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?

@Msmcc1212

Mirinska Do you have a link for the research that shows that if everyone wears masks it lowers transmission. I agree with you but I can’t find any definitive research. Just conjecture based on how other infectious diseases spread and how CoViD-19 spread. It’s pretty clear to me that mandatory masks indoors would help from the bits I’ve read, but even WHO don’t seem to agree from what I can tell and I am not an expert in this particular area.

I saw a scientist on BBC News 24 saying that there was research on this. She was specifically challenging the view that mask wearing only protected others from transmission and referred to a study that looked into what happened when some wore masks and compared it with when all wore masks. The study found that protection for everyone increased when all wore them. That was the optimum result. . If I can locate that study I’ll post it. I’ve also felt that the information about masks was influenced by availability and fear of people stockpiling them at a time of PPE shortage for health care workers. It seems common sense that if people in health care settings need to wear them for protection then they must protect. It’s already been shown that wearing them can protect others, as the WHO has stated. There are countries where it’s traditional or required, many of whom give out free masks to the population, which suggests there’s more than one scientific opinion on this matter. Personally out of respect to others and to reduce anxiety if I accidentally cough, I would wear a mask in indoor public spaces. I think of all the bus and taxi drivers who’ve died. I just wish we were advised to wear masks and that everyone would anyway out of consideration. If outside social distancing should suffice without masks but even that many people not doing and are being cavalier with others health and it creates anxiety as well as actual risk. It’s a breach of the rules but is allowed to go on. I’d like to remind a jogger that comes right up in my airspace, please socially distance, but I don’t think they understand or care so I just hastily put on my mask if I see them coming and try and get out of the way. I also wear a mask outdoors where there are lots of people. If everyone socially distanced , we could all enjoy the fresh air. Then coming out of lockdown would be much safer for everyone and a second spike or local spikes less likely to set us all back again.

For those who don't understand why we have had lockdown and why we can't just lift it with not strategies to keep the infection rate, perhaps read this study that has just been published.

It projects that if there are no interventions to keep infection rates down "a median unmitigated burden of 23 million (95% prediction interval 13–30) clinical cases and 350 000 deaths (170 000–480 000) due to COVID-19 in the UK by December, 2021". and that "The characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 mean that extreme measures are probably required to bring the epidemic under control and to prevent very large numbers of deaths and an excess of demand on hospital beds, especially those in ICUs."

Forgot link www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30133-X/fulltext

@mrpumblechook well it looks like our government are unlikely to go for such a strategy (thank god), so maybe we can return to this thread next year and see whether the evidence proves these mathematical models correct.

[quote Bizawit]@EarlGreywithLemon you’d rather experiment with people’s livelihoods, mental health, children’s education, domestic violence, cancer deaths, the list goes on...[/quote]
I’ll take it one by one:

• livelihoods: if they virus runs rampant in the way of Italy and Spain in March and April, do you think people will be queuing to go to to restaurants, bars, theatres, travelling, shopping etc.? Or do you think they’ll vote with their feet and stay at home to protect themselves, as they were beginning to do in March pre lockdown? Also, with large numbers of the workforce sick all at the same time, how do you think all these businesses would fare? How about water, electricity, food supply, rubbish collection? How would they cope with substantial numbers of the workforce sick? And what would we all do when they are disrupted?
• mental health: losing loved ones before their time, fear of an uncontrolled epidemic: what do you think they do to mental health? Just ask the doctors and nurses who have seen what the disease can do first hand. There have been calls for PTSD treatment to be made available to them after what they have witnessed. Imagine the effects on larger swathes of the population living through this.
• children’s educations: with substantial numbers of teachers off sick with the illness, there wouldn’t be much of it going on. There are already issues with short staffing due to vulnerable and shielding teachers. Add the numbers of others sick for weeks on end on top of that. Likewise, don’t you think that provision of domestic violence support services would be impacted drastically?

Finally, I’ll repeat for the millionth time - cancer treatments were not suspended because of lockdown, but because of the virus. Patients undergoing these treatments are too vulnerable to it to come into hospital. This would be even worse with an uncontrolled epidemic on the rampage. I’ll say it again- I don’t think Spanish or Italian hospitals did much beyond Covid treatment in March and April.

I think we are stuck partly because the government failed to lockdown early enough , failed to still close borders , failed to plan & provide PPE , failed for months to work with the rest of the world to get a more universal track trace system bin place - it’s still not working , failed to issue coherent guidance , the list is endless
Yes I agree it’s hard but it’s been exacerbated by systemic failures . People need to be more careful & until we get more coherent team working with government ,other countries,Nhs ,councils ,education instead of newspaper fed titbits designed to be popular rather than truthful things won’t improve

