Now we are a coupe of years on. Do you think the Covid lockdowns should have happened

[Rainbowdeer]

I don’t we should have shut down the schools and I don’t agree with the lockdowns
the damage has been far too great
esp regarding children’s mental health

the economy been damaged far too much

work culture has totally changed

Lockdown was needed in my opinion. The waste of money like building the nightingale hospital and maintaining it and those worthless ppe was not.

Companies got greedy and the government should have done more to prevent profiteering.

Well our ivf clinic closed, to be on standby. It was staffed by nurses and doctors. It stayed empty. The nightingale hospitals has staffing plans. If they did not it was a total fucking waste of money establishing them. Was that just pissing money away? If so, then why was it not flagged at the time? There were plans for staffing.

I would have kept schools open. Especially during spring/ summer terms when classes could move outdoors.

I would have pumped extra money into social services provision,as home visits became essential, not voluntary. Women and children were trapped in intolerable circumstances. Unacceptable.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/nurse-shortage-causes-nightingale-hospital-to-turn-away-patients

There weren’t staff for the Nightingale Hospitals - the staff were already working in other NHS hospitals.

Schools couldn’t remain open as they couldn’t guarantee they had enough teachers available as many also got Covid.

All of those saying schools should have stayed open:

• You would have had teachers and support staff dying. The latter, especially, are often older.
• Kids are terrible at hygiene and constantly touch each other, even in secondary schools, transmissions would have rampaged and you would have ended up with schools shut because of lack of staff. There was no PPE available, and the safety measures in schools were laughable because the job could not be done effectively within the restrictions.
• Transmissions into the community would have multiplied. Those kids happily spreading Covid everywhere would have brought the virus home, too - affecting everyone who was immunocompromised or elderly.
• Open schools would have neccessitated more mixing of the community, especially at primary level, making lockdown as such a farce.
• The knock-on effect would have been something else. Open schools, so why not open childcare? Open childcare, why not open clubs? Each of those with cleaners, caretakers, maintenance, admin, IT etc. Soon you would have had most people in connection with children back at work - again, children are terrible at hygiene, so Covid would have spread like wildfire.

There is a reason why head lice, noro, colds, flu, measles etc. are most commonly found in schools, and once there, spread across the whole class and year group.

Children were not super spreaders of this virus and tested negative much faster than adults.

There is a middle ground between schools closing for the majority and staying open.

I think a lot of people are cross that schools stayed shut while overseas travel and other non essential stuff reopened.

It was a warm, dry year and, once waves calmed down classes outside would have been possible. The school year could have changed to run school all spring summer early autumn then close over winter. There were no imaginative solutions.

Nightingale hospitals were propaganda to both frighten and reassure the electorate. You can’t run intensive care units as stand alone operations, you need theatres and other specialists (eg renal, cardiology, specialist imaging) on site. The sickest patients need to be managed in standard hospitals. We also didn't and don't have an excess of NHS staff to send to these centres to work, most hospitals run on short staffing and their staff were needed to work in their own departments.

The only way they might have been helpful was to discharge bed blockers to, although it would have been much less than ideal to manage frail, distressed elderly in aircraft hangar style buildings.

I have posted evidence (proper evidence consisting of academic papers, articles in serious newspapers etc) showing that schools are one of the biggest sources of contagion. Anyone who works in a school can see this anyway; you have groups of 30 intermingling and swapping classes all day in close proximity to one another.

I agree about outdoor classes in the summer months though. However, outdoor classes will not have the same learning impact, although they will still fulfill a useful social function.

The thing is the r number needs to be kept as low as possible for as long as possible so, if you want to open schools, other measures need to be stricter and lockdown periods will be longer and harder.

There seems to be a misconception among many that the ‘old’ can isolate and the young live their lives like normal. Firstly, in most communities age groups intermingle. Secondly, the risks to the middle aged and other vulnerable wasn’t minimal. The fact that so few died was a triumph of medical treatment in a hospital setting. Plenty of relatively young people needed basic care like oxygen, fluids and steroids to recover (at least two of my colleagues in their 40s and 50s). If hospitals had been overwhelmed the picture would have been a lot grimmer.

We do have choices, but the choices come a long time before a pandemic. We need far more hospitals, doctors and nurses, and much more medical care available in the community (like Germany had). But that means investing now, and some of you paying more taxes, which would also interfere with you ‘living your lives’.

People can also prepare a lot more themselves by thinking how they could cope better if it happened again. Judging by that horrid series of threads in the pandemic where the well off prided themselves in mixing with friends and family and moaned about the lack of gyms, beauty salons and restaurants, a little bit of reading of some stoic philosophy might come in helpful. Also, dare I say it, getting a job!

