Have we ever had a lockdown before covid?

[Owlyhedgehog]

Just that really....
Im 41 and have never heard of it before, just wondering if there ever was once before covid?

Well.it wasn't a flu virus for a start it as a novel.virus that at the time we knew nothing about and the scenes coming out of Italy were pretty scary

Definitely during the 'Spanish Flu'. And other countries used quarantine/lockdown measures very successfully to control SARS & MERS.

All the people saying “only sick people should be quarantined” are missing the problem that was the government failed to act quick enough to build a testing capability and capacity to see “who was sick” because unlike flu more people with covid are asymptomatic spreaders.

Jenny Harries even said “we don’t need to test because we have the NHS” which was absolute bollocks.
Then the numbers of cases got so high, because the week before lockdown people were still being encouraged into pub’s because they had “sanitised the door handles” for what is a disease spread “like smoke” on droplet and aerosols in shared air.

Lockdown is a ridiculous blunt tool that ended up being necessary to inaction.
The government saw what China and even Italy were up against but good old exceptionalism “it won’t happen here” meant that lower level things were too late to implement.
There wasn’t enough PPE, not enough testing capacity and not enough shoe leather epidemiologists to track down active cases and clusters and isolate them.

Lockdown didn’t cause all the issues and effects since - it’s an inept government and the virus itself.

Now 3 yrs on the money for research for new vaccines/treatment and long covid is drying up, even though 1 in 10 infections (not people) are getting Long Covid.

And if no further investigation and investments are made - the next pandemic - which IS coming - probably before 2035, could be much worse.
This is not about being anxious or scared but rather let’s be prepared so we can avoid high levels of death and further lockdown potential.

Eh lass, those were the days😁

@Youthinkyoureuniqueyourejustastatistic

I agree. My fear is that Daily Telegraph type musings and blaming the whole situation on ‘lockdown’ rather than - ‘the virus and how to manage another pandemic’ means that we’ll have a large section of society who will respond (or rather not respond) purely on their own individualistic terms resulting in a collapsed public health system. Virus wins.

It wasn't a "novel" virus, it was a coronavirus, and we've had those forever and in fact we knew an awful lot about it right from the start, hence Chris Whitty (Chief Medical Officer) telling us in March 2020 that it was a "mild to moderate" virus for most people and that a significant proportion of the population would never catch it.

He put that proportion at 20%, in fact it turned out to be 30%.

I never caught it, I'm clearly immune due to other coronaviruses I've caught over the years.

Strangely, people have completely forgotten what we were told in March 2020. Hysteria took hold and everyone went completely batshit.

Covid had the same IFR (infection fatality rate) as the flu, a bit less in fact, and significantly less for younger people.

All this was known in March 2020.

By definition it was a novel virus “ a new pathogen of a previously know type”
Other coronaviruses include MERS which is thought to have a case fatality rate of about 35%.
The proportion of people who haven’t caught covid yet, isn’t just people who are “immune”, it’s people who are actively still trying to avoid the virus using public health mitigations.

There are still people shielding who if they catch the virus are likely to die, even if they have been vaccinated.
One of those people was my beautiful Aunty who died in Feb this year after avoiding covid so long, her carer, who was known to be covid positive by the agency, visited her for care and she caught covid and suffered them most grim few weeks before her death.

We have had corona virus,s before but Covid was a brand new type of corona virus I dont think.you scan be immune to.something you have never had 🙄
Maybe you caught it and didn't have any symptoms who knows
I have had it once about a year ago
And my oldest son has had it twice
Neither my dh,or younger son have it ,it doesn't mean they.are immune though

We have never previously had the sort of lockdowns that happened in 2020-21. The examples people have given are of smaller and more localised restrictions. Quarantine has been with us for thousands of years, but it isn't lockdown.

Lockdown as we recently practiced would've been completely impossible before the internet age. There's no way it could've happened before what, 2010 ish? At the very earliest.

That’s not entirely true is it?

Look up Typhoid Mary. She was never symptomatic but in the 1800’s scientists had figured out enough to understand she was an asymptomatic carrier and the cause of outbreaks.

different people have different responses to infectious illnesses.

Lockdown was facilitated by tech, it was just about possible for people to get the goods they needed and for the economy to keep going due to delivery services, working from home (I know other people had to do the delivering and not everyone can wfh)

Quarantine was used before that to isolate people with infectious disease - leprosy, TB etc

This oral history about a little girl with TB who was taken from her family for years of quarantine always makes me cry when I think about it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszmrt

Typhoid Mary was the early 1900s but yeah, we'd known about asymptomatic transmission for a loooooong time before covid 19.

