The next person who tells me we all need to move on...

[Youknowaboutthepaint]

Is likely to get both barrels.

So many people still seem convinced that "the other lot" would be even worse, even though they can't begin to tell me why.

That Christmas, while our esteemed leaders were partying was DH's last. He spent it at home, in pain, without access to the medical care he needed and without seeing anyone except those he lived with.

A few days later he went into to hospital where he stayed for 3 months, without a single visitor. During that time he was told, alone, by telephone because his consultant was shielding, that his cancer was terminal, stil he wasn't allowed any visitors. He never met his oncologist and I had to fight every day to find anyone who would talk to me about his prognosis/ treatment/pain control/return home.

He came home eventually once they'd managed to get his pain under some sort of control, to die, a shadow of the man his DC had last seen, still officially not allowed any visitors. (Although by that point anyone who wanted to visited, I classified as a carer).

Then we had to restrict numbers at his funeral.

All the while those making the decisions that had affected us so badly were having the time of their life. Most are still in power/working in governement, making the laws that affect us all, dishing out or receiving honours, spending our money. And they've lied about it continuously since.

I'm still trying to support severely traumatised children whose lives were badly affected by lockdowns, even if they hadn't had to deal with all the stuff with their dad.

I'm generally a fairly easy going, resilient sort, but I dare anyone to tell me it's time we got over it.

@cantab94

Ok I’ll do away with the “ifs”

As late as summer 2021 there was a 1/5 chance that any given variant would have a much higher fatality rate than known variants.

Based on fatality rates of SARS (10%) and MERS (34%), this would give reasonable cause for alarm as with increased transmissibility seen with covid, anything on this scale would be catastrophic.

To be blunt, the majority of politicians have no background in science and probably treated it with the contempt that many members of the public did/continue to do.

I completely agree there was limited cost benefit analysis and a lot of factors such as excess deaths due to other causes were not taken into account, because they were on an emergency footing. There was next to no pandemic preparedness despite scientists banging on from the late 90s about the uptick in zoonotic disease emergence…. Jeremy Hunt was health secretary and did not rate it as a priority, Cameron made cuts.

As we are at risk of further pandemics, WHO wants intergovernmental cooperation in future so that everyone moves in unison by way of development of a Pandemic Preparedness Treaty.

If you are wondering what for, and want to assert that this too is ridiculous please check out WHO R&D Blueprint. We are going to end up with so many more communicable diseases with pandemic potential in our part of the world due to increasing temp enabling spread of vectors to U.K.

To get back to the point of the thread - everyone is focused on politicians breaking rules (a great deal of others outside of politics did too).

While it is absolutely appalling that government members imposed horrendously inhuman conditions upon ill/deceased people and their family members (including myself) while in the same breath disregarding said rules for themselves.

My bigger concern is in the enormous failing of the government to prepare and protect us in the 20years prior to the pandemic, which could have avoided much of the shit show that we endured.

We cannot allow the same thing to happen again. Everyone should be shouting from the rooftops about pandemic preparedness, research and development, more money for innovations. Rather than focusing on Boris and company’s parties.

Nobody should be made to move on from being angry about what happened. But the failings of government go so much deeper than breaking covid guidance - if they had done their job in the first place it wouldn’t have been as bad as it was.

"They had all the available data and knew covid did not pose a high risk to the vast majority of people. That's why they partied - they were not scared of taking it home to their families.
The question shouldn't be 'why did they not follow the rules?' But instead 'did we need the rules at all?'.
Watching their behaviours during lockdown tells us all we need to know. People were terrified by the government's daily dose of fear, whipped up into a frenzy by the very government that knew covid had a very very high survival rate and that people should make their own choices.
Informed consent went out of the window - they deliberately installed a team of psychologists to increase everyone's level of threat and fear"

Exactly. But i will bet a penny to a pinch of shit that this angle wont be covered in the enquiry.

Yes it wasnt me who wrote it

@JenniferBooth we were living in Denmark from 2020 to May 2022 and the thing that was very different was that we didn't have the gvt on the soapbox every day whipping up fear and new rules - I don't think this helped one bit- my 83 year old father in law watched every day- I don't think this was helpful at all on mental health

In Denmark We did have the gvt on live around every 3 to 4 weeks announcing any specific new changes and all other figures were updated every day on a site you could follow. We also had certain conditions about being tested once the bars and restaurants opened- but it was all free and very easy to access (if a bit of a pain) - you had results on digital account on your phone . It was just less manic and the rules more easy to follow.

We also went over to Sweden a fair bit and there it was different again but a lot less manic than the UK.

@JenniferBooth- for me, the biggest risk/problem with Covid was its unpredictability. Even though it may well not have posed a big risk to the majority of people, and had a high survival rate, there seemed to be no way of telling who would be badly affected by it, and who would shrug it off easily. It seemed to me at the time that even fit, healthy people were becoming seriously ill with it, even dying, and that did worry me.

