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

I would! I loved lock down and the vast majority of the people I know feel the same way although obviously would never wish the devastating effects of illness and death that occurred. If it wasn't for lock down, things would have been much much worse.

And some people were trying to do jobs outside the home and look after kids with no childcare so parents juggling

Good to know that six years on, Covid is still capable of getting us all riled up and at each others throats on Mumsnet.

Yes I totally ignored that one. After all we had been seeing each other on a daily basis just before lockdown started ( lived 2 mins walk apart) so I can't see how it was any riskier to continue

Some people had this experience. Many paid for not working, how nice. Others of us were trying to do our jobs from home (for the first time, so harder) AND home school our children at the same time. It was the complete opposite of lazy downtime.

So if something like Ebola or that bird flu (for which there is no cure and a pretty high death rate) became pandemic, you would not comply with lockdown?

Great.

If you had a disease with a substantially higher mortality rate amongst working age people and children that spread like Covid, I think you would be dealing with a significant societal collapse.

It isn’t a threat. It’s just an observation.

Hospitals were incredibly stretched last time with insufficient staff, equipment and medicines. People died - either of COVID or of other diseases - who would not have died if full care had been available. And that was with steps taken to minimise spread (to flatten the curve).

If everyone carried on regardless too many open would be sick at once and many more people would be denied care.

You have to be joking if you think people would comply with stuff like the 'rule of 6' that Matt Hancock literally admitted was made up on a whim (which I guessed at the time as it was ridiculous!) and then they were all found to be having parties anyway!

And do you regret having not complied now?

Other than worry about potential death and government sanctions- I loved the lockdown last time, clean and tidy flat, lots of lazy downtime, lots of running and photography. I lost lots of weight easily and was a healthy size. My work was particularly fulfilling too.

Can I ask what job/type of organisation this was and why if it’s a desk job, it couldn’t be done from home? Not being antagonistic, just curious?

I'm not who you were quoting, but I'll share my tuppence. I "didn't comply" because if I was going to be forced into attending and working in an office building without openable windows, despite working for the government, then I certainly wasn't going to be stopped going about the rest of my business. If it was THAT bad then they should have taken the necessary measures to ensure and enforce a WFH policy for those in roles that could be done remotely.

When all you heard on the news was about WFH, furlough, and essential workers guff, it all meant nothing to me. Colleagues were forced into the office despite having 'vulnerable' family members, and parents had to fight for their child to attend school because we weren't considered to be essential workers for that purpose.

Yeah, that sounds humane. Not to mention unenforceable.

New novel diseases of that level are rare. By the next time one on that level rolls around most of us who recall the lockdown won’t be here to complain about it. How many are alive who lived through the Spanish flu epidemic?

The issue is you had to either go full on shut down for a long time like NZ or let things go, knowing there would be deaths but looking at the long term picture of the country and economy. The gov did neither we were in and out of lockdown they messed about and the whole thing was a crap bonfire.

Can I ask, because I don’t know anyone in real life who didn’t comply (that I know of!), but why didn’t you comply with it? Until it personally affected you?

I’m not being a dick, I’ve just never known anyone to ask that question to.

I wouldnt comply unless it zombie apocalypse

I would comply, @Pavementworrier - despite having had my first vaccine, I ended up in hospital with Covid, and am still suffering from long covid, that has left me disabled. I wouldn’t want anything similar to happen to another person, if there were reasonable precautions what could prevent it.

I didn’t comply the first round but covid nearly killed me so yes I would comply the second round

What would happen is selfish idiots would revolt, the lockdown would be delayed until the hospitals could no longer take people and the dead were piling up in the street and then the government would be forced to act anyway. As happened here with the idiot Johnson in charge , only worse.

Some morons would need to see bodies piled up in the streets before their selfish denialism could be overridden and common sense prevail.

Then we’d have a different problem. Getting food to people in their homes and keeping the lights on.

I certainly would but then I'm not stupid.

Perhaps, but that wouldn't in itself create the conditions necessary for a lockdown to be viable. We all have to hope there's never anything most seriously affecting those groups, because the lights would be at real risk of going off.

How many of those died FROM Covid? They changed the recording metric to massively inflate the numbers.

Are you aware of how many people die in the UK per year? No one mentions those numbers.

There is, of course, another option which is that we would not in fact deal with it. Quite who you think would enforce everyone taking a turn at such roles in the event of a really serious pandemic is not immediately obvious.

And this is the point that was being made. Even if it were better to try and have a lockdown in a particular set of circumstances, that doesn't mean enough people will play along for it to happen. There's no guarantee the structural factors necessary for a lockdown would exist, even if people had a really well thought out argument that they should.

Which is one of the reasons our absent OPs premise was wrong!