I agree with @ReformMyArse

Also that first summer hospital intake was very low

If the reasoning is capacity we had a large amount which would have facilitated schools

Judging by that horrid series of threads in the pandemic where the well off prided themselves in mixing with friends and family

Not seen those, but speaking as a resident of a low income area I can assure you there was plenty of that going on at the other end of the financial spectrum too! Mind you, we weren't lacking in unofficial beauty salons during lockdown either. Especially in 2021. It went home based, that's all. I didn't partake, but it was definitely there.

I am in no doubt that lockdowns caused much more harm than good, and this is a hill I will die on. However, I might have grudgingly respected the possible need for them if the government hadn't behaved appallingly in so many ways:

Deliberately frightening and gaslighting the public. By doing this, they painted themselves into a corner, and made it politically impossible to ease lockdown.
Condemning so many self-employed people to financial ruin, after saying "nobody will be left behind". Ditto Nick Gibb saying "no school child will be left behind".
Actively stifling debate.
Wasting police time on checking people were not going for walks: I suspect that some incidents, like the Derbyshire coffee, have the government's fingerprints all over them.
Perpetuating myths such as "one hour only for exercise". That one might have been accidental, but they made no attempt to correct the record.
Encouraging the public to grass on each other.
Deliberately playing divide and conquer.
Imposing so many nonsensical rules, such as closing playgrounds, banning "non-essential shopping", and the way England, Wales and Scotland seemed to compete on this.
Constantly moving the goalposts, to justify ongoing lockdown.
The complete refusal to admit that lockdowns would cause huge damage. This alone is one of the most scary things for me.
Partygate: and what we found out about might only be the tip of the iceberg; probably lots of other ministers and MPs were at it as well, and had fewer enemies than Johnson to grass on them.
Barnard Castle.
Bullying the public into taking the vaccine.
Infantilising the public, with three-word slogans.
Using mountains of plastic on screens and signs.
Making their decisions by leaking them to the press, and testing the public reaction. I would have respected them far more if they had said "this is what we believe is the right thing to do, here is why, and we understand that it seems controversial." They could have done this to end the first lockdown much sooner, explaining that it would be better to have the wave in summer. Instead, they decided to appease the baying mob, by trying to convince them "we can send the virus packing if we lock down hard and long enough".
They talked about reopening schools in June, but the baying mob screamed "Noooooooooooooo!!!!!!!". So they could then say "we tried to reopen schools in June, but the public wouldn't let us".

The list goes on and on.

And the final one (for now) is that they are still refusing to admit that lockdowns caused massive damage. This convinces me that they might be used again, maybe for a totally different reason, which is why I feel we have a duty to resist them.

The other problem with schools staying open is that parents don’t send their children in anyway.

On the day the school I was teaching in opted to close (I think about a week before lockdown), I was teaching to half full classrooms, even though there were to date, very few cases.

A lot of the damage done was by parents and pupils deciding that, because schools had to close, schooling was thereafter optional. This was exacerbated by lazy heads not making enough effort to keep schools open during the teachers strike.

To be honest, much as I think teachers, doctors and nurses are underpaid, I don’t think professionals should strike. The strikes have been disastrous.

But, back to the Covid period itself, lockdowns are either government imposed, fair (at least they should be) and co-ordinated or self imposed, unfair (either driven via fear or a sense of social responsibility, with the rest paying no cost) and chaotic.

I would be immensely surprised if, after a plethora enquiries across the World, any response other than lockdowns is put in place for a novel pandemic virus plan.

It's easy to look back with hindsight but that first year noone knew what was going to happen. We didn't have a vaccine and the virus was mutating and we didn't know if it would get more or less serious.

Nightingale hospitals were built to be holding areas for when the hard decision had to be made about who we treated. They were were for those it was decided not to treat so the staffing was just around trying to make people comfortable, not healing people.

I would be immensely surprised if, after a plethora enquiries across the World, any response other than lockdowns is put in place for a novel pandemic virus plan.

That would be very short sighted, if so. Let's assume that lockdown was indeed the best choice to deal with covid, and is shown to be so when we know what all the positives and negatives were. It's still a policy that requires a specific set of circumstances. There's no guarantee they'd exist with a future novel pandemic virus.

I can understand why governments wouldn't be keen to spell out that if it's bad enough, normal society would collapse anyway whatever we do. So that's not likely to be explicitly spelled out in pandemic planning, for obvious reasons. But it's also quite conceivable that a novel pandemic virus in any given country wouldn't be met with a population who were willing to lock down, or a society that could and would pay for it. Because actually, lockdowns aren't government imposed in a society like ours, they're more government supervised. They only happen if the public are willing.