I will say that a lot of people seem blissfully unaware of how common asymptomatic viruses are though. There's yet another thread today where people are claiming it's not flu unless you're really ill.

In plague times houses that contained a sick person were locked up - so the healthy people were locked wth the sick to rpevent thm form apssign on the infection.

Given the limited tools to fight bubonic pague it was frequently a death sentence for the whole household and was strongly resisted. Searchers (people paid by the parish to look for infection in houses and report it) were often bribed to conceal or ignore sickness.

Such persuasive caps but not really true.

See for example wartime campaigns about sexually transmitted disease - gonorrhea, herpes, chlamydia, syphilis etc can all be passed on by seemingly healthy people. Or should that be SEEMINGLY HEALTHY PEOPLE

Covid had the same IFR (infection fatality rate) as the flu, a bit less in fact, and significantly less for younger people

All this was known in March 2020

it wasn’t ‘known’, it had been observed. In a virus that hadn’t been in existence for more than six months. In a global population with immune systems that had zero exposure to it.

back to the OP, no, I don’t think medical lockdowns on a huge scale were a ‘thing’ prior to 2020. Quarantines certainly were though, we had TB hospitals where people were taken for extended periods and in the years immediately prior to corona hospitals, schools, and care homes would quarantine strictly in the case of outbreaks for things like Norovirus or measles.

Well as observed correctly the scale of lockdowns we had were faciltiated in large part by tech. Even 10 - 15 years ago it would not have been possible to have so many people working from home or getting food and other essentials delivered so quickly and easily.

I think that those limitations would have meant a difference response as we simply would not have been able to support such a lockdown without the tech we now have.

Lockdown was facilitated by tech, it was just about possible for people to get the goods they needed and for the economy to keep going due to delivery services, working from home (I know other people had to do the delivering and not everyone can wfh)

They did indeed, but I think the major factor was that tech facilitated enough of the population to stay at home, and in conditions that meant they'd be likely to observe the regulations. I'm glad you mention delivery services, because I think the vital role they played in getting millions of people to mostly stay out of the way isn't talked about enough. There's no way the population would've stuck it for so long without them!

That is true - I wonder how observant people would have been if there was no social media or easy communication via things like WhatsApp and Zoom.

My whatsApp groups of close friends were often the only thing that got me thorugh the day - the easy conversational style of WhatsApp in particular came in to its own in lockdown.

First, there is a major difference between healthy people and asymptomatic people.
Second, it wasn't just "a government", it was pretty much every government on the planet. That is one hell of a conspiracy considering those self same governments regularly fail to agree on much simpler things, like the definition of a sausage. It's also fair to say that pulling off such a massive conspiracy would have required the direct involvement and collaboration of millions of people from heads of state right down to junior civil servants. Where are all the whistle blowers then, remotely credible ones anyway? But hey, don't let common sense get in the way of your unhinged obsession.
Maybe, with the benefit of hindsight, better decisions could have been made. Not by you though, I guarantee that.

This very true ,no zoom meetings,teams,wfh,being able to.teach lessons on line etc, would have made things very difficult.

@PinkCherryBlossoms

Globally, there were countries who
didn't have access to technology as we do - but were still in lockdown. Technology made it easier for us. I read reports that people were shot in Africa for not complying. Poor communities in India did not have Ocado.

Covid had a significantly higher IFR than flu for the UK population, and the mutations during 2020 made it even worse, though it was biased more towards older people - Covid is much safer for infants than flu is.

Only repeated waves of infection and vaccination brought it down to the same as flu for our relatively old population.

But regardless of raw fatality rate, letting a highly contagious and debilitating disease run completely unchecked through a dense population with zero immunity is a recipe for disaster for society and the health system. Should they have loosened up earlier? Maybe. Did they make some questionable choices? Absolutely. But they absolutely had to take drastic action in March 2020.

@WhalePolo but they do have mobile phones.

And a lot of developing actually fared better than Europe and the US as they have younger populations. Don't foget the biggest risk factor by far for getting sick or dying from covid is age.

But the lockdowns would never have arisen if the most powerful countries, who have the most sophisticated technological access, hadn't implemented them and set the agenda.

Although actually even in the poorest societies, you'd be surprised how many people have mobiles and Internet access. They aren't able to conduct such large parts of their economic activity remotely, but the technology is certainly present.

Eyam, Derbyshire 1660 something.