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?

@WhenLifeGivesYouLimes

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.

You're quite correct, but I think @EmilyBrontesGhost is simply not worth the time really. Hairy hands is my guess.

Used to happen all the time.

During the plagues and the Black Death there were lockdowns. Villages and towns were shut, families were barricaded into homes and left to die.

@PinkCherryBlossoms Indeed - for example pentration of mobile banking and payments in rural communities in Africa is actually higher than in a lot of western countries - things like MPESA are very popular even with very remote subsistence farmers.

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

@EmilyBrontesGhost you may or may not have caught it - or you might catch it yet

My OH and I 'only' caught it in March this year. I wouldn't have known I had it AT ALL if a friend I had been with told me she had tested positive. OH was more affected than I was - but we thought he simply had a bad cold - but duly tested when my friend contacted me

Who knows whether that was the first time we had it or not? I had been in contact several times in 2022 with covid - at a wedding where around 50% of people came down with it, including someone I was talking face to face with most of the evening, also at a funeral and wake where several people actually had Covid at the time ( only found that out later). Apparently I didn't catch it - but maybe I did and didn't know

Just saying.....

African countries have been implementing restrictions to control virtual spread very much independently from whatever agenda is set by other countries - and have been used to that for years. A migrant worker in India is going to experience a very different lockdown in terms of access to food and technology than your experience in the U.K.

No, I haven't caught it.

And if I haven't caught it in the last 3+ years then clearly I'm immune.

Chris Whitty told us in March 2020 that a significant portion of the population would NEVER catch the virus. He put it at 20%, in fact it was 30% of people who have prior immunity.

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

Did it? My memory is of overwhelmed hospitals and high death rates.

I presume that you never had any of the vaccinations either then?

Once lockdowns got started, no country was implementing them independently of outside influence.

@EmilyBrontesGhost If you haven't had vaccinations or Covid - I think you mean you have natural immunity - which is not the same as prior immunity?

No, of course not.

I haven't had a vaccine in over 40 years.

@PinkCherryBlossoms

but that’s what you’d expect in a global pandemic. That doesn’t mean that an African country can’t implement its own restrictions for Ebola independently of outside influence.

No! There has never been a lockdown before as far as I know. Definitely not in my lifetime, or not in the UK.
In the past, (medieval times) there was quarantine during times of plague, but this applied only to those who were sick, not to the general healthy population. And not to the entire population of the country!
Here I will say, I remember the 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreak. I was at school (nothing closed). I remember lots of school friends being off sick in turn.
I didn't get it.

I didn't say anything about ebola and don't have an opinion on that point.

Or she's had it and simply not known or tested for it.

@PinkCherryBlossoms

No- you were talking about lockdowns, and so was I. This thread is about lockdowns.

This was the issue though. The sick were not all being isolated. Sick elderly patients were being discharged into care homes and travellers were still allowed to fly in without being tested. Contact tracing was a joke. Basically the lockdown was to cover up for government failures to kerb the spread.

Our discussion began when you responded to a post of mine about covid lockdowns. As I said, I've made no reference to ebola and don't have a view on African responses to localised disease outbreaks.

Oh yeah and despite being told by the Chinese early on that children did not tend to show symptoms when infected, the government still insisted on certain symptoms being present to qualify for a free test. So they mismanaged the spread and put us in lockdown to make up for it.

None during my lifetime, but I believe something similar was implemented during the post-WW1 flu pandemic. I vaguely recall my mother-in-law (born in the 1920s) telling me that her mother talked about it.

Oh for god's sake. Quarantine for healthy people is the whole fucking point of quarantine. You don't know if they are incubating the disease or not, so they quarantine for the incubation period.

OP, until the MMR, quarantine was totally normal if there was a chance you'd come into contact for someone with measles, mumps or rubella. This usually lasted 2 weeks.

The village of Eyam had a lockdown during the plague.

London had a lockdown in December 1952 due to the smog - there was no transport, no emergency services, and everyone was advised to stay in their homes until the air cleared.

In 1831, when there was a bad cholera outbreak in the North of England, the South had a quarantine on all ships coming into southern ports.

This academic article is an interesting read:

In 1965 Blackburn has a sort of lockdown. No-one was allowed in or out of the town due to a polio outbreak. There was a mass vaccination programme and it was quite short lived.

There was not a lockdown in 2020. There were restrictions, some severe.

I'd count the Black Death restrictions and some local ones in the same category. Though I doubt the government of the day partied and ignored others, or were as corrupt.

Certainly there have been measures mandated by the Governments and ‘policed’ by the local Medical Officers for Health when there were outbreaks of infectious disease, especially prior to antibiotics.
This one of six pages of tables for Transmission of Infectious Disease circa approx 1951, you can see how ‘apparently healthy people’ who had been in contact with the sufferer were required to stay in quarantine- can you imagine the impact on school and work that would have today?

@PinkCherryBlossoms

You stated this.

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.

And I disagreed saying that African countries implement lockdowns for disease control independently of powerful countries setting an agenda. I gave an example, I’m not just talking about Ebola.

Lockdown is not some kind of agenda used by powerful countries, it’s a controversial restriction used to control the spread of deadly viruses and stop health systems from collapsing.

I also said that lockdowns were experienced by those in very different circumstances than for you in the U.K. where there were no food delivery services and easy laptop type access.