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

Yes, I'm not sure the people coming out with this like a comfort blanket realise how dim they sound.

Most people are some mixture of selfish and selfless, and the ones who are totally at either extreme aren't representative. People who want restrictions to protect them/loved ones are no better or worse than people who don't want restrictions because they/their loved ones were more vulnerable to lockdown. Calling people selfish doesn't work now because too many of us switched off, and we also have more understanding that both lockdown and not locking down mean fucking over some vulnerable people. You aren't morally better, or worse, for wanting to prioritise one group over the other.

And the saddest part is that even today the morons think they were right, because they 'never got ill'

I am self-employed and didn’t get any work for six months and I wasn’t entitled to any government assistance. So you are incorrect in your assumption.
Eventually I started working online delivering training workshops. Fortunately we were mortgage-free.

I think complying all depends on the type of illness. Would I comply with Covid 2.0? Absolutely not. The detrimental impact on my child from lockdown/isolation and children like him were devastating for an illness that wasn’t a massive concern for the vast majority of the public.

Black Death? Children dropping dead? Then of course I would comply as would, I suspect, 99% of the population.

I also think that people are forgetting that the U.K. trebled its ICU capacity (not including the unused nightingales) and filled all of it in the winter of 2020/2021. We didn’t choose the second lockdown, Boris was forced into it by circumstances.

It’s very much in everyone’s interests for that not to happen because if you have an accident then you don’t really want the response to be ‘we don’t have capacity to treat you, and the contingency plan of using icu capacity in another country isn’t an option either.’

Bold to assume that either a lockdown or social visits would be possible in the event of something like ebola. Both of those things presume the basic building blocks of society would still be functioning, are you quite sure about that?

edit- I keep ballsing up the quote function!

I would happily comply as an agoraphobic with a medically vulnerable child.

We got through the last lockdown. It gave me a break from "people".

Lockdowns are not damage free. The selfish moron thing just isn’t useful. Most people complied.

If we had a full re-run of the Covid pandemic but with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, we wouldn't lockdown in the same way as we'd know more about what was effective, what wasn't and the longer-term social and economic implications.

However, if we were to be dealing with a completely new pandemic of the same magnitude but a different virus and with different impacts, then who knows? We'd have the same knowledge from the last pandemic about social and economic impacts and behavioural insights into what people would/wouldn't comply with based on Covid. And a future virus could be substantially worse than Covid - as others have said if we were dealing with something with higher mortality or predominantly impacted children then behaviours would be hugely different.

Well plenty (me included) didn’t comply the first time so why not?

absolutely blows my mind that people still believe all the lies that were told

Yep. The government moved the goalposts all the time, to keep the figures high and frightening. Similarly, I'm certain the confusion between "died of Covid" and "died with Covid" was deliberate. Didn't the number of covid deaths suddenly drop as well, when they moved the goalposts to define a covid death?

Because they tweaked things all the time, sometimes quite blatantly, this is why many of us believe that any government simply cannot be trusted with what they tell us. Lies and spin. I don't doubt the virus existed, but conveniently omitting to tell us when it was clear that it was not as bad as first thought... nobody in government had heard the story of the boy who cried wolf.

Speak for yourself! We complied because we didn’t want my vulnerable husband or our elderly parents - or anyone else’s - to die.

Sadly, as this thread shows, there are far too many selfish morons around

I disagree on this.

The reality is we locked down far too late, this then meant we were locked down for far longer and much more damage was done in the longer term. Hindsight is perhaps a great thing, but all the signs were there, our government failed to act, when other governments were playing out live lessons for the rest of the world.

But as others have said, very few I think would comply again in the way in which we all did the first time round if we had another pandemic hit, trust is far too low now, knowing all we do about those in power wo thought they were above everybody else.

A lot of people didn't comply the first time, we had neighbours throwing parties throughout, in Liverpool basically no one followed the advise, it was quite scary actually...

We are not going to have exactly the same virus with the same death rate and the same vulnerable groups next time so the question is pretty pointless. If they close schools and restaurants etc down as it did last time how are people going to not comply anyway? A few people would decide to socialize in their houses and catch the virus but they probably did that last time too.

Quite. Many people seem to have forgotten quite how frightening it was at the beginning, when we had no real notion of what we were dealing with.

The majority would comply again, I’m sure, particularly if children were at high risk.

Plenty of people would comply. It didn't bother me.

Perhaps you could all sign a statement that if you end up getting sick you agree not to receive any treatment?

If there was ever a global pandemic or war, then I would absolutely comply, like I did this time.

If people did this during the black plague then over 100 million people wouldn’t have died.

If people stayed indoors and turned their lights off during the war then less people wouldn’t have died from bombings.

I don’t understand the need to ‘fight the system’ all of the time.

The lockdowns weren’t perfect and we waited too long which is why it was dragged out. An earlier 2 week lockdown could have likely been more effective.
But hindsight is a wonderful thing and we were not prepared.
Hopefully we would be more prepared in the future.

@GertrudePerkinsPaperyThing would you still visit friends if it was Ebola or similar or had a high death rate in children? Would you wait until it was known how deadly the virus was before breaking lockdown rules or break them and then possibly find out the hard way how deadly it was?

I disagree ‘no one’ would comply. At the end of the day, when people see others dying or severely ill around them, they will want to preserve their life. The survival instinct is very strong

This is true, and if countless people dying and/or kids severely affected was required to ensure compliance another time then this is what would be claimed, with social media left to do the rest

Given how comprehensively we were lied to last time you'd think more would have learned to treat such claims with caution, but with some it simply isn't the case

@Dolphinnoises I don't know how to phrase this without sounding sarcastic but I'm genuinely interested - does deforestation have an impact on pandemics ? (I understand obviously how global travel does). Or is it just a factor illustrating that the world changes beyond what we can imagine in advance?

So what you are saying is that restricting freedom didn't, in fact, appear to help things very much? That is one reasonable conjecture from the death rate (though of course we will never know why that high death rate was the case).

But for god's sake! "Still banging on about freedom"? We should not be willing to give up our fundamental freedoms without clear evidence (i) that it is necessary; and (ii) that there is no other suitable alternative. You seem to think that "freedom" as you term it is a "nice to have"; you are wrong. You may not be wrong about lockdown, or anything else, but you are so unbelievably wrong about that, that it is truly depressing. Lockdown to prevent a general election? (It's not likely but it's at least theoretically possible). "Digital" lockdown to silence a certain part of the population? Lockdown to prevent people meeting and discussing political ideas, organising political movements? Lockdown that prevents you having any form of family life? Lockdown isolating people from their religious communities? These are all fundamental freedoms protected by the ECHR. Now, they are qualified rights, so can be infringed upon if such infringement is both necessary and proportionate. All a lot of people are saying is, was it both necessary and proportionate, particularly for the length of time it went on; and what information should the public have in order to understand whether it is necessary or proportionate? It's not that we do it, it's how we scrutinise what we are doing.

Your post stinks of a "chicken licken/little" attitude.

When I say not comply, I meant we’d all keep seeing local friends and family if we wanted to.