If there was another pandemic in your lifetime...

[GoodChat]

Would you follow all the rules as stringently as you did the first time around?

I was thinking about this today. I was completely law abiding the first time round - followed every single rule and guideline they put in place.

I had a 9 month old at the start of lockdown so it was nice to spend more time with her as I'd just come off maternity leave and then got furloughed. We were basically living in a little bubble and it was lovely.

I was made redundant which was crap, but it also opened up new opportunities for me and now I'm in a completely new industry, with a far better work life balance and better pay for a more relaxed life.

But... I now have an 18 month old and an almost 4 year old. I can't imagine only leaving the house for an hour a day and not being able to take them to parks etc. I don't know how people managed it. I think those who did are incredible. My mental health was battered by the end and I still get wary of groups in enclosed spaces without masks - even though I'm not scared of catching anything.

I also think any kind of lockdown/furlough scheme etc would destroy the economy beyond repair if it were to happen in the next 50 years or so. I imagine more people would die from poverty than die from infection next time.

I don't think id cope with a pandemic being managed as it was last time, and I don't think I could trust the government with the complete mockery they made of us before.

I think I'd approach it the next time with a stiff British upper lip of "keep calm and carry on".

What do you think? What did you do before and what would you do again? Would you be as fearful as you were at the start of covid?

I was spoiled by living in a lovely rural area with lots of open countryside but are there really any areas without a green space within walking distance? It was taking out cars that was the issue from what I heard but I might be wrong. You were allowed to follow walking routes from England to Wales, weren't you?

Because the majority of the general public, me included, don't have enough knowledge to be able to decide whether it's necessary, how dangerous etc. So we just have to have faith that it is for the common good.

Well, we don't actually have to have faith, do we? Which I think is the point OP is making. People taking the view that you took was essential to the functioning and observance of the last lockdowns, because we don't have a coercive security apparatus that could force the population into observance. They had to want to.

I think a lot depends on how long into the future the next one might be. If it's eg next year, and the same lot are still in charge, that communal faith is not going to happen. The level of trust isn't there and it won't come back that quickly. A few decades into the future it might be quite different.

I don’t think I would, no. Sadly.

@AxolotlOnions where I lived previously there wasn't really anywhere in walking distance that wasn't going to be overrun with people, which felt unsafe.

Where I am now I'd be fine.

I'm not sure about the walking paths. You might be right.

The consensus among epidemiologists is that its likely we will experience another pandemic within decades, they think their historical frequency will increase. There have always been pandemics, they're are part of human existence, the last terrible one here was only 100 years ago. Scientists worry a lot about zoonotic diseases as a future pandemic. They are diseases which jump the species barrier. Many think HIV jumped from primates. Bats are a pontential source for future diseases.

I will know to go out and buy toilet roll.

It would depend on the nature of the new disease & the level of risk it posed to me. I took covid very seriously & did everything realistically possible to avoid catching it from before the first lockdown until I was vaccinated because I’m asthmatic. If the next pandemic was another respiratory virus which causes pneumonia, I would take it just as seriously.

If, however, it was a viral gastroenteritis (for example) which could be very dangerous to the elderly, the immunosuppressed etc, then I wouldn’t consider myself to be at particular risk and I would take a more pragmatic approach.

Where I live the local park was mobbed. Locals on facebook were complaining that it was like a local festival down there with music playing and people drinking.

I think they would if it had a high mortality rate. I think Theg would have problems getting people out of their houses.

If Ebola was rampant in the U.K. would you really carry on as normal?

It depends what it was, at the start of covid it was quite scary seeing lots of people on ventilators and so many deaths.

In a real deadly pandemic they wouldn't even need to scare the pants off people. They wouldn't need all the propaganda they used l, had parties, they would be terrifed and probably nowhere to be seen. My great nan passed last year and she didn't hide herself away. She lived, we hugged , she hugged the kids and we met regularly, she did wear a mask and took the vaccines. It wasn't covid that got her in the end either and she always said she will be damned if these tyrants would tell her what to do, she lived through measles, bombs , no vaccines as Children and in a country where malaria wasn't uncommon either.

Yep I think for some people the reason they travelled was because they wanted somewhere emptier. If you live in an urban area where a lot of the local population have no garden, the parks are going to be very well used. I never travelled in the first lockdown, and in the second one it was because I wanted to rather than because I cared about the amount of personal space available in local parks, but there were people at the time who said this. If a person is afraid of transmission, it's logical enough to prefer somewhere with fewer people.