The hospitals were obviously treating a lot of people who were seriously/critically ill with Covid - I used to be a nurse, and in my experience, it is absolutely unprecedented for hospitals to be turning ordinary wards into intensive care units to cope with the numbers of patients they are treating from one cause. If we hadn't locked down, it seems logical to say that we would have seen more Covid infections - and surely a proportion of those would have been serious or critical cases - and would the hospitals have been able to cope with that? I'm honestly not sure they would.

I'm so sorry & can't imagine the way your dh suffered & the hurt & sorrow you have gone through. The Tories should be punished at the next election, people have long memories. The Boris Johnson situation is already causing a split in the party & hopefully & hopefully there will be a full blown war where the only answer is to call a General Election. I know this won't change everything you went through, I can understand how angry & hurt you are & I hope that time will help you come to terms with it.

@SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius yes, and one thing I couldn't help but notice in Denmark and Sweden was that vast swathes of the population appeared to be in better physical health to start with- of all ages. I rarely saw grossly obese under 30s for instance- a few bigger older people but way way less than the UK. Their health service too looked in better shape to cope - although at one point they did admit in Copenhagen they were quite close to capacity.

Not sure about Denmark, but Sweden regularly tops the international charts for best mental health support. I suspect that, the free capacity of their other health services and their physical fitness levels are all linked.

It seems covid has put a huge spanner on that though….

Yes, it's almost like deliberately trying to frighten people as a matter of policy wasn't a very sensible idea.

This is the point. It didn’t matter to them that the rules they imposed inflicted unbearable pain and harm on the people who stuck by them, because they had no intention of abiding by them themselves. So they never bothered to spend any time asking “is this fair? Is it justifiable? Is the risk it reduces great enough to merit being so tough?” And it’s just not good enough. Our government owe us more than that. They exist with our consent, not the other way around. They are there to serve us, not the other way around.

That's a great point, but also, even those who did intend to keep the rules would've known they weren't going to be on the sharp edge of them. Nobody in government would be stuck trying to work and look after toddlers toddlers the same time, for example, or homeschooling kids without enough reliable devices. They weren't going to be stuck in tower blocks without access to outside space.

So even the likes of eg Priti Patel, where there's zero suggestion of any rule breaking, still didn't have that incentive because it wouldn't be their problem.

And none of this can be separated from the severity and sometimes stupidity of the rules. They weren't the ones who'd have to suffer them.

@BalanceMeHumours we had a huge psychiatric facility literally about 5 mins walk from where we lived and it always looked very pleasant and well cared for.

The population of Denmark is 6m, Sweden is 10m……

Population of London alone is 9m…

U.K. is nearly 70 million people, with greater population density and a culture of non adherence to government guidance.

It’s a lot harder to manage.

Sweden did not enforce lockdowns, Denmark did but it was also very prompt in responding to the threat which was beneficial.

Population Density Comparison

U.K. 281 per Km2

Denmark 137 per Km2

Sweden 25 per Km2

Population density is important as you won’t have people mixing as much where lower = lower transmission.

Hospital Capacity

All three countries have similar beds per 1000 (2 - 2.4, which is v low) but bear in mind U.K. 90-95% capacity filled at onset of pandemic.

@Robinni yes I am very aware of the differences- one reason I was glad we were there for most of it apart from first few months!!

I do think it was handled better though- prompter action, less fearmongering every day on TV- in fact the on TV thing was only every few weeks , plus we had to have tests every few days registered on your digital app if you wanted to go in bars or restaurants - so most people under a certain age were doing this every 3 or 4 days for quite a while (free and easy to access, never waited more than 10 minutes or so)

I didn’t get ‘fear’. At all. I saw a buffooning leader who seemed intent on populism making jokes, partying and making throwaway comments about the dead. I saw a leader who was quite keen to ignore scientific advice. Inept - yes. Trying to instil fear - no. Seriously?? Afraid of Boris??

There's more at the gov.uk link below about the belief that the population weren't sufficiently scared. This was discussed at the SAGE meeting on 23rd March 2020.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/887467/25-options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22032020.pdf

Bottom of page 1 states ' A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group...The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.'

I'm not sure people were afraid of Boris as such, except insofaras there were plenty of us who were scared of what a shit PM he was.

@StormShadow Yes! Scared of how shit he was. Love that. 😂

Hard hitting tactics I would have said Philippines, Venezuela, Cambodia, China. Here? I guess we are used to democracy and freedom, but on a global scale I’d say no more ‘fear’ than other comparable countries in Europe. If anything we were a bit of a laughing stock with Boris in charge.

Tell that to the people still going through the courts and being fined for breaking Covid rules

That the Philippine president was at one point ordering Covid rule breakers to be shot dead?
I’m not saying it’s right, but on the grand scale of global scare tactics, we were not the worst and probably comparable to many European countries.