To think the lockdown needs to end now?

[Fr0thandBubble]

I could understand a lockdown being imposed for a few weeks to make sure the NHS was up to capacity, but it’s gone well beyond that. The NHS now has lots of excess capacity and yet here we still are.

I am horrified by what has happened to our civil liberties, what it’s doing to our children’s education, what it’s doing to everyone’s livelihoods and mental health, what it’s doing to the economy, how people are not getting life-saving treatment for things like cancer, etc.

I don’t understand why people aren’t given the right to choose to self-isolate if they need to but for the rest of us to be allowed to get on with our lives and to take responsibility for ourselves.

I don’t understand why people who are not old and don’t have underlying health conditions are acting hysterically and why people have decided it’s OK to police other people’s behaviour and shout at them in the street.

I feel like I’m living in some kind of awful dystopian society.

I realise I’m in the minority here but does anyone agree with me?

The initial lockdown to protect the NHS and building of the nightingales was correct, but this elongated lockdown especially in devolved administrations registering 14 deaths a day like here in Wales is another.

The NHS has 11% of its ICU beds delivering covid care. It's now time to unlock. To allow social bubbles for friends and families, to get business open. We have to salvage what's left. It's time.

@Inkpaperstars

Wanting lockdown to have been applied differently or for a shorter time is one thing, wishing other measures had been in place is fair enough.

But I would like anyone who did not want any restrictive measures in place, or any lockdown applied once we had the rate of infection we sadly ended up with in early March, to describe what they think their life and freedoms would have looked like during exponential growth of infection to a natural peak.

I think it would have looked a bit worse than 2018, which I don't remember insofar as I didn't know anyone who succumbed to this particularly virulent strain of flu.

I don't recall anyone complaining about 2018, mind you.

I’m not old, elderly or particularly vulnerable...heading that way though as I’m nearly 70
I was a bit concerned in the early days in case I should’ve carried my passport in case I was challenged to stay indoors.
It made sense to look down for three weeks to give the nhs some breathing space
Now, I feel like it’s decending into farce and it’s time to stop the madness.

Has there been a glitch in the matrix and we’ve been catapulted into a different galaxy.
I was abroad when lockdown happened, so it’s a good possibility

I feel the government are like a dog with a bone And want to wring the last drop of juice out of it

I mean grown adults..terrified to step outside their front doors
You couldn’t make this shit up
Even if 500,000 had the virus and they haven’t
65 and and a half million havent had it

If we keep accepting this stupidity our lives will never be normal again

It’s time to demand our lives back, or we really are doomed

@Dowser Agreed.

Maybe we need to do a peaceful protest in each city to let our views be known to the government
We are many

We cannot let this carry on like this

Weird, though, the giant gulf between the perceived support for lockdown and this thread (for example). How might we account for this?

I, for one, am not a bot.

@EarlGreywithLemon

Please tell me you’re not seriously advocating going back to a time when diseases like this rampaged through the population. If so, what on earth is the point of almost a century of medical advances??

But it hasn't rampaged through the population. The overwhelming majority of the population won't even notice they've had it.

@marginalgain Yes, I am amazed that 49% have said YANBU. From people I have spoken to IRL, I felt like the only one who thought it should be lifted!

I wish there were some kind of peaceful, non-conspiracy theory related protest movement; I would definitely join it.

Many of these threads are started by parents who are working from home and fed up with having to teach or motivate their kids. Fair enough, I appreciate you opinion and can understand it is hard to do both and as a result you might feel that you aren't doing particularly very well. However, many people have died as a result or in relation to covid-19, being a healthy person doesn't mean you can't be asymptomatic and pass it on. There are people more vulnerable out there eg. black and asian people who statistics are now showing have higher death rates than their white counterparts if lockdown had not been implemented how many more people of those backgrounds would have died? Why is it ok for r you to continue your life as normal when doing so could cause someone else to lose theirs?

I dont agree that all routine appointments at hospital should have been stopped eg. cancer treatment or referrals and think hospital trusts will have to take a good look at how they have managed the situation and the many preventable deaths if diagnosis and treatment had not been overlooked!
The whole point of a community is that we look outside of ourselves for the greater good of others and that is what we have been asked to do eg. to stay in so we don't pose a threat to the elderly or ill. I find threads like this so woe is me!

I agree with every word you've said OP - Please can we get on with life now everyone is suffering...