It’s all very well being wise after the event, but we were in completely uncharted territory. Did anyone you know die of COVID, or has anyone suffered long lasting effects?

I dare say that would affect how you feel about lockdowns. I know only one person who ended up in hospital from Covid, and only one who was really ill, but before vaccinations were available I well remember being hyper cautious.

We didn't know anyone who died "of" covid or suffering long term health effects of it from "normal" settings.

We know plenty of people who suffered due to the lockdowns and restrictions. It hastened my MIL's dementia and took away her independence. I had two small business clients who took their own lives because the restrictions bankrupted them and meant them losing their homes. Lots of other small business clients had to give up their businesses and took work in supermarkets or delivery jobs instead. My small accountancy practice has lost over half of our client base - lots of small shops, guest houses, cafes etc - closed and never re-opened. My neighbour's mother broke her hip and caught covid IN hospital where she should have been protected but there was apparently few precautions being taken, and ended up dying of it!

We knew loads of people who caught covid, and quickly recovered after a few days of feeling rough. It spread through my son's Uni flat of 8 people and they barely knew they had it, other than a few cold symptoms for a few days.

Yes, I fully appreciate "some" people who didn't fit the risk profile (health issues, overweight, elderly) did suffer badly from it, but the vast majority of younger and healthier people weren't badly affected at all - they were more badly affected by the lockdowns and restrictions, i.e. lack of financial support if in business or freelancers, damage to education, damage to socialising, and mental health arising from that.

To protect against future pandemics, I think there should be a strong message of personal responsibility, i.e. keep yourself as fit and healthy as possible (move more, eat less, lose weight, etc)., increase your back up savings, be careful with job/career choices if you are vulnerable etc. If more people protected themselves, then there'd be fewer people who'd need to be protected by society generally and we could "target" support at the most vulnerable rather than the scatter gun approach where people got help they didn't need, were restricted when they didn't need to be, where some people didn't get help they needed, etc etc.

People had covid on their death certificates if they were tested positive a few weeks before but their death was unrelated to covid. Someone in my town died in a RTA and even he was tested positive a month earlier. If he didn't have covid and had the same accident, he would have died anyway as his liver and spleen were ruptured.

No doubt instructed to do that to make the official statistics look as if Covid was causing more deaths than reality, to justify the restrictions/lockdowns and frighten people into compliance.

It was established very quickly that death certificates were "with covid" rather than "due to covid" which is blatant data manipulation.

It's like my c-section years ago, where I had a c-section due to pre-eclampsia, but I saw my paper file which had the "elective" box ticked on the front of it, there being a binary choice of "elective" or "not elective", so despite me not having a choice (well in theory I had a choice), but the statistics would make it look as if I was one of the many claimed to be "too posh to push" statistic that is often peddled in the media!

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics!

The measure to look at was excess deaths, which was nearly 100% correlated. Covid caused many deaths as anyone who worked in an ICU unit will tell you.

Fear was used as a tool, as were silly 3 word slogans. But they needed to enforce certain behaviours.

The alternative is much harder forms of enforcement using the police and/or army, and we tried to avoid that.

And as for the conspiracy theories of preparing us for other lockdowns, they haven’t happened.

How many excess deaths were due to people being unable to access NHS healthcare for other issues, though, such as cancer, etc?

On the other hand, how many deaths in the years after if the healthcare system had collapsed completely?

Is there any reason the healthcare system would have permanently collapsed, as opposed to have been temporarily overwhelmed in some departments?

I think that a lot of people these days want to always assign fault when things go wrong and the government is always easy to blame.

Boris was clearly the worst possible leader for Covid being scientifically illiterate and lazy, but lockdown was advised by an expert panel using their knowledge. Virtually everywhere in the world did similar with very minor variations based on population demographics and amount of medical care available.

Decisions had to be made in very tight time frames with imperfect knowledge and, if you took a risk and it went wrong, the consequences would have been disastrous.

I do think lockdown did so much damage as people have, to some extent, lost the resilience they used to have. It is also the fault of the internet and 24/7 exposure to messaging.

From what I understand, yes, through much higher rates of death, long COVID, PTSD or burn-out in the healthcare staff, which would than take years to replace with fewer candidates still and you would not have enough people to teach them either.

There's not really any evidence to suggest that would have happened at all though. If anything, getting the worst over with quicker might have caused less long term damage.

Are you suggesting that this unnamed person's RTA death was recorded as being a result of covid? If so, how do you know this?