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

If the acute respiratory support departments and ICUs were completely overwhelmed, what makes you think that would result in "getting the worst over quicker"?

The person’s sister told me and showed me a photo of his death certificate

It's well-known that people who died and tested positive for Covid (or had tested up to 28 days before, until the goalposts were moved) were recorded as "Covid deaths". I'm sure this was a deliberate move, to keep the fears high, and to justify Boris's staged grovel about one hundred thousand. There was also a point when the Covid death count suddenly went down a few thousand, when the government moved the goalposts.

Statistics can always be manipulated to suit an agenda. There's an awful lot of truth in the saying "lots of statistics are made up on the spot". Just like Gove made up the figure of "1 hour a day for exercise" on the spot, and scientists have admitted that "two metres" for social distancing was made up on the spot, with no prior calculation.

@scalt,

Yes, the deaths with Covid was silly, as well as some of the messaging.

But, realistically, our deaths and hospitalisations and fatality rates pretty much tallied with all developed nations, so they only changed things at the margins.

But they allowed this silly debate about whether Covid was just a ‘cold’ and the government had different motivations other than to protect its citizens.

And how on earth are people supossed to do all that
The State.................look after yourself Dont smoke dont drink. Keep your weight down and excersise and work full time.
Also The State............... run yourself ragged caring for your elderly relative when we unsafely discharge them from hospital at 2am.

Icu dr. 100% yes. Bad enough as it was, dread to think without lock down

Yes, but not as extreme as they were. Schools should've stayed opened for example, and people being outside, in open air spaces shouldn't have been restricted .

Schools didn’t have enough healthy teachers to stay open.

Protecting citizens isn't easy though as you could demand very few deaths

It would take draconian action with bigger harms

Plus it's about cost. If another pandemic happened now there wouldn't be the ability to do the same

Trying to weigh stuff up wouldn't count as we'd not be able to shut sectors or offer furlough

Nonsense. There was never going to be a scenario in which all teachers had covid at all times. Individual classes could have closed as needed.

@EasternStandard ,

‘Plus it's about cost. If another pandemic happened now there wouldn't be the ability to do the same

Trying to weigh stuff up wouldn't count as we'd not be able to shut sectors or offer furlough’

This is a kind of fantasy that we have some floor on our living standards. If you think of what countries have gone through in national emergencies (wars, previous pandemics), you can see that we could halve our gdp/capita and still live through it and rebuild.

Luckily Covid 19 turned out to be remarkably mild in terms of pandemics so, hopefully, it will have acted as a warning shot across our bows. Also, hopefully, as pandemics average one per century, we won’t get to see it tested out, as I think it would be grim.

I think no they shouldn’t have (though had a very good lockdown!!)
and statistics on health and economic outcomes also show they shouldn’t have happened.
There are also reverberating impacts on the job market and people’s mental health.
Even covid jabs are being outlawed in various places (including a number of US states) as they are being acknowledged for the non-covid preventing myocarditis inducing pieces of shlt ‘conspiracy theorists’ were warning us about.

Covid was an overall shlt show, a massive exercise in authoritarianism and fear mongering in the masses overreacting to something now widely acknowledged to be lab made

@Parker231

One of my keyworker groups had 17 children, tbh it would've been easier to have the whole class.

And over 7m have died- hardly fear mongering! DH is a doctor and worked on Covid wards. He’ll never forget the days and nights trying to keep so many patients alive.

Yours reads like some kind of quasi religious belief that lockdown is something that just falls into place, rather than being a complex policy response that the public have to actively support.

The pp was talking about a pandemic now, rather than one when everyone who lived through covid is dead (and there's also concerns that we'll be getting them more regularly from now on, so once a century may be optimistic). If you think people in 2025 would go along with any of this again on the basis that hey, humans have survived wars, it's not her post that's a fantasy.

@ThePartingOfTheWays ,

I really don’t think you understand how a national emergency works at all.

Far better to nudge people to behave in a certain way than to force them but, if they won’t, the army and police together are perfectly capable of keeping people at home.

I am sure, had people disobeyed, the r number stayed above one, and hospitals became overwhelmed, there were contingency plans to enforce the lockdown.

There is zero quasi religious about epidemiology, it is pure maths and science. And, until you develop a vaccine, the only method to combat it is behaviour modification, voluntary or enforced.

