It's been five years since the pandemic and I have questions

[BaggyTrousing]

• will Paddington ever be investigated for his role in the departure of our dear old queen?
• was the woman who wrote "and the people stayed home" ever taken to task for her contribution to the awfulness?
• what about that nurse who was roaring about bread in a supermarket car park? Hopefully shunned and avoided at least
• how do you all feel now about protecting the NHS?

The way people deny the seriourness of the pandemic (like they do with climate change and unsustainable over-consumption) and resist any attempts to limit the damage because they value personal freedom more than collective responsibility (since the UK mentally is just an American version of Europe) is why the UK unsurprisingly had one of the worst COVID death rates globally, and also illustrates why the Swedish approach of allowing people to deal with it how they see fit would have been a terrible idea.

The applauding of the NHS by people who at the same time spent decades voting for right wing low tax governments and object to paying more tax to improve funding of public services, a classic example of national-scale hypocrisy.

The next pandemic will bring about the same attitudes and results because humans are terrible at owning mistakes and learning from them.

I remember my sister having a row with a woman because she walked down the same aisle as her in Iceland. I think sis told her to fuck off 😆😆

Collective responsibility, but not for all the vulnerable people we threw under the bus with the restrictions based approach obviously. Only for the ones we prioritised. The damage to the collateral isn't even worth mentioning.

I'm on the left, but the frequency with which the argument you espouse here gets made is strong evidence of just how badly the mainstream left did at making any kind of cautious approach to restrictions. That was bad for all of us. There were some downsides and criticisms that the right wing were never going to make, so the general public didn't get to hear them in mainstream discourse.

A friend's garden shed was in one tier but her house was in another tier at one point. We considered a meet up in the garden shed.

Most people panic bought bog roll. I panic bought wine.

What I would like to know most seriously though is - why have some of my colleagues STILL not learnt to unmute and mute themselves on Teams meetings?!

We didn’t but you really didn’t need to go out to see what was going on.

Not sure if you've worked for government, but honestly, having a clicker is cutting edge technology

As a single person the effects to me: I know of two fatalities due to COVID. People I knew, had connections to others. #1 lost a 40 years old daughter, that left 4 young daughters. #2 lost her MIL.

I myself have a 44 year old son who had 2 post COVID strokes and the resulting heart damage. It was/is real to me. And I live with the terror every day of my child not having a full life.

I think the Welsh rule was that we could only go out once a day for exercise. I don't think even that had a time limit on it. But I may be wrong.

I have a back problem that gets significantly worse if I don't exercise in the right way (swimming, mainly) and at one point was driving to the nearest swimmable body of water (which was in the middle of nowhere) with my medical notes in the car in case I was stopped! It didn't help my paranoia about being stopped that some Welsh minister (I forget which) explicitly said that they didn't want people wild swimming.

I wouldn't see the issue with a light-hearted thread about over zealous airport or concert venue security, no. That's the analogy to the Covid restrictions you're making, right?

I'm in a longitudinal research project. Every so often I get a short questionnaire which asks, among other things, how much I believe in various conspiracy theories (they don't call them that, but they are - most of them are your standard crazy stuff!) They put the Covid lab leak in there as a conspiracy theory and it's been weird to myself watching my answers go from "I think there could be some truth in this," to "Yes, this seems likely!"

I think there's definitely been a quiet shift about it in the media etc.

I remember panicking because we were doing our house up to rent. There were 3 electricians doing a rewire at the front plus me and two friends painting at the back. More people than I'd seen in months and it felt a bit like a party!
There was a knock on the door and the person declared himself to be from the council. Cue confused panic at the sheer number of people in the house about to be witnessed by the man from the council. It turned out he was only there to remove a wasp nest from the attic. So he duly removed the wasp nest and then all six of us were crowded around him peering into the bag he'd placed it in while he did a show and tell.
It was a glorious day.

Nope and I have declined Apples reminders too on my Watch

So quiet that they think we don't notice. Yet more evidence that the media is very much manipulated to "create" a public mood.

I have a health condition so I did continue to wear a mask once restrictions eased. My choice.

the lockdown nonesense listed on this thread relates to the illogical and inconsistent rules applied illogically and inconsistently or heavily handed. And let’s not start by listing the many rule breakers done by the rule makers at the heart of government.