@MarginalGain

Well, if it would have looked like 2018 then lockdown was a huge mistake. I don't know why it would have when the disease is different. Medic friends never mentioned flu in 20-8. They've mentioned this. The have a look in their eyes as if they have emerged from a war zone. I am not qualified to comment.

Re death stats I don't know, the document I link below may shed some light on high rate of excess deaths.

www.actuaries.org.uk/system/files/field/document/Mortality%20monitor%20Week%2021%202020%20v01%202020-06-02_0.pdf

@TrustTheGeneGenie

Because a measure of a decent society is how it treats its elderly and vulnerable

Doesn't matter how it treats its children then? Because they've been well and truly thrown under the bus.

Not entirely sure how all the elderly and vulnerables care is going to paid for if we can't go back to work.

Children's education has been interrupted and this has caused them distress. They will get over that. The economy has suffered. It will recover.

Elderly and vulnerable have lost their lives. They continue to risk losing their lives. The risk has not changed that much, they've just got ICU beds available now. Ending shutdown too soon or too quickly puts more and more lives at risk. It is not possible to just isolate the vulnerable.

what about the threat to those who are not elderly or ill but have lost their jobs? Do these people not matter?

It doesn’t make sense to lock up 65 and a half million healthy people.

I do think that children have suffered. Mental health in many has suffered.
In our area we have had less deaths to Covid-19 than to suicides, yet the county I live in is shut down, businesses destroyed, lives wrecked.

Our local school has had the 'risky' keyworker children in school for the duration and not one single case of the virus at all. Seriously apart from London and some clusters, lots of the country has nothing and yet the hysterical want us to stay lockdown even longer - why?

Up to May 22 includes a long period of 'lockdown' too.

I don't in real life know anyone who has suggested that there should not have been any lockdown, nor anyone who says lockdown should go on indefinitely/till a vaccine is found. It's a dynamic I have only witnessed here.

We will not be in lockdown forever and ther will come a time in the hopefully not so distant future where we have some sense of normality but that should be carefully weighed up against the number of deaths and rate of infection.

Schools too will need to look at the provision of schoolwork they have delivered and parents should be able to raise it with them if they have found the support wholly lacking. Maybe if the curriculum had not been suspended the provision of education would be more equal across all schools? All things that I hope are scrutinised after lockdown ends.

the economy has just 'suffered', it has taken an absolute hammering. I think many furloughed people still haven't accepted that they are soon to be unemployed. And high unemployment affects not just those individuals but their families and the wider economy. It is going to take years and years for the economy to recover and every day we remain in lockdown it will be worse.

the economy HASN'T just 'suffered', it has taken an absolute hammering

I honestly find threads like this truly terrifying. I will step away because I don't need the stress. But I beg you all to read some more about this disease. Please please don't be so selfish as to say you're not in the danger age bracket so it doesn't matter. Please educate yourselves about how it's spread.

I'm sorry to say this but it sounds like some of you just don't understand the gravity of the situation.

Agree Alec
I’ve seen my youngest grandson today for the first time since lockdown
It’s been the first time he’s been out of the house
He’s done no work, school never gave him any
He’s read no books, he’s done no topic work..I researched the Black Death with him before all of this. He’s 10 , a bright lad and is playing the system
He’s played on his x box . He’s as white as a sheet, from never going out.
For gods sake..let’s get kids back to school, people to work and get life back to a proper normal
Not this bloody half life which is neither nothing nor something

Because it's the decent thing to do. Because a measure of a decent society is how it treats its elderly and vulnerable.

In your opinion. What about the elderly and vulnerable who have been broken by by lockdown? Not every "elderly" person wants to be isolated from the world. It's fucking heartbreaking.

@lockdownprincess

I honestly find threads like this truly terrifying. I will step away because I don't need the stress. But I beg you all to read some more about this disease. Please please don't be so selfish as to say you're not in the danger age bracket so it doesn't matter. Please educate yourselves about how it's spread.

I'm sorry to say this but it sounds like some of you just don't understand the gravity of the situation.

I think it's you who does't understand the gravity of the situation.

@lockdownprincess equally perhaps you should understand the gravity of other people’s situations, facing serious illnesses untreated, lost livelihoods, damaged mental health?

Two people I know have died during lockdown, one took their own life, the other died alone in their home having fallen down their stairs.

I don’t know anyone who has had coronavirus, never mind died from it.

I feel so sorry for young kids living through this - it's not been fantastic for a while anyway but 2020 is a fucking shitstorm.

Covid-19 is real and it's awful but we're now making the cure worse than the disease.