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

Oh yeah I think the people making a big show of it were probably a pretty small percentage. Most people were just quietly participating in illegal childcare swaps, having parties in their houses with people they trusted, meeting in parks with a plan to scarper if the police turned up etc. Honestly I can't think of a single person I know who trumpeted it, though I was surprised by the number of people putting photos of obviously illegal stuff on social media!

Yes.
I would definitely be able to stomach a pandemic as you mentioned.
Again, SPEAKING FOR MYSELF AND MY LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES.
To be perfectly brutal, since my remaining (abusive) elderly parent lives in another country, let's make it worldwide.

There was one woman in my street who made a big deal out of not complying. She's a total lunatic and illegal dog breeder though.

For the people saying obviously everyone would comply, out of interest were you around much visible non-compliance last time? I very much was, but I've had the impression that thanks to the MN demographics a lot of posters here had a different experience.

People would obviously comply. The people on here saying they wouldn't are very much giving Nigel Farage vibes.

My kids came out of lockdown/the pandemic fine. Mental health unscathed. My son was about to start secondary school, so it was less than ideal, but it wasn't great for anyone. We did what was best at the time. I personally don't think it's a great idea just to let our older and more vulnerable population die if there's another pandemic, so if the advice from the scientific community who know best is to lock down, then I will go along with that.

People in this country are queuing in car parks as we speak. Just in ambulances rather than cars.

We now know the social effects of lockdown - particularly the effects on children's education and mental health - and so I don't think any government would go for a lockdown again. I also think compliance if they did would be very low.

There's enough data now to compare the effects of the different approaches various countries took, and IIRC Sweden didn't lock down but asked its population to observe social distancing, and they have fared better than most on the social effects I think.

To be perfectly brutal, I think the UK would stomach another pandemic that killed the old and the sick, but left the young largely untouched. Should another pandemic kill the young, then maybe lockdowns would be brought in and people would comply.

That's definitely not what I'm saying.

Some things

1. so you would rather ?

A) spread the disease to the vulnerable
B) become ill and put a strain on the healthcare system

2 children who are long term effected by Covid speaks volumes about parents not doing enough at home. Parents should have been able to maintain schooling and socialisation at home. I understand some might feel uncomfortable in social settings but at this point that shouldn’t be the case.

All the kids in my family came out of it fine. And before you say “oh you’re probably all teachers and have a high level of education” I was raised by two Working class people (one of which has no GCSEs, one is a tradie - and my nan left school at 14 to run away for a better life). I was chronically ill as a child so I barely went to school. I was often bedridden, barely saw other children and now I’m a social butterfly with an ungraded degree, doing a masters, and starting a PhD in the fall if things go to plan. I was also part of the Covid gen who missed GCSEs.

3 children being behind saved thousands of lives. I think that’s worth it.

4 it most likely won’t happen again in our lifetime. And if it does, it will be much more smooth. “To be depressed” oh god take a breath it’s not the end of the world. You’ll sit at home for three months

5 only thing to be depressed about is the economy post Covid. That’s actually sickening

I said disagree that ‘no one’ would comply. Some didn’t comply last time, some wouldn’t next time. It’s a dominant behaviour, not a universal rule.

Speaking as a member of said laptop class, albeit in a family where most aren't, I think the exact opposite. In my experience, the belief that lockdown could just happen and of course the Aldi workforce would continue to turn up however tough things got tends to be held by people who've never been in that seat.

But neither is normal life going to happen, which is what most complainers want to happen instead of lockdown.

Look, being a Tesco lorry driver is a VOCATION and the thrill of feeding people who are lucky enough to be able to keep themselves safe will DEFINITELY be enough persuasion for the peasant class.

Because if this weren't true, maybe I wouldn't be able to be get my three meals a day, and surely they couldn't possibly be that SELFISH.

They’re not in charge. They advise the gov who takes the virus into account but also social and financial costs.

The CMO / CSA etc knew this and said as much.

I do wonder how many of the people going ‘well I wouldn’t lockdown’ are the same ones now working from home and refusing to return to full time office working which was one of the biggest changes brought by COVID.

Covid was, at the time, what is called a Disease X. A DX is a new virus or variation that has no vaccine, no cure and is highly contagious from which humans have little to no resistance so that the mortality rate is potentially very high.
A new DX is coming. No one knows where from, what it will look like and what the base disease will be (covid, bird flu, Influenza A, Ebola, MERS etc) and it could be an entirely previously unseen virus or even one that has combined.
The main problem with the spread of covid initially was air travel because governments were scared of causing offense and losing money but shutting everything down immediately would probably have avoided the long lockdown. Just think about all those people...flying around the world spreading covid as they went before any country got a grip on what was actually unfolding.