This 'second spike', this 'second wave' - forgive me this thread is 39 pages long and I've only read the first few, so maybe this has already been raked over - but I don't understand why people see 'some people sitting on a beach', or 'some people sitting in a park', or 'some people having a street party' and think somehow that means that 'lockdown's over' and we're going to end up back where we were at the beginning? Do people actually remember where we were before the beginning? A world where millions of people went to work every day using public transport, millions of children went to school and sat in tiny classrooms, millions of people went to cinemas, gyms, clubs, theatres, restaurants and pubs. Millions of people hugged acquaintances and touched things that strangers had touched and queued up next to people and sat on airplanes and ate off breakfast buffets in hotels full of people they didn't know. Where people had parties and attended awards ceremonies and had children on sleepovers and went to softplay and trampoline parks and squeezed themselves down Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. That is how we ended up with a thousand people dying a day. Not because some people sat on a beach, or some teenagers went to the park. We're not living a half life, we're living a quarter life, maybe even less. Yet people still think we should be living less lives, doing less, staying in more, being smaller and smaller and smaller because of the dreaded (and still only theoretical) 'second spike'. And meanwhile our economy (and economy = people, they're not two separate entities) is shrivelling and dying and our children are missing out on socialising and learning and experiencing and people are dying of things that aren't Covid in their 1000's because of this lockdown. Yet the 'keep us locked up' don't seem to care. I despair. I just despair. Thank you OP for giving me this much needed opportunity to vent.

@EarlGreywithLemon yeh I just don’t agree with you at all - in any of it.

Also the decision to suspend cancer treatments was a policy one- not an inevitable consequence of the virus. Didn’t have to be done and should not have been done.

@EarlGreywithLemon It was a policy CHOIcE informed by the mentality of people like you , who are so irrationally fixated on the risks associated with one particular disease, that you are prepared to risk/ sacrifice almost almost anything else, cause all manner of other harm to mitigate it.

@Bearhorn yep. This second spike is being used as a bogeyman to scare us. When people take matters into their own hands (which many have done already), and the second spike proves as mythical as the weapons of mass destruction, her majesty’s clowns and mumsnet’s dementors might have to back down.

End the madness now. We have to live, not merely exist. Our children are going to resent government in every shape and form from now on.

I suspect that come 15 June a lot more people will start to realise they’re going to lose their job. Why? Because that’s 45 days before 1 October when the current furlough scheme ends and that’s the minimum length of time required for redundancy consultation.

We are potentially heading for a winter of discontent when coronavirus will be the least of our worries.

We are potentially heading for a winter of discontent when coronavirus will be the least of our worries.

Spot on.

Alec DH and I both run our own businesses.
So far we’ve both managed to keep all our staff either through furlough or through dropping them down to 4 days a week.
But we’re both aware we’re just kicking the car down the road and we’re going to have to let some people go.
It’s gong to be bloody awful.

@AlecTrevelyan006 I agree, that’s when the riots and looting will really get under way. I always said this will cause the break down of a civil society, it’s starting to happen. Millions of people with no jobs, no schools, no money, lots of angry people with time on their hands is a recipe for disaster.

Most of the people in hospital with Covid-19 caught it IN hospital. If those people were cancer patients with lowered immune systems, the likelihood is, they would not survive. This is why certain cancer treatments have been cancelled - to save lives, not to redirect resources.

I agree that due the impact on a nation’s economy, people’s livelihoods, health, education etc means that lockdown has to be eased wherever possible. I also think that each individual needs to take responsibility to try and avoid transmission during and after the process. We could learn a lot from more successful countries especially in the Far East where consideration for others and the wider group is different from selfish individualism which is more common here. How we individually and collectively behave directly impacts everyone else, particularly the vulnerable.

Far more scary than coronvirus, then it really will be the fittest survive

I just feel sad and frustrated that there are lots of people supporting a continued lockdown because the government and the media have managed to convince them all that they’re going to die the second they come in close contact to anything they haven’t expressly been told is safe.

The number of people on the news this week saying they’re not sending their 5 year old back to school as their health is more important than anything, for example. Complete madness given the risk to the under 40s, never mind the under 15s

The problem is that most people haven’t seen the other consequences yet and some never will as they won’t see the correlation of future deaths from other diseases, economic hardship etc with the lockdown.

this thread will be interesting to read in a years' time

"providing everyone who did not isolate relinquishes their right to NHS treatment and accepted if they got the virus they are on their own"

So based on your logic that should also apply to anyone who 1)smokes 2) overeats 3) Drinks to excess 4) takes no exercise. 5)eats a crap diet. That way we can get rid of SD instantly as any surge in cases will be easily dealt with by newly emptied hospitals. Jobs a good un.

@earlgreywithlemon
I entirely agree with you.

I was at hairdressers when this was all getting serious early March.

I said that I was hoping for a lockdown soon. She said 'Why would the government do that to us?'

I said it was to prevent hundreds of thousands of people dying prematurely. Bizarrely I am one of those people who does think that we have a responsibility as a society to believe all lives matter be that the elderly, the BAME community or anyone else vulnerable.

The same goes with the slow relaxation of lockdown. It is because people's lives DO matter.

[quote strugglingwithdeciding]@BamboozledandBefuddled where are you getting 8-9000 Cases a day hasn't been that for a while [/quote]
These numbers have been verified by Patrick Valance several times, the most recent at yesterday's briefing. He confirmed that they are still high and slow to come down.

Oh and I didn't send my reception child back!

@nellodee that may be true for some but certainly not all- for many , cancelling their treatment was effectively a death sentence. Measures could have been taken to mitigate the risk of infection.

@cherryblossommorningstoday sorry, nope, you don