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

Yep. People confuse their 'should' and 'is'. Even if one accepts the principle that it would be best to let the epidemiologists in the driving seat, we very much do not have to do that and there would be no guarantees whatsoever that the public would be willing.

Don’t lockdown sceptics worry that vanishingly few genuine experts (virologists, epidemiologists and immunologists) think lockdown was unnecessary?!
Perhaps there were more that we think, we just never heard from them. Perhaps one of the government's "emergency powers" to which you refer was being able to silence anybody who contradicted the narrative. And I'm not joking. What happened to Dr Vernon Coleman? Has he been cancelled, or silenced by the secret services? You could watch BBC interviewers interrupting "experts" who were about to deviate from the agreed script.

I agree. I knew someone in her 40s, previously fit and healthy, who still hasn't regained her speech thanks to catching Covid early on.

I also agree there were some very silly rules, like being able to go, say, to the pub, but having table service only, distancing and having to leave at 10. Not sure the virus would have got that memo! Ditto Eat Out to Help Out - both attempts at shoring up the hospitality industry rather than effective pandemic control measures.

The insistence on handwashing being a protective measure when early on there was evidence of Covid being spread through the air was also a bit daft.

However, it is more than silly to underplay how severe the virus was initially and before the vaccines started to work.

Thanks for your clear and very sane post. I despair really. People seem to have lost their ability to think clearly and logically about this horrible time. And at the time of the first lockdown, the vast majority DID comply. We saw community thinking and compassionate concern for people we didn't even know. I try to cling on to that in our post-Covid era where social cohesion and community seem to breaking down.

Maybe the lessons we learned will include prioritising mental health and our young people the next time this happens - and it WILL happen again. I remember how chilling it was listening to epidemiologists saying that although Covid was bad, it wasn't THE big pandemic they'd been bracing for.

Now there's a surprise a one post wonder goady op that's vanished
colour me shocked
carry on frothing guys

Obviously. In the same way that the will of the people to have lockdown trumped the lives of those vulnerable to lockdown in 2020-1. Hence, say, increased deaths due to alcohol consumption during that period.

That's part of what pandemic management is. The will of the people, expressed through governments, trumping the lives of whichever vulnerable are seen as most suitable to be collateral.

Or you could take a less hysterical approach. There needs to be a balance between protecting the vulnerable and damaging everyone else. It’s awful on a personal level when you are left thinking I could well die because of this, but governments are thinking for millions, so it’s about balance between competing and contradictory interests.

Arguably we got that wrong with lockdown because we now have far more vulnerable people who cannot work because of their mental health, at great social and economic cost to the population. Put simply, no society can “afford” to cater merely to the needs of the most vulnerable. They need to be offered a reasonable level of protection, not everything possible, because the latter damages others.

Some idiotic responses here. No two diseases are the same so the response to the next outbreak will be different. But if there was an infectious airborne Ebola variant circulating you would still be mingling down the pub? Right…

I doubt people would comply if it was something similar to Covid.

There is so little trust in politicians these days.

It didn't 'become apparent' that most people recovered. The vaccine luckily worked well and therefore people had it less seriously. That is why most people recovered. If the vaccine hadn't worked death rates would have been what they were at the start multiplied as more people caught it.

I find your checkpoint post facile tbf it’s not going to work.

You need the public consent for any response to happen.

I bet you didn't have to work outside the house or enjoyed furlough

Well, both, along with a succession of useless governments, including this one, have damaged us, in many ways, but I was just talking about virus compliance.

Yep! And things would get nasty if they couldn't.

I sometimes wonder whether 2020-21 would've gone differently if it hadn't been so easy to obtain deliveries of treats, nice food and inessential crap to entertain oneself actually. It's not even just about having the bare necessities, though obviously order would break down soon enough if people didn't have their electricity and three meals a day.

If you die, you die.

@EasternStandard ,

‘I still agree with **we’re not dealing with this in the way your post describes. It’s either messaging or it’s so severe people just stop going out.’

You are welcome to agree, but reducing it to a facile binary isn’t the real world.

At the start of Covid, it was reasonable to assume a 1.5% case fatality rate in what was known from China and Italy. It ended up being a lot lower, and lockdowns ended up being less severe with experimentation (bubbles, rules of 6 etc).

But, in the real world, most viruses are neither Ebola or a cold, and when you get a novel zoonotic virus, there are a lot of unknowns, so you have to play safe.

Just read real scientific papers on both epidemic and how to manage them. Zero of them will suggest reliance on people to self manage isolation.

I rather miss lockdown.

