Triggered by lockdown

[user64827723]

It can't just be me.

I just replied to a thread about small age gaps and was triggered. During Covid I had a 1yr old and a 2yr old. We lived in a flat with nothing to do and no where to do.

I cried most days and I still get so upset and mad about it now, those precious first years completely lost. 2 years of nothing to do, no swimming, no baby classes, wearing a face mask at soft play and even then the cafe was closed and numbers were limited.

Life with babies and toddlers is bloody hard but nothing will compare to trying to parent in lockdown.

I felt at the time, and still do feel, that parents of very young children were completely forgotten in the madness of covid lockdowns.

Anyone else feel like this?

I was pro lockdown because DS1 was very much involved in the research and he thought it was the right thing to do based on the expertise of those who knew what they were talking about.

I don't think I was aggressively so. Although I know some were. We lost 2 close family members to Covid and without lockdown it could well have been more.

We saw it as the least worst option. But would never negate the feelings of those for whom it was traumatic.

Yes absolutely, Covid itself had a horrible impact on many who had it. The issue is, the lockdown just focused on covid and it was as if anyone else going through anything else or who had other conditions were forgotten.

And for some/many, Covid was a cold, or people had no symptoms.

The issue is that although maybe some people should have been isolated to protect themselves, isolating the whole population was ridiculous. The poor medical and community care, and restrictions during covid could have easily lead to my son not suriving birth, or my suicide soon after. Both were close calls. Many people were at risk of other things more than covid.

@CwmYoy I think there was also a lot of aggression from people who were anti lockdown. A balance was needed. People were tending to sympathise ONLY with those who had horror stories that supported their stance. Sympathy was needed for all circumstances.

I was also pro-lockdown. It was the right thing to do at the time, when no-one knew anything about the virus. It was also the right thing to do when hospitals started to become overwhelmed in Dec/Jan 2021 - my friend was working on Covid wards at the time and was traumatised by being unable to provide adequate care because there were so many patients. There should of course have been far more support available to people who needed it, whose children were suffering - the hardline approach was awful, the NHS needed to be supported in giving nuanced care.

However, the messaging and government behaviour around lockdowns was obviously fucking atrocious. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have locked down when we had to, it means we had the worst possible government at the worst possible time, because for some reason people thought Boris Johnson was the right choice for Prime Minister. The problem is not that we weren't allowed to have parties. It is that he did have them.

I don’t think threads like this one would have lasted without being overrun by angry pro lockdown posters

In fact it’s all there in the archives so people can see how people reacted

For balance, there were a great many anti lockdown aggressive posters too. Links to extreme websites and think tanks. Posters grouping up and attacking other posters on both sides of the argument.
@CloudyMcCloud

The difference is these threads didn’t exist because of those posters. They were overrun. Some links were no great barrier even if people disagreed.

Which added to the isolation and trauma some experienced. As these really sad posts now show did happen.

I think lockdown was necessary and it saved a lot of lives. I still found it incredibly hard and traumatic and in retrospect (knowing what we know now) a lot of the more upsetting measures didn't actually protect anyone and that's a bitter pill to swallow.

I don't think it's an either or situation.

A lot of the very pro-lockdown people were just people who were terrified, so I have compassion for them.

@CloudyMcCloud but some websites are not allowed to be linked due to Mumsnet terms and conditions because they show extreme content. I agree with Mumsnet on this.

Well there you go. Report it and it’s deleted by mnhq. Problem solved.

Since it deleted and just the odd link you can’t compare it to the difference between this thread and others during the pandemic.

@CloudyMcCloud

The issue between aggressive pro lockdown and anti lockdown posters was being discussed. I stated that it came from both sides and gave an example. Similarly you could apply the same reasoning there to pro lockdown posters - report it to Mumsnet and it will get removed.

Problem solved.

If that happened the site would have only had a few posters on it during Covid. Oh hang on..

Take a look at old threads. It’s all there.

Anyway getting back to the trauma and isolation people felt.

Which wasn’t expressed at the time due to backlash. Good to share, I’m really sorry to those who suffered it was very hard

@CloudyMcCloud

Yes but you’ll find plenty of aggression from both sides of the argument. I would suggest in equal measure. I remember posting about cancer at the time and got some horrible comments - really aggressive. And it wasn’t from ‘pro lockdowners’.

Lockdown was horrible for a lot of people. I was “pro-lockdown” in that I felt the first one was necessary. In that phase a lot of people died and it would have been a lot more without lockdown, plus we were still learning about the virus and trying to buy time for a vaccine, it could have been so much worse than it turned out to be. I suspect people would have felt very differently about it all had it turned out to be the sort of virus that was most dangerous to young children for example.

I was and still am furious at the government for not doing more to make sure we were not in a position to need to lock down again after the first one. Track and trace was a complete fail, if it had done it’s job seriously like in South Korea, it should have prevented the need for a blunt tool like lockdown. It’s a complete scandal that they allowed it to be run by disinterested teens basically, and did not attach and follow through with serious penalties for those breaking individual isolation. I get really annoyed that the “anti-lockdown” people didn’t and still don’t seem to understand this and took a more extreme position for the most part of “COVID isn’t real” or “it’s just a cold”.

The U.K. ended up having the worst of both worlds, hugely high impact on society and the economy through a series of damaging lockdowns and also one of the top fatality rates. I predicted this is where we were sleepwalking to fairly early on, you could see the mistakes happening and their likely impact in real time. There WAS a way to minimise the need for lockdowns for everyone but it would have required the government to get their act together and for individuals to be willing to isolate when positive even if not particularly unwell themselves. Basically moving to tailored individual lockdowns at a time that made sense (when positive) rather than everyone locking down. I think most people would have found that hugely preferable to what happened.

