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

Accidentally pressed no, but I deffo think they needed to happen. Deaths were high and bad enough, I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if we didn’t

How do you protect those people without having lockdowns?

Press the Yes bar to change your vote. You will see the tick move.

Oh don’t know you could do that! Done. Thanks

I agree with this, with hindsight things could have been more balanced, but at first it seemed there was nothing that made one person more vulnerable to it than another, I guess we didn't have enough data on it at that point.
90 year olds with illnesses surviving with barely a sniffle and young, fit athletes dying within days, and I suppose until patterns were established that made cases like that outliers, then we just didn't know who was going to be the most vulnerable to it, in order to protect them, so everyone was protected.
I don't see that anything else could have been done really with the information that was available, and with the NHS already creaking the threat that it was going to be overwhelmed was very real I think.
The lockdowns caused a lot of damage, but something like that was going to cause a lot of damage regardless, no matter how it was handled.

Yes, lockdown was the correct thing to do, and saved lives.

Sweden managed the pandemic very well without a lockdown.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/sweden-avoided-covid-lockdowns-now-reaps-benefits

Do we really need to go over this again? Most countries in the world had lockdowns of some kind - they were necessary. We were quite late to lockdown and our idiotic government at the time managed things very badly, which led to significant problems (sending children back to school for one day, for fuck's sake). There was no plan and no leadership.

But yes, we had to lockdown. Schools are hotbeds of infection, of course they had to close. It was a novel virus killing many people. I have friends who work in the NHS, it was completely overwhelmed by the numbers coming in for treatment in March 2020 and January 2021.

People need to accept that the world has changed. WFH would have slowly come in anyway given the technology, the pandemic just hastened it.

If we spent the same amount per capita on health as the Swedes do, and have as low a population density as they do, then we might have been able to get away without lockdowns too.

Nope

No

Never

Of course not! It was a load of nonsense.

That was a direct quote from Gove

I’m incredibly glad they happened, I think they should’ve started earlier and lasted longer to protect the vulnerable among us- however there should’ve been more support available in terms of dealing with school and work from home, mental health etc.

Other countries dealt with it a lot better, better planning, government, education and hygiene practices helped.

Ironically the lockdowns were probably the best thing that ever happened to my mental health, though very anxiety-provoking at the time they have me a much-needed break from the stresses of the outside world and time to process things from two decades earlier.

Obviously not the case for everyone though. I feel society is more selfish than it used to be and lockdown probably had something to do with it.

I do recall Michael Gove mentioning an hour exercise each day.

The first lockdown was understandable. Subsequent ones were indefensible imo. Slightly more sensible attitude to risk/reward once we knew who was actually at significant risk.

First one? Harder to say. No vaccine, huge risk of NHS overwhelm, limited understanding of transmission...

In hindsight, primary schools should've moved outdoors to offer continued socialisation and a very limited curriculum. I'm a primary school teacher (then and now). But...would parents have sent children in? Who knows? The weather was glorious!

What's done is done.

The next pandemic will be different. The COVID lockdowns did eliminate flu that year.

A couple of years?

The last restrictions, eg mask wearing, ended in June/July 2021. Actl ockdown had neded much earlier. We are now in 2025.

Sweden managed the pandemic very well without a lockdown.

Apples and oranges. Sweden is nowhere near as densely populated as the UK. Population of Sweden in 2020 was about 10.3 million. Population of Greater London is a little under 9 million.

No, I never supported them.

You’re never doing learn anything if you take that attitude

reflecting back is what helps people learn what to do differently next time

My family loved the first lockdown in the main. It was a bit mental having to work from home with four kids and DH works frontline in a&e.
My kids loved not being at school. They were all over 8 so could pretty much do their work without any help and then have most of the day off free to play in the garden. I know we were lucky to have a garden.
Because of DHs work I could see how bad the situation was for frontline staff and given the limited number of NHS beds and dense population it was the right thing to do.
I don't think people should have been left to die on their own, particularly children. I also don't think the cunt of a prime minister should have had a party when he was allowing children to die on their own.
We lost two family members to covid and it would have likely to have been one more if they didn't get the treatment they did. Without a lockdown they probably wouldn't have.

Yes.

At the time it was a complete unknown.
It could have wiped out half the population for all we knew.

You can look back with all the information and say look it wasnt that bad we didnt have to do all this but thats only because it turned out not to wipe us out! but nobody could see into the future and know how it was going to turn out.

People had to act on the limited information available.

The next pandemic (and there will be one. More than one. They happen) may be the one that has us dropping like flies. Or it may be a case of the sniffles

We simply don't know.

So we either plan for the worst and hope for the best or we don't and say whatever happens happens.

I'm not going to sit here years down the line and look back and say governments did the wrong thing when I have years worth of information they didn't have.

Given that our population density (259 people/km2) is over eleven times that of Sweden (24 people/km2), I doubt that Sweden's approach would have worked here.

Prior to developing a chronic illness made worse by Covid infections, I’d have said the lockdowns shouldn’t have happened. My kids education suffered but I do think they have caught up now, and we lost all our savings due to my husband being self employed and losing nearly a year of work. But as someone who is still concerned about catching covid and the thousands of vulnerable people out there, I think lockdowns avoided a lot of death and I can’t be angry about that.

If it had wiped out half the population, everyone would have said ' they should have locked down '. I haven't the answers , but who knows?