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

what? how on earth can you extrapolate it 'never said you couldn't do each of these things every day,' from a very clear 'you can leave the house for ONE form of exercise per day?'

that is literally what it means - you can do ONE of those things per day, not one of each of them. Some of the rules around the pandemic were strange but I don't see how that can be worded any more clearly.

When people post stuff like this it reminds me that half the population has a below average IQ. And that the average isn't high.

No.

Doubtless that happened but honestly I think it would dwarf into comparison by the extra deaths if lockdown wasn’t used, yes it was dreadful that cancer treatment etc was cancelled, but honestly where would they have been treated, the hospitals were full to capacity trying to save the lives of those with covid

Yes. It was an unknown disease and lockdowns must have limited the spread. I am pleased I didn't have to risk it in the early days even though I've had it 4 times now mainly because of my job.

Yes point taken, it didn’t need to be one extreme or the other and could have been somewhere inbetween.
The point about people already taking precautions prior to the lockdown, I’m not sure if this only applied to people in the health industry because I remember the day the first lockdown was announced we were still in the office and 60 of us were called into a boardroom, squeezed in to be told we would be working from home. I don’t recall anyone thinking this was risky until after the fact. I don’t recall masks/distancing etc coming in until the lockdown was already underway.

Our hospital was never "full to capacity". It was like a ghost town. Our local newspaper reported covid deaths in the local hospital every week. It was basically 1 or 2 per week, I think the highest weekly was just 3! Different areas were affected in different ways. Around April time, OH had to be admitted via A&E to do with his cancer and we were the only ones in there - the whole place was empty. He was fast tracked through for an x-ray and MRI scan and they were deserted too - no one in the waiting rooms and no waits - just sign in and straight through.

Which area of medicine do you work in to make this judgment? You’ve never seen the data on hospital admissions, ICU capacity and death figures?

This isn’t really a debate for anyone who understands mathematics.

If we hadn’t locked down, hospitals and health infrastructure have been overwhelmed ,and not just the old but vast numbers of the young and healthy would have died. Your child might well have died from a trivially operable appendicitis.

We live in one of the most densely packed islands with one of the lowest ratios of doctors and hospitals per capita in Europe.

Schools would have shut anyway due to sick teachers and bodies would have been left to rot in situ. It just would in no way have been tolerable.

The task was to flatten the peak and it (just about) succeeded.

Of course, some of the corollaries for mental health and education were horrendous but they couldn’t have been avoided, as they were due to a novel zoonotic virus. It was a choice of a terrible outcome and a very bad outcome. We took the very bad one.

As to how GPs, schools, parents responded post corona, that is far more discussable.

A&E units were kept separate so that accidents and emergency cases didn’t use the same area as Covid patients. Which hospital are you referring to as hospitals with capacity were taking patients from other areas of the country.

No they shouldn't.

Old people and CEV should have been told to stay home and the rest of us got on with it

Not at all. Those who were at risk could have chosen to have stayed at home. People should have taken personal responsibility for their own health

Did anyone noticed which areas got the most cases per 100k? Use your thinking skills. I remember going to a different doctor practice for a blood test in mid April 2020. Don’t remember what was the reason for visiting s doctors further away,

Had to drive past two mosques on the way home and there were people hugging each other and about 300 people in a small space. I was so angry.

Plus I lived in farce of the Leicester lockdown. Non essential retail, hairdressers etc reopened on Monday. By Thursday, the Leicester lockdown was in place. Was supposed to be 2-3 weeks but ended up being almost 6 weeks. Got jealous of colleagues and customers who live in neighbouring councils and showing off their haircuts.

Later on. Other parts of the UK got higher cases per 100k than Leicester in LL. Did they have a local lockdown? No.

I don't think its a clear cut answer.
For all the criticisms I have about Boris Johnson (and there are a lot!!) imposing the first lockdown wasn't one of them. It literally was the unknown.
I think I saw some stats that said it could have been much shorter and saved more Iives had it started earlier, but who knows.

Even eat out to help out...there was a balance between keeping businesses afloat and keeping people safe. Furlough and wages are only one aspect of business expenses, all the other stuff like rent, bills, insurance, materials or goods bought before lockdown but in anticipation of customers/orders etc all still needing to be paid for.

I thought at the time closing playgrounds, preventing people sitting on benches and threatening to arrest people going for a walk was OTT but a lot of other things it's easy to look back with hindsight.

I thought it was wrong then and still do. But we largely complied.

the figures for hospital admissions and also deaths were readily available from the ONS on a regular basis ( I think fortnightly? Can't remember).
ICU capacity was also available to see both country wide and county wide . That was possibly weekly?

The tier systems in place was a mess.
Can't believe it's five years soon since Boris Johnson made his speech to the nation.
It was a strange time

So from the data you will have seen that it was not a mild illness

The last government did the 2021 unlockings really well. I remember many naysayers on here and on twitter demanding that the unlocking be cancelled

Yes but we didn't lock down soon enough.

After that initial one I'm not sure.

Not all school did shut down, some went on line two days after with a fully functioning system ringing parents if pupils weren't present.
Old lap tops were refurbished for those who didn't have one, and some pupils used their phone. Every pupil was checked on as normal.
My daughters school just dumped them

Cases had not started to fall before the first lockdown.

Why? I was a healthy 30 year old before covid and after catching it I spent 2.5 years in bed and still don't live a normal life due to organ damage and fatigue because of selfish people spreading it around because "it's a cold."

Prior to that I'd had flu once in my early 20s and I hadn't even got around to registering with a GP where I was living because I went so infrequently.

The government behaved terribly. But I can't see a way around the lockdowns, given the knowledge, infection rates and modelling at the time.

Some of the posters on this thread are completely clueless about what it was like inside hospitals in the first and second waves.

Young, fit people were dying. At one point our hospital had >150 people in critical care beds - all theatre recovery areas had been converted into make shift ICU. It was not a conspiracy

Personally
was very against dentistry getting banned. We should at least have been allowed to get people out of pain

especially since after the first lockdown ended not one of our governing bodies admitted that they were responsible for shutting every dental practice down - not one of them ever owned up to that ( we were allowed to continue in the second and third lockdown)

Absolutely we should have locked down. And sooner. I have a teacher friend who got covid very early on. She now has long covid and can't work. My brother got it early (train on the way to/from work). His whole body is fcuked. Heart failure. Vision problems. Is now on dialysis. Another friend's husband died from it. She was pregnant at the time with their 2nd baby.

If you remember covid and think lockdown wasn't necessary OR look back with fondness on the down days with family, you are the lucky ones. So many peoples lives were wrecked by it either through death or illness.