No one wants to get these diseases but no one wants to be inconvenienced by restrictions either but do you actually want to see your loved ones dying at home in agony because people refuse to be sensible and caused a pandemic to spread? I am still masking where I need to, still washing my hands when I get in and still carrying a packet of tissues everywhere. Does that seem extreme? In December 2024, an obviously ill customer sneezed on me at work and a week later I was in hospital very ill because that customer had Influenza A and I'm medically vulnerable. The number of people I have seen who think that it's ok to sneeze on people/wipe snot on their clothes/ sneeze on their own hands and then touch goods or wipe hands on textiles etc. is huge - huge!

The next DX could be far worse than covid and far more deadly.
Is our government better prepared? No
Are other countries better prepared? Unlikely
Should we lockdown again when DX arrives? Yes, absolutely but let's hope that there's a better plan but I think of our current PM and think....um no, it will be a very dithery decision process and far too slow again

I think a lot of professionals have learned a lot, but in terms of government it depends on the particular ministers and civil servants making decisions, and whether they are listening to/understanding what the scientists and health professionals say. So threads like this might be quite helpful to make sure ideas about how things could be managed better next time are probably quite helpful!

“The will of the people”, eh?

You assume “the people “ all think like Daily Fail editorials.

We don’t, some of us think for ourselves.

There’s no point going through life feeling depressed about what might/could happen

Everyone’s an expert apparently, aren’t they? I have a PhD in public health and work in infectious diseases. What would you suggest the public health strategy is, OP?

Do I think normal, healthy people wearing masks now is a bit bonkers? Yes, but I have lots of friends in the US who wear masks now and continued to self-isolate long after all of us here were back to normal life. But in the midst of a pandemic where there is little evidence base to support an alternative approach to keeping people healthy and alive, absolutely I would.

We have to look out for each other. I think people who couldn’t cope with a few weeks of staying home and homeschooling and going on some walks would be struggling with life anyway. It was literally weeks in Spring of 2020 and again winter 2021. Yes, it was tough working and homeschooling and looking after a toddler while keeping our family business afloat, but it was fine. Far from the most traumatic thing I’ve had to go through. 😂

Yes, I do think some families are quite dysfunctional and for them, it amplified the effects of the neglect and the substance abuse and the poor social skills and limited resilience they had instilled in their children. But for everyone else, if we can’t cope with a few weeks of not going to the pub or soft play, then we’re setting ourselves and our kids up to struggle in life.

People seem to be looking back at Covid with almost rose tinted glasses, suggesting the deaths weren’t horrendous, hospital workers weren’t dying along with their patients, and no one but the elderly died and long covid doesn’t exist.
Before the vaccines were effective many healthy people were dying, we didn’t know exactly how it was being transmitted and many people put their lives at risk for the public good.
Were mistakes made on how long lockdown lasted? Undoubtedly. But remember watching the bodies piling up in India and Italy, the people in our own hospitals dying. I think people would comply with a lockdown, but I also think it would be a more compassionate lockdown with people allowed to see dying relatives. Unless of course it was a haemorrhagic fever.
People on this board seem to assume if having Covid didn’t affect them too badly then it was fine for everyone who didn’t die. Many people are still living with long covid. People who were in their 20s and 30s when they caught it are now still too ill to work or in some cases even walk, with various post viral symptoms.
As many people have said, it depends on the type of pandemic, but even with another covid-type virus, don’t forget how horrendous it was at the time.

I think we need to be more worried about a world war type situation now than a lockdown. A lockdown would be blissful compared with sending teens off to be trained to fight and then being killed, food shortages, bleak loss of civilisation, chaos, starvation which is what is going to happen if there is a proper war. Not to mention the further clamp down on free speech - no one would be permitted to talk about negotiated peace.

But if there were a pandemic, those who say "no one would comply with a lockdown" are wrong, I think. There are two groups of people now, one who understand the science from the first time round, who would comply (if the leadership were doing the right thing in the circumstances) and those who don't, who won't. Those that would will have worked out the best strategies from last time. The government would need to be proactive about thinking through solutions for those who live in tiny flats etc as well though and it is better the public pushes for this rather than go into meltdowns over lockdowns.

The COVID inquiry is looking at what can be learned.

they could have developed a policy, it would need more nuance but along the lines of just people over 60 or those who lived with them to isolate, tell everyone to work at home, close large indoor events but otherwise largely carry on

This is where people miss the point. It’s not only those more vulnerable who die if hospitals are overwhelmed. It’s premature babies, teenagers with a ruptured appendix, people who’ve had heart attacks or car accidents. It’s everyone who needs life-saving medical treatment. Because there aren’t enough staff to treat them.

Interesting that you mention A and E nurses as opposed to, say, cashiers in Lidl and petrol stations. Do you think all that will need to be done to persuade people with NMW retail jobs is to tell them it's ESSENTIAL they go in?

Every virus is different and so you can't be blasé about it and think it'll just be a Covid re-run (and that was bad enough). I worry that people won't comply with any restrictions because they think they know better and distrust any experts, and so as a result fatalites will be higher. Humans are their own worst enemies!