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

It was a lie. The hospitals weren’t full at all, they were empty. Also, coronavirus was known. It was a deliberate fuss over nothing

Exactly @EdithBond In Northern Italy, there were reports people had to die at home, cared for by loved ones, as hospitals ran out of beds.

I had a colleague, who had gone home to see family, stuck in the family apartment in Lombardy. She was terrified. We skyped and the sound of ambulances screaming past was constant. Neighbours locked in, infectious. It was like something out of a zombie movie.

Yeh it’s really something, those posts.

I think that's right. There's so little trust now, hard to think of any individual or body who would actually be believed. That may change as time passes, but it'll be a while.

Id love it the government paid for me to stay home i got food parcels from the council and I laid in the garden all day

Lockdown wasn't necessary beyond the first one ...

The pros and cons of that will probably be argued forever, @SabrinaCarpetCleaner, but I'd say it was certaainly necessaary to maximise the money making opportunities for those calling the shots

Or have people really forgotten Hancock's infamous remark about "putting the cherry on Dido's cake" with the insensate funding for test and trace?

So even though it would be a different virus and a different government,
you would visit family members and risk infecting them and potentially killing them because the people in government didn't comply with their rules last time.

We do, but I'm not sure how that would get round something that dangerous and contagious being out in society. There's no planning going to make everyone keep turning up to work just the same in those circumstances. Just have to hope prevention works well enough for it to never get to that stage!

I broadly agree, although during the cases you cite, there was no infrastructure for people to isolate, wfh and remotely place orders for goods/services, and there were no vaccines for any of those diseases. Also personal and public sanitation, and public health communication were not so advanced. Medicine itself has improved; Bubonic Plague is still around but now 95% cases recover if caught early and treated with IV antibiotics. My guess is that COVID 19 WAS the expected pandemic, but we were just in a better position to cope than we ever have been before, thank goodness.

Id rather live my life and not be constantly worried about possibly catching something. I worked with other people during the pandemic bit be er caught COVID. However as soon as the lockdowns stopped I was diagnosed with cancer. Now no amount of hiding away can't prevent that.

I stand corrected - totalitarian state is not enough for the population these days, they want a proper fascist one.

For the record, there were lots of people who were against lockdowns, and the idea that if you refused the vaccine, you would be excluded from society, and I think that we came dangerously close to this: Austria did it, the plan was oven-baked and ready, and just needed a nod from number 10. Fortunately for some people, the government can still claim "we never made the vaccine compulsory". I haven't shopped at Tesco since they did that advert of Santa waving his vaxpass. The BBC will never tell us that there were massive marches against lockdowns. How do I know that these happened? Because I took part in them, I saw them with my own eyes. The BBC either didn't report on them at all, or said "a hundred or so conspiracy theorists gathered on Speaker's Corner".

It was not "a hundred or so" people. It was HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people, maybe even a million or more. The march was about 40 people wide, and literally miles long. And not "conspiracy theorists", but ordinary people, concerned for their children, and their futures.

But it suited the BBC and the government to tell the public that there was little or no resistance at all. Just like the Post Office told each postmaster in turn "nobody else has had this". Those in authority lie all the fucking time. I took down signs about social distancing in parks and other places, because I thought there needed to be a visible resistance.

People would comply if it was serious enough. I don’t regret complying with covid before I was vaccinated. There’s still a lot of lessons to be learned from covid but no country was prepared for a pandemic on that scale.

Yes they would.

I think people might be more likely to comply if they had confidence that those in authority were doing the same. Partygate killed any trust in the Johnson government.

A lockdown is the right thing to do when people are dying, the hospitals are overflowing and the bodies are piling up from an illness they don't know hardly anything about. It was bad but could have been worse too.

If they had done it sooner last time, there wouldn't have been so many deaths and it wouldn't have gone on for so long.

I complied last time and would again.

Oh, no, much better to slowly suffocate to death or, depending on the virus, drown in your own blood. Life is for living and all that.

Am surprised there isn’t a lockdown now tbh given how poorly everyone is! I am sure I know more pretty ill people now than they were with Covid! I’ve never felt so rough

Yes. This is why we need proper planning in place.

Lockdown wasn't necessary beyond the first one. Robust public health messaging should've been the approach. Furlough was popular though, being paid to sit at home made lockdown a much easier sell. I imagine a lot of people returning to work today would welcome a lockdown! Hopefully though, those people are having a great day at work 🙂😉

The one good thing to come out of it is that us heroic key workers who work/worked in the public sector have become much more aware of our worth, and our pay demands since and going forward demonstrate that. Comical to think government thought at one point that a round of applause and some pots being bashed would be adequate.

But it is unreasonable to presume you'd actually be able to lock down in such circumstances, since the people we all rely on to keep the lights on might not be quite so keen to come into work.

Lockdowns don't work 🤪

My god I despair.

Imagine a doctor who, when discovering that you have a bacterial infection, dithers for weeks before giving you antibiotics, thereby allowing the bacteria to multiply, then gives them in fits and starts, thereby allowing them to regrow but with new resistant strains, then finishes the course early before you're better.

When you die, the people of this country will infer, not that the doctor is incompetent and should be struck off, but that antibiotics - one of our most powerful, effective weapons against infectious disease - don't work and should never be used again.

If only there was a disease that selectively got rid of idiots.

I would comply.

Those saying they wouldn't comply I suspect may change their mind if faced with a high percentage chance of terrible illness and subsequent inevitable death upon contracting illness.

As others have pointed out: ebola.

It's not unreasonable to consider that another pandemic may involve a disease which has the same dire survival statistics as ebola, and presents in similar ways in which the body suffers before it's inevitable demise.

No thanks, but each to their own.

Isolating yourself when you or a member of your household is unwell is the sensible thing to do.

The only reason we ever needed lockdowns were because people were too stupid and selfish to actually do that, and decided to "be heroes" and go to work/school/uni etc no matter how poorly they were feeling.

Pisses me off.

There would be no need for lockdowns if people just self isolated sensibly. They would need to spend a week at most away from other people, they could even go for walks if they felt like it! It would mean that the majority of people, for the majority of the time, would be able to act as normal.

Lockdowns were sadly never supposed to eradicate illness. Only to slow down the spread to enable the country to cope with infection levels.

@christmasnamechangeforthelotofthem ,

‘How do you know I don’t work in a relevant field? 😂 the thing about science is it’s almost always subjective and there’s always a counter argument. Kind of how it works.’

That paragraph tells me you don’t work in a relevant field!

Science is definitely not subjective. The whole point of it is a method that can be objectively applied.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t alternative theories or that scientists don’t disagree. But that is why statistics is a tool of science. Papers are always qualified using confidence intervals and unknown factors are clearly laid out.

But that doesn’t in any sense make it subjective.

In the case of COVID, the SEIR model accurately predicted the rise in cases and the falls in lockdown. But, initially the confidence intervals were large. These narrowed as more became known about the virus.