My post was about affordability now. We've had statements on the lack of resilience for another similar event. We are in a riskier position wrt funds

When people say we must protect citizens it sounds to me like the no one should die narrative that I think some politicians embraced

That's not possible and it wasn't the aim anyway

Going back to cost purely financial I think it's around £400bn without scrolling back to that useful post

If a pandemic happened now we wouldn't have the same to cover the huge amount put in place eg shutting sectors / furlough that happened last time

Clearly you do not understand how small our army and police are compared to the population. Or that lockdown actually requires lots of people not to be at home, but to be out at work, which rather complicates matters- if we could all stay at home, things like shooting anyone who happened to be on the streets would be easier. But we require some people to be out of their homes, for work.

There are about 170,000 police in the UK, plus 75k army, some of whom are abroad. And 25k reserves. That's 270k total, so perhaps about 90k on duty at any one time, best case scenario? Meanwhile, there are about 65 million others living here. That's not enough to prevent people from going into each other's houses if they want to. It's one to about every 3 miles of paved road. None of this is epidemiology, incidentally.

This is why the last government focused so hard on trying to manipulate people into behaving. They understood that the state had no chance of enforcing lockdown on a population who didn't want it. It's particularly implausible in a democracy, but even the Chinese government had to bend to the will of the population in the end.

Your problem is that you're confusing what you think would be the best thing to happen in a new pandemic with what would happen. Not the same thing!

Yes, the lockdowns were the right thing. Without them, thousands more people would have died or gone without care. I can't understand why people think any different.

I have a relative who was sedated and intubated. Without that care she would have died. Without the lockdown, that care would not have been available.

And you're right.

Even if we assume lockdown, with the associated need for furlough, was the best policy response to covid, that's a different point to whether and when we can do it again. There are some cards you can't play very often.

@ThePartingOfTheWays ,

I don’t know why you think the police and army couldn’t enforce a lockdown. Look what they did in the riots. It doesn’t take many people sent to mail for meaningful terms to change most people’s behaviour.

Even in Paris, during Covid, the police stopped people and checked their papers, where they were going etc. It worked.

And you aren’t even trying to be 100% effective, just effective enough to get the r number below one which, with a disease like Covid, is easily achievable.

Far better to nudge people to behave in a certain way than to force them but, if they won’t, the army and police together are perfectly capable of keeping people at home.
Really? Army and police perfectly capable of keeping people at home? In this densely populated country? With the police cut to the bone, probably many of them off sick with covid (if the propaganda is to believed) and barely able to deal with the real crimes which happen every day, as frequently ranted about on Mumsnet? While I think there's a certain truth in "persuasion is better than force", there's persuasion, and the monumental scale of gaslighting, frightening, deceiving and toying with the public's minds which the government deployed.

I'll believe in the police and army forcibly containing the public if it happens, not before. If large parts of the country had really and truly rebelled, I think there's no way the police or the army could have contained it. I'm sure the government knew this, and it's probably why they did some well-publicised police raids, to make people believe that this was possible, and why they went all out on frightening the public, and threw everything they had at this. This was often talked about by those who saw it as their duty to resist: a common mantra was "there are far more of us than there are of them (the police)". I saw with my own eyes that the number of anti-lockdown protesters easily numbered hundreds of thousands, even though the BBC tried to tell us otherwise.

Going back to the lockdowns, once again, I wouldn't have minded them so much if the government had been more sensible about the way they had communicated with the public. Whether they intended to or not, and whether the threat was genuine or not (I don't know either way), they made it look as if they were experimenting with authoritarianism and fear, as if to find out exactly how much control they could exert over the public. This is what worries me about the future.

I agee and I wonder if that particular poster would call an ambulance should they be taken seriously ill. They really shouldn't, surely it would be "fighting against nature", or is it only the elderly who should lie down and die?

There really are some idiots in this world!

I don't know why you think they could. Well I do actually, wishful thinking.

The riots were a tiny percentage of the population. And your Paris example involved a population who bought into the need for restrictions. Neither of these things are comparable. Any comparison has to include the same ratios and a general public who aren't having it.

So please explain, how a combined police and armed forces of 270k max are going to control a population who don't want to comply with lockdown. That's 68 million other people, 270,000 miles of paved roads, needing to be stopped from mixing outside of those in certain essential work. This new, hypothetical 2025 pandemic certainly can't be assumed to be one where the R is easy to keep below 1 either, that's not one of the conditionals. We have no guarantee it wouldn't be one where it was much harder.

Schools spread a lot of covid.

The absolute resistance to this fact, particularly during covid was astonishing. People don't want to hear what they don't want to hear. The contortions people went through to pretend that cramming 30 kids in various combinations shoulder to shoulder in poorly ventilated classrooms wasn't the ideal way to spread an airborne virus was astonishing.