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

Why worry about something we have no control over.

Absolutely! At that time, we did not know how bad COVID was. But there are many viruses that could kill, and people would fall like flies. I don't think people who refuse to comply today would still go outside if a new, dangerous virus struck.

I still agree with @Binuswe’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.

Sorry to derail. Can anyone help me understand the paragraph below in layman.

Why are these industrial fatality storage tents required.
Mass Fatality Resilience Capability-Lot 2
Home Office
Published date: 18 August 2025

Following on from the market engagement notice in late 2024, and a competitive process ending on 28th March 2025. The Home Office now publishes the contract award notice for a Mass Fatality Capability Resilience Storage Framework.

In the event of a major incident resulting in a large number of fatalities which could overwhelm existing body storage capacity the Home Office would provide contingency support to the requesting local authority. The Home Office seeks to replace its current capability with a more efficient operating model. This opportunity will support the Home Offices strategy.
The initial term is 2 years, with the options to extend yearly for up to 2 additional years (2+1+1).
Our vision

I wouldn’t comply for any reason whatsoever.

We knew a lot very early on, I agree. I also think you’ve got it on which disease we should do it for and hopefully there’s a long gap before the next one so it’s not so difficult to react if a worse one comes along.

If it really doesn't take much to create effective deterrence, it should be easy for you to explain how this would be achieved with the facilities that we already have. All you've done so far is tell us it would be easy.

Your Paris example is neither here nor there either, because it doesn't include a population who weren't having it. Stopping people isn't the problem. It's what happens when they defy whoever's doing the stopping.

You also don't claim that stopping people in the most built up areas does anything elsewhere. In the case of the UK, we have about 350,000 armed forces and police, and around 250,000 miles of road. I live in a large city, so one of the easier areas to police, and even then I can get to the homes of numerous friends and acquaintances without even going on a main road.

@EasternStandard ,

‘We didn’t need it. People complied in the U.K. due to behaviour change messaging’

Correct.

My post concerned a situation, as posited by the OP, where people didn’t comply.

Epidemic control is all about getting the r number to about 1 over time (so flattening the peak), and also managing the second moment of the distribution, so you don’t get mass spreading events.

Which is why you need to trust virologists and epidemiologists to do their best for everyone, and listen to them. As most neither understand medicine or statistics properly.

Of course - and a short lockdown while we worked out where we were would have been acceptable - though distancing measures may have sufficed.

But you are wrong to suggest we knew nothing. We knew it was a corona virus - and we knew a lot about those generally. We locked down because China did - forgetting the political and socio-cultural differences between that country and the West. There are many, many diseases out there - haemorrhagic fevers, bubonic plague - that absolutely merit a full lockdown, as would a variant of them. A variant of a corona virus was in all probability an overreaction.

And that’s is a huge problem if we then can’t lockdown for something that kills on average 50% of people who get it with no treatment available because we can’t afford it economically or because people won’t comply.

There was a middle ground and we shot ourselves in the foot by not taking it.

Is NannyandJohn back, all this talk of the army, jail and checkpoints.

Current flu advice was for people in care jobs/hospitals to wear masks.

As has been pointed out a lot of times already in this thread, if such a disease were very contagious, nobody would be able to lock down because we'd be starving, looting, rampaging etc. And diseases that had high mortality rates but were very difficult to transmit would mean most people not worrying about getting it- they exist already.

It's the Goldilocks analogy. Lockdown needs a disease that's dangerous but not that dangerous. There is no point immediately leaping to something where everything would go down in flames anyway. The question is whether the middle ground exists and if so, where it is.

Think it would depend what it was, I can’t see many people complying though unless it was a highly contagious, life threatening for ALL, disfiguring disease of some sort.
Some people I know still put themselves in a lockdown- the recent flu going around for example, they didn’t leave their homes. I still see people wearing masks.

People would have to be dropping dead on the street from the illness before anyone else would pay attention.
It would be nice if we lived in a cleaner society, that people washed their hands often, wear a mask when ill. Washed more in general, instead we have a society and culture with a lot of sloppy dirty people who have no pride or interest in soap.

Schools weren’t closed. They remained open for some children.

Interested in why you think it wasn’t sensible to ask parents of children who could stay at home to do so?

We didn’t need it. People complied in the U.K. due to behaviour change messaging.

Brexit has damaged it more in many, many ways.

@Binus ,

‘Let's assume for the sake of argument we're talking about a virus not severe enough to prevent the basic blocks of society from functioning. Who on earth do you think is going to be staffing all these checkpoints? The UK has 70 million people and our combined police and armed forces are like 350,000. You talk about jails, which already don't hold everyone we want to put in them- who do you think is going to be staffing these? Even China, with a fully functioning authoritarian state apparatus and actual gulags, couldn't manage to keep that up when the public turned. And we don't have anything like what they've got.
Enforcing lockdown would actually be impossible if the public weren't up for it. This is why so much emphasis was put on messaging and increasing people's perception of their own risk. Because whatever else one might say about the previous administration, they understood well that we couldn't possibly enforce a lockdown through deterrence. If it gets to the checkpoints stage, the whole thing is doomed to fail anyway. People have to be willing to do it voluntarily.’

It really doesn’t take much to create effective deterrence and Nightingale prisons are 100x cheaper than Nightingale hospitals! And much easier to staff.

How many people would still defy lockdown if their mate just got a 3 year sentence for doing it?

In Paris, where someone in my family lives, there were checkpoints, and people were randomly stopped, asked for their papers and why they were out. One checkpoint can easily stop 100 or more people in a day, so I don’t think the ratio is a major issue.

I assume that a lockdown has always been the plan in the event of a pandemic, so the fact that it’s already happened once is neither here nor there.

But I think that the way a lockdown would be received would very much depend on the disease. Yes of course if there was a horrible incurable disease with a very high mortality rate, especially if young healthy people were dying, then we’d all adhere to it. But the issue with Covid was that pretty quickly it became apparent that the vast majority of people who got Covid made a full recovery. And yet we still weren’t allowed to go for a picnic at the park. I don’t think the population would tolerate again such strict rules for a disease that was minor for most people.

Safer is not the same as safe enough that they'd mostly be willing to come in.

But your second point is correct, and that's what people are talking about. It's glib to say all we have to do is keep out of the way so services can function, because actually, there is sod all guarantee that any virus serious enough to make people willing to do this but not serious enough for it to become irrelevant. And that's why the whole premise of this thread is wrong.

Unfortunately there is a huge mistrust of experts so I don't think the covid skeptics/anti Vax/flat earth type thinkers are interested at all in what actual qualified scientists have to say.

I'd love to be paid to stay at home as I have crafting hobbies and other stuff I like doing at home that I never seem to have the time to do. In reality I'd have to go into work like last time as I can't work from home in my job.

I wouldn’t comply next time. It’s damaged the country so much.

Last time the push was to protect the vulnerable population by reducing the spread of it.
It would be an entirely different situation if we had a disease like MVD where the mortality rate is up to 88% and people needed to protect themselves rather than strangers.
Noone other than conspiracy theorists who didnt believe in it would be socialising in that situation, and even they would likely quickly change their mind once people they knew had died.

Again though, they're going to worry about wages less than they'll worry about death.

And there is an answer to this, for those amongst them who don't have relatives who'd feed them. You just won't like it. What will happen is, some of them will go looting.