't necessarily when those initial measures don't happen.

There are analogies between lockdowns and pharmacological interventions such as antibiotics. For example, both have side effects and you don't want to use them unnecessarily if you can avoid it. But they are nevertheless sometimes necessary, and are effective provided that they are administered promptly and competently.

They did not have any official instructions to stay at home. They did not shut bars or schools. They did social distance and the Scandivavians, Finnish in particular, are good at that.

Their excellent health systems might account 100% for the fact that they had one of the lesser death rates in Europe, but I doubt it.

And they have avoided the rest of the problems that are troubling other countries still. Who knows what we might have spent on the NHS if we hadn't spent it on furlough and reduced income tax. Who knows what we could spend on it now if our National debt wasn't already sky high.

No They would expect the child free to take the hit

Is it not the case that because there was so much covid, a large number of death certificates necessarily mentioned it as one of the things people had at the time of their death, even if it wasn't necessarily the single cause of death? I seem to remember some people who were doctors or coroners or registrars at the time explaining that that's standard practice, not a plot.

We're all familiar now with the fact that people with serious comorbidities were more vulnerable to covid - surely you'd therefore expect covid to be listed as a contributing factor, even if they had severe other conditions that meant they would be dying soon anyway. They can't be both more vulnerable to covid killing them because of their other conditions, and simultaneously so unaffected by it that it shouldn't be mentioned on their death certificates even when it's there.

If there were a pandemic that was only really serious for the <18s, such a substantial part of the workforce has dependent children that the impact would be overwhelming, even if you had a % of the population who didn’t care

Exactly. The same ppl who are denigrated on here for living in social housing expected to risk their lives Get to fuck

When looking at Sweden don't you have to compare to other similar countries, with similar demographics, lifestyle etc ie their close neighbours who had better death rates than Sweden. Sweden also treated their elderly in care homes woefully just like we did and high death rates in them.

Very true.

You can really tell which posters have reflected on that, and which haven't. We are lucky that we never had a situation where basic services were threatened because enough people kept coming into work throughout, and that we didn't get close to a breakdown in law and order either. These things meant that millions of people actually had the option to lock down.

Some people realise that this stability can't be guaranteed in a future pandemic. Others, the ones who keep popping up telling people they'd definitely lock down if they had a 50% chance of dying or whatever, clearly do not. There's no iron law that says you're going to stay fed during the next pandemic!

It’s odd though as one suggestion from the enquiry has been that lockdown could have been avoided. What did they envisage to do that

This has been debunked. To analyse the effects of lockdown you can't just compare Sweden with other countries because the mortality rate is multifactorial. Sweden has a excellent health system and starting population health, for example. If you compare Sweden with it's similar neighbours however, it's mortality rate was much higher.

More generally, academic research has shown that lockdowns do significantly reduce mortality, but they have to be done correctly - i.e. immediately, consistently and strictly.

That doesn't surprise me. Although the WFH thing is just an excuse, it's really just a staffing issue. Those in the call centres, and HMRC are particularly bad for it, are really heavily monitored. There are teams of people whose job it is to monitor things like break times and report on it. It's like a bad parody of the worst traits of call centres, but they are real.

What the pp is correct though, for the majority it’s mild. She didn’t say everyone. The CMO said similarly at the start.

I don’t think the pp was suggesting gatekeeping, just natural consequences?

I agree. Especially the child free who are last in line for everything.

I'm very sorry that your husband had to go through what he did. And I'm very grateful for all that frontline medics did for people back then.

But the fact remains that for the vast majority people under 50 years old and the majority of people under 75, Covid was not life threatening.

Sheer numbers overwhelmed the health service but even Delta, which was really bad and I caught it, wasn't life threatening for a fit and healthy person. The bigger problem was how infectious it was, which we can thank skilled Chinese bioengineering for, not how deadly it was.

Needless to say that my heart goes out to anyone who lost a loved one or who has been left with post viral complications.