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

To reply in more detail - first, public policy should not be made in an individual basis and people who make it about individuals are really unhelpful in discussing things.

Second, I’m more talking about chronically ill people who are alive simply because of medication. They are, perfectly understandably, fighting nature to stay alive. But you can’t fight nature forever, and we should never have locked down millions of healthy people on that basis - but we did, and at a cost to public health, mental and physical.

You say your mum shielded - fair play to her, she took responsibility for herself. That’s not what lockdowns did.

Lockdown 1 and my dentist shoved a prescription for antibiotics for my abscess though the letterbox after a telephone call where I described my pain 🙄

ETA, not my letterbox...I had to go to the dentist and stand at the door and wait, like a postman in reverse.

Yes.

Lots of ‘rules’ were batshit - like masks. But the lockdowns saved lives.

The first lockdown yes, but kids should have gone back to school for the summer term.
The second ones absolutely not.

@Fizbosshoes

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.

This was a classic example of Rishi not actually understanding small businesses when he based the SEIS support grants on "net profit".

Say a business with:
Turnover £100k
Cost of sales £50k
Gross profit £50k
Overheads £30k
Net Profit £20k

Covid support (if not excluded) based on the £20k. So it didn't even cover the overheads many of which would be ongoing like rent, utilities, subscriptions, equipment/vehicle leases, etc. So nothing left to cover the owners living costs (i.e. their profit).

Not to mention there were two months of support missing over the whole 18 months or so due to sleight of hand in timing of the support payments, so those businesses didn't even get support for the entire period they were restricted from trading!

He also talked about the £50k threshold (net profit, over which NO support at all) was fair because most businesses over £50k turnover had turnover of £200k or more. Note he exchanged profit and turnover in the same sentence! Either he was too thick to know the difference or he knew exactly the difference and was misleading Parliament to try to justify his incompetence.

He had 18 months to rectify the gaps/exclusions and CHOSE not to do so! So I have no sympathy for the "he had to do it quickly" argument - he had plenty of time to correct the mistakes and exclusions, but he was too arrogant to do so as that would have meant accepting mistakes were made, which he had never admitted.

Yes they were necessary at the time to control the spread of the virus. Which was deadly and at times out of control.

I think that only the vulnerable should have isolated. We all had to isolate to protect the vulnerable, However in the end the really vulnerable were totally exposed to it in hospitals and care homes. There was no way of keeping it out of these places so it was all a waste of time and money and has had a serious affect on some young people and children.

Technically it was not novel, that would mean it is completely new, but it wasn't, the coronavirus family has been around for a very long time, and SARSCoV2 is related to SARSCoV1 which caused the original SARS outbreak.

I don't think the restrictions were lockdowns, except perhaps for those clinically vulnerable.

Regardless of what you call them, I think they were justified. Could have been much shorter and removed in a better way though if we had been governed by a competent Prime Minister and government. I'm confident if there had been a different Tory leader, or even Jeremy Corbyn, at least 20,000 fewer would have died.

Younger fit people did die from Covid.

My friend's DB age 40 extremely fit, no existing health conditions died from COVID - unfortunately he caught it the week before his Covid jab.
This was late 2021 in the US

Yep. It's abundantly clear from what happened in Scotland in August/September 2020 that schools were by far and away the biggest factor in spreading the infection, so if anything, the schools should have been closed for far longer.

Again, using individual instances is no basis for public policy.

The damage from lockdowns should have been more considered

I think it was very high

We were dealing with an unknown disease. There was no choice unless we wanted to risk another Spanish flu in terms of death toll.

As a previous poster wrote.... unless you were front line staff, then actually how can you truly have ANY insight to the devastation that was occurring in the hospitals.

We locked down as the NHS couldn't cope with the amount of sick patients requiring ITU/L3 care.

Some of these patients were being cared for by staff who didn't have the skills or experience to do that.... and they had to go to work praying that their lack of knowledge wouldn't make someone sicker or even kill them.

So I'm very sorry that some of you found it difficult to be at home nice and safe or people are suffering with their MH due to the short period of time they didn't see their friends, but quite frankly man up and be thankful that you're still alive as some of my colleagues aren't.

Hear hear

I have never in all the years l have been nursing had to close theatres to open it up as an overflow ITU.

@Ddakji I was referring to the fact that a poster said that 'young fit people were not dying'

I never said that lockdown should or should not have happened because of this.

However due to the fact that Covid was a completely new virus with unknown outcomes, I do think lockdown was the right thing to do although it could have been handled better

Edit: spelling

I was not a fan of the government at the time but I don't think that they could have done anything differently. I think they did the best they could under circumstances where nobody knew what they were dealing with. I think it was outrageous that there had not been more efficient pandemic planning. It was only a matter of time.

I was diagnosed with cancer 3 days before the first lockdown. I was very fortunate that I had the treatment I had under the circumstances. I don't know how I would have felt had that not happened. I do think I would have been compliant. Again, it was very difficult and rapidly changing on a daily basis.

I can't honestly say how I would react if it happened again. I still can't quite believe it now.

Absolutely agree with this. You were all bloody amazing

No we shouldn't have had lockdown. Schools should have stayed open. Those who weee vulnerable should have stayed at home with proper support for them in place, the rest of us should have carried on with masks and social distancing.

Still haven't had my lungs x-rayed or been referred to a lungs/asthma specialist. Before Covid, I was on two meds. Now on the same two meds (one of them is double the strength) plus two additional ones. Plus had as many asthma attacks in 2.5 years than I did over the previous 20....

Came down what I discovered a few months later (via an antibodies test) to be covid a few days before the first lockdown and then in July 2022.

To look at lockdown costs and benefits, you also need to look at countries that didn’t do it. Overall the approach Sweden had , avoiding full lockdowns worked better in the long run and they are benefiting now. Hindsight is a wonderful thing though.

People always witter on about how schools should have stayed open. Schools couldn't stay open, they were already closing due to lack of staff (my DCs' school shut the week before the official closure started). The school I work at was emptying rapidly where kids were ill, or parents were taking them out of school because they were worried - any kid that had asthma was already not in school, for example.

Lessons couldn't continue as normal with less than half the kids in and lack of teachers to cover absences. The kids at home weren't getting any sort of education because they were meant to be in school so schools weren't setting work. We were limping along as it was. Once schools officially closed to most pupils, then we could start with remote learning.

When they reopened to selected year groups, they didn't go with a hybrid model so that parents of the 'lucky' years had consistent childcare. Really for the kids' benefit they should have had them all back in on a rota.

The 2nd time schools closed could have been avoided if the govt hadn't stuck their head in the sand and pretended that covid wasn't raging around schools until it got to the point where they couldn't ignore it. Some schools were on 13% attendance by that Christmas, again unsustainable (in fact the DfE forced Greenwich council to reopen schools that had closed for being riddled with covid, only to then close them itself within a few weeks).

If proper measures had been taken in schools to stop covid spreading around them as much as it did, it's possible they could have stayed open.

I agreed with the first 3 weeks of lockdown and possibly some of the rest of the spring/ summer 2020 lockdown but not the continued lockdowns, eat out to help out, tiers and all the associated confusion. I standby the thought that gradually returning to some kind of normality over summer would have been a better plan.

Maybe at first to try and slow it down. But the exhausting regional based lock downs, bubbles, ridiculously conflicting advice combined with the sheer incompetence and arrogance of the government was awful. After the first phase I genuinely don't know anyone who fully complied. We all breached the stupid guidelines. It was a disaster and we're still paying for it