The greatest risk at the start of Covid wasn't about the people who would die, it was that no one had any immunity so it would run through the population like wildfire and while the mortality risk was around 1%, the hospitalisation rate was much higher and the NHS would have collapsed even more than it already has.
I followed the rules and would follow them again - just because Boris was a selfish arse doesn't mean I want to be.

Covid is a funny thing, I'm not in any vulnerable group but I've had it 3 times over the last 18 months and each time has taken multiple months to recover, even without a 'serious' initial infection. My CEV FIL has had it twice and breezed through it. It feels like there's so much we don't understand yet about the long-term effects of covid, I honestly don't know what else could have been done to slow it spreading to give time for a vaccine to be developed.

If we had a disease with a high mortality rate, do you think the services and structures that allowed so many of the population to stay at home would still function, and what might happen if they didn't?

Absolutely not. Death seems preferable to more of this shit show tbh

Hmmm second or third thread I've seen asking this and worded very similarly across different websites in the last few days. Are we being softened up for something or are they surveying how much people will mindlessly comply again?

Not a fecking chance I'd comply like last time having seen the damage it caused to my youngest. Already have it arranged with school that the kids are prioritised on multiple factors including how badly it affected them last time and my own mental health - and I'd be out and about working throughout because I work for an essential service so we're allowed to be face to face when needed. I'd also be lifting the kids over the fences of any locked playgrounds this time around quite blatantly - because that was just fucking spiteful to lock them up when garden centres and golf courses were fucking open.

My plan would be to turn off the fucking news and do what's right for my kids and screw any hypothetical MN fantasy scenarios like the bullshit that some arseholes on here spouted.

It was like that where I am. A local coffee shop did a roaring trade of takeaway coffee and cake, the bis were overflowing with takeaway cups as nobody crushed them before putting them in! and a local deer park was packed with picnickers who insisted on feeding the deer so they had t do a massive cull. A friend was hospitalised with a fractured skull due to an aggressive, overfed stag! Then there was the teenagers at a local lake and all the dog poo... It wasn't ideal.

Hmmm second or third thread I've seen asking this and worded very similarly across different websites in the last few days. Are we being softened up for something or are they surveying how much people will mindlessly comply again?

Well it isn't the former. I can think of very few things the Tories would like to do less than try and implement any kind of pandemic based policy that would require us softened up. It would inevitably get people talking about Partygate again, and that's generally accompanied by a drop in the polls for them. Even with Johnson gone, Sunak got fined himself and spent months gaslighting and bullshitting us about it. It's not in his interests for people to be reminded of that.

Anyone that thinks Covid did not have a high mortality rate, it was considerably higher than Polio.

I was volunteering at a local foodbank but if we have a bird flu outbreak I probably wouldn't, or I'd insist on nobody entering the building. Bird flu has a 53% mortality rate. Covid was scary enough. I know a few people who survived but who are now disabled and have a greatly reduced life expectancy. I am VERY glad I never caught it.

But if it was a serious risk to health, they would let people start dying and then the public would comply. Especially if it affects young adults and children. Imagine the local new saying 10 children have died in your area that week from this new disease. Suddenly nearly everyone would comply.

Faced with the scenes we had coming out of China and Italy as we did in early 2020 then yes, I would do it again.

Yep the scenes coming out of Italy were horrifying ,my 16 year old son has recently spent three weeks on critical care ( not covid and is now recovering) and I spoke to some of the staff about their experience,s ,they said it was an awful.time and some of the covid patients who. were not ventilated were in bays with other covid patients who were and could see them getting sicker and sicker,how terrifying must that have been for them! Apparently they youngest person to die on their unit from covid was only in their 30,s and had no.underlying health issues
it's easy to look back in hindsight ,but the early days where very little was known about it were awful.

That's what they did with covid though, wasn't it. They were reporting on deaths but the main headlines were how many children were critically ill, in the beginning. It's how they scared people into compliance early on.

If children were dying in significant numbers, their parents would refuse to work out of the home and we'd be facing the breakdown of basic services and serious societal unrest. People illegally having their mates round would be the least of anyone's worries. I'm also not sure young adults whose brains haven't yet finished developing would necessarily respond by hunkering down in that situation either.

Do you remember the very early news reports coming out of China that were showing people dropping down dead in the street? There never was an explanation.