Exactly this. All the people saying 'i will not comply' are just talking bullshit. And what would that even look like when everything is shut down? Standing in the street going 'look at me look at me I'm not complying' 🙄. People think that because they had covid in the latter stages and weren't seriously ill that the virus was mild. By that point the virus has weakened, as a lot of viruses do over time. People that got the virus early on were seriously ill or dying. Our friend, a key worker in his 40s, fit and healthy, died. My hairdresser and a colleague from work, both in their 20s have permanent heart and lung issues and are significantly impaired. I dont believe that anyone, in the face of a new, unknown virus, with scenes as we saw in Italy and China would refuse to lockdown

@Newbutolfather Don’t lockdown sceptics worry that vanishingly few genuine experts (virologists, epidemiologists and immunologists) think lockdown was unnecessary?!

Those experts were giving advice only on reducing the number of infections.

Others are looking also at increased deaths from other causes, but it is, quite honestly, impossible to have a data rational discussion on this issue without being accused of wanting someone's granny to have died.

I disagree. I lost my dad to it in a care home and it reinforced the “fuck this, life is for living” attitude I had. I travelled and had foreign holidays all the way through and have zero regrets

At the start - they didn't really know what they were doing and lockdown was a good idea.

The problem is that later on it then became about politics and manipulation and that is why the trust has been lost.

If it were to happen again public compliance will depend on the disease and not just belief in the government.

And the 'will of the people' trumps the lives of the vulnerable, does it?

-I believe the evidence is that it has severely impacted the mental health of children, as well as social capabilities, of which the effects are still being felt

-My understanding is that children were at a lower risk with covid

-Children missed out of education

-Impact of parents having to manage childcare while still having to work from home

-Danger of children not being able to go to school who are in abusive situations at homs

People would still expect others to be out though if it meant they couldn't get their shopping, it's always others.

This is precisely what worries me, and why I feel that we must keep on and on reminding ourselves and others just how terrible lockdown was. I do feel that if we are not careful, we will be nudged to believe "actually, lockdown wasn't all that bad" or "it wasn't actually lockdown". (They tried that in December, calling it Tier 4, to avoid using the L-word.)

For me, it was not lockdown itself that was the worst part, but the way the government communicated with the public: a screeching U-turn from "it's nothing to worry about" to "you must stay at home"; and another screeching U-turn from "masks are worse than useless" to "you must wear them, they save lives". And the fear. They decided that the only way to talk to the public was to "frighten the pants off the public". Their words, not mine: it's in the Whatsapp messages which they tried so hard to cover up. The fact that they TOTALLY REFUSED to admit that lockdown caused any harm at all.

The way the government tried to micromanage EVERYTHING, and the fact that people seemed to want this - to me, that was much more terrifying than a virus, or even lockdown. Mumsnet was clear evidence that people wanted the government to have an answer to everything, and took their word as complete gospel. "You're not allowed out for more than an hour a day!" That was never a rule: it was something Michel Gove improvised in an interview, and it quickly became the gospel truth. The government didn't bother to correct the record.

I would have respected lockdown much more if the government had been more sensible and measured about it, and said "unfortunately, we believe we have to lock down. We are aware that this will cause massive damage to the economy, and the development of your children, if it goes on too long. We shall endeavour to protect you from losing your jobs and businesses, and we shall endeavour to keep lockdown as short as possible, because it will cause massive damage." And then, after a few weeks, "We can now see that lockdown is causing more harm than good. We shall lift restrictions, but provide measures to protect the vulnerable, and it will be better to have more infections in the summer, rather than the winter. We cannot control the virus: all we can do is lessen the harms."

But instead, we got Boris Johnson claiming he can work more miracles than Jesus, saying "we will do whatever it takes to eliminate the virus, and to keep you safe." And the boiling frog method of stringing the public along with "in twelve weeks, we can send the virus packing. Normalish by Christmas. It would be inhumane to cancel Christmas - oops, I've just done it. Significant normality by Easter. (Which year?) Irreversible road map to freedom by June. Sorry, I meant July."

And all this has now set a precedent: people expect instant action from the government. (One reason they are disappointed with Starmer is because he has not solved all the country's problems by now, but that's another debate: Johnson had a habit of constantly telling us that salvation was just around the corner, people believed him, and expected instant results. People expect the same from Starmer.) Although people are now licking their wounds from the damage caused by LOCKDOWN (not the pandemic), I worry that it might not take much fear propaganda to have the public baying and pleading for lockdown again, and not even for a pandemic. They'll probably call them something else, like a "stay at home order", and use them in the event of terrorism, climate change (tweak a few figures here and there to make things look terrible), Trump using weapons of mass destruction, or whatever other threat the government uses the fear machine to bombard the public with.

And the counterpoint to that is that many people, including myself, are more distrustful of government in general than ever: I distrusted most politicians since the day Tony Blair was elected, and now I will never trust any politician again as long as I live. As scandal after scandal is still breaking, with the "fast lane", and Johnson and his mates lining their pockets on the dodgy contracts, people will be angrier than ever. I bet that the "Partygate" we heard about was only the tip of the iceberg, and that far more politicians and lockdown's biggest cheerleaders were breaking the rules: thinking he was politically invincible, Johnson was careless enough to get caught.