These are so, so sad to read. Almost like covid and lockdown memoirs. I'd forgotten quite a lot of what happened but reading these, I do remember. Think I'd blotted it out.

Johnson needs to publicly answer for so much but, he will never be made to do that.

@DramStokker

There was an alternative, which was for a politician to stand up and say that the hospitals were going to struggle to cope with the peak of everyone got the virus at once and would therefore have to triage whether and when people got treated according to their respective likelihoods of survival. Therefore, the reality was that those who were in the most vulnerable categories (cancer, pregnancy, the elderly) would need to stay at home (with relief payments more generous than SSP if wfh not available) and those who were elderly (and therefore less likely to get successfully treated on triage criteria) would need to take precautions. Society would try to function as usual, but with each sector taking as many precautions as were practical - schools could have been very well ventilated or taught kids in some classes outside on rotation over what was a warm and dry summer to allow spreading out of other classes inside (I know, less effective, but still some learning and supervision of extremely vulnerable children that would have been valuable - pragmatism was required from all, but some of the teachers on here were extremely against anything other than being able to do their normal jobs in perfect conditions).

It would also have meant that once someone in a nursing home got Covid, that person was not going to hospital and we had to accept that others in the nursing home might also get it - people would be allowed to take their relatives home if they wanted to wrap them in cotton wool, but otherwise would have to accept a risk. People would be allowed to visit relatives outside, healthcare workers would take mandated precautions and we would test people for covid before putting them back into nursing homes, but the risk would have to be accepted.

This is obviously very unpalatable to tell people, hence why politicians ducked it (but the triaging did happen at the peak anyway and lots of elderly people did not get the ambulance call outs etc), but it has the benefit of honesty. It is basically what the Swedes did, and over the long term they have actually done fine. It also would have saved masses in furlough payments paid to people who could have worked - those sectors, like hospitality, which would have suffered in any event could have been given a more modified furlough, in which people who were not required due to sickness or lack of work kept their service conditions alive in their jobs for the duration of the pandemic (so redundancy available etc), BUT would get tax relief if they sought alternative employment rather than claiming benefits (delivery driver, supermarket worker etc).

It absolutely could have been done.

(Ps I don't think track and trace would ever have worked in the U.K. - we don't keep information about people to the extent of South Korea or require local registration like in Germany. I personally don't think that we should have bothered on a governmental scale - most employers would have developed a policy that enabled those workers who shared a household with someone with a positive covid test to wfh or claim sick pay for the benefit of their workforce. Generous sick pay to stay at home if officially testing positive would have been far more effective - by the second lockdown, many low paid workers could not afford to sit at home on SSP even with a positive test)

@ChatBFP

Yes - but the politicians that were saying that kind of thing was the likes of ReformUK and Great Barrington with links to the far right. And I agree with all the reasons why Great Barrington were criticised. Was there an alternative political group who were supporting what you say?

@DramStokker

No, unfortunately there weren't.

The problem with the GBD is that it was sponsored by right wing economists and had a lot of its impetus in America, which has a very different political climate.

There were some very credible, and not very right wing, scientists and disaster planners who did feel that the pretence that we could basically eradicate covid with the lockdown and tracing measures without significant sacrifice was ill conceived and the medicine would be worse than the cure, but their contribution was marginalised in the GBD and they were shouted down (see Times link below, for example) .

If, instead of the economics (which just couldn't compete with the emotion of the time), opponents of lockdown had focused on the long term non-economic damage, there might have been more traction.

Ultimately, most politicians are short termist, which is why promising a short sharp shock was so appealing. It was nothing of the sort and that should have been obvious to anyone really.

Sweden did do it right and stuck to its plan (which ironically was the same plan we had for pandemics, we just abandoned it)

Some of the emotional stuff pumped out at the time was utterly mad. Describing the death of a 90 year old as "tragic" is pretty hyperbolic (especially when we don't do the same in a bad flu season). This doesn't mean I am keen on euthanasia or hate the elderly, but it's fair to say that things did get massively out of hand on that front.

The GBD also just didn't have enough flesh on the bones as to how to get from A to B. So you end up with a fight over Plan A (zero covid possible) and Plan B (let it rip). Sweden was neither - sensible precaution, whilst allowing as much freedom to the young as possible.

We tried Plan A - we did it badly. But it also just wasn't possible in a country like ours. Show me a single western country that managed it. Those comparable countries who did better (Germany and France had similar excess deaths) only did it due to better healthcare systems and healthier populations to begin with. Most spent less money than us, because they have civil services that worked throughout, have more effective local government and don't have practises of farming out things to expensive management consultants who promise the earth. They also spent far less money on furlough - ironically, people were baying for blood about all the people who were excluded from furlough, but very few people in the mainstream said "hang on, this will cost an absolute fortune and will have to be paid for by our kids and grandkids - is all of this responsible", which is what people really should have said.

But people were in total denial about the sacrifices being made.

So @DramStokker, in short, there wasn't a political group who was advocating Sweden and pitching moderation. That's the issue!

I don't think there was ever a right or wrong way to manage the pandemic. Whatever happened, someone would get hurt.

I was happy during the first lockdown, I felt safe and protected, spent a lot of time in the garden and enjoyed my daily walks.
I had to work during the second (November) and third (jan-March) and that left me with severe ptsd that resulted in a major mental health crisis the following year. I would have preferred being stuck indoors, unable to leave, whereas the OP found that incredibly hard and traumatic.
It was a horrible time and I hope we never have to face another pandemic in my lifetime

@CouldIHaveThatInEnglishPlease

I'm sorry that happened to you. What was the thing that was triggering? Was it the fear and anxiety?