The initial lockdown I support. There was a crisis in both China and Italy which we could see every day on our TVs. We didn’t know what we were dealing with and it didn’t look like it was just ‘an old and vulnerable’ disease especially when the big Covid ignition in Europe seems to stem from a ski resort.

but I think there should have been an earlier realisation that the elderly and vulnerable needed shielding not continue the shutdown of society and the economy. And definitely once the vaccination roll out started that should have eased all the restrictions.

I cannot forgive the NHS for shutting down for anything other than Covid with all the missed treatments and earlier interventions.

i can’t forget or forgive the impact on a generation of children who had friendships, mental health and learning disrupted.

And I will never forgive the tossers who made the decisions that lead to wholesale corruption (including MPs and peers) and incurred costs to our economy of c £400 billion. Financial ineptitude on a grand scale by the party of alleged probity. We and the generations after that will be much poorer because of this. Print money all you like but it has to be made real at some point. This was ultimately a vanity project for Boris, Rishi, Matt et all who wanted their ‘ Churchillian moment’.

Entirely agree with all that.

With you on the corruption, and there are lots of economic decisions from the period I don't agree with. But if we were having a lockdown, that also meant furlough. Enough people had to be paid enough money to stay at home and behave, and that's not cheap. It was always going to be really expensive once we'd gone down that route. I'm not saying it couldn't have been any cheaper, but lockdown creates a bill to pay.

It does indeed think is why I only agreed with lockdown & the furlough scheme until Covid vaccinations were available to the vulnerable.

People being furloughed went on way too long because the country couldn’t afford it.

The highest priority groups weren't fully vaccinated until what, March 2021? I know furlough went on til September, but as I understand it the large majority of uptake was during restrictions periods.

It's true we could've shaved a few months off, since restrictions ended totally in July in England and hospitality fully reopened in May. There were 1.6 million people on furlough at the end of July 2021. I don't think they were all working for airlines.

I know there are also some people who just supported the first lockdown due to not knowing what we were dealing with, and would support furlough then but full normality thereafter.

The farce of tv presenters sitting apart on the sofa when clearly the studios had cameramen, sound engineers, floor managers all in the same close vicinity.

Valence, Whitty, Boris and Co going through the theatre of separate podia for the daily update, but walking out in each other’s slipstream.

My neighbour flies business jets and was busier than ever during Covid flying the great and the good to exotic climates to get away from the tedious and inconvenient lockdowns. Several months afterwards, the BBC were interviewing the president of the Seychelles and he was openly discussing how they’ve kept the islands more exclusive by only allowing selected clientele to holiday there during Covid (whilst we were all at home obeying rules and not drinking coffee outside!)

Never again, I’m afraid.

The farce of tv presenters sitting apart on the sofa when clearly the studios had cameramen, sound engineers, floor managers all in the same close vicinity.

I work in TV.

Everyone in TV worked to social distancing with much smaller crews meaning making TV was incredibly challenging and complicated. It wasn’t business as usual with the presenters just sitting apart for show whatsoever, you’re completely wrong on this.

Then there's was the sheer amount of used masks found discarded in the streets. I used to pick them up and put them in the bin.

I'd agree with most of that, but I remember boris on TV saying yes, people will die. And he was handed his arse, on here and in the press worldwide. So he had to backtrack. As far as I can see boris was all for letting covid run through the population and whoever was still standing after, was good to go.

It wasnt ever going to be a churchillian moment, or Tony Blair's war moment. It was meant to be survival of the fittest.
Financial ineptitude is practised by all parties.

Greens if they ever get in will spend hundreds of billions of your money on green initiatives.

Labour, I can see that moving the rules to borrow up to 50 billion extra isnt exactly probity.

And torys, always lined the pockets of their mates, took every advantage here.

Like most countries and leaders did. Just read the Spanish papers from the time, the German ones, all the governments were slated for dodgy deals. I think only scandi countries were relatively scandal free.

Ok, thanks. I take that comment back then and stand corrected.

It just seemed from images released at the time of off camera, there was a lot of posturing by presenters - especially on daytime tv.

Well I can’t speak for every single studio but I know our teams took it incredibly seriously, if a crew went down with Covid it was a bloody nightmare so nobody wanted that, and news/radio coverage was classed as essential to continue and mostly impossible to do remotely from home.

Our rules were always higher than the government regulations at the time, it wasn’t taken lightly.

And I guess also from a reputational perspective no broadcaster wanted to get accused of not following social distancing guidelines either, so potentially they did seat presenters even further apart than necessary to avoid accusations of not following what people at home were.

I couldn't muster the energy to get cross at Cummings.
His hypocrisy meant that Boris had to decree that we could now travel for exercise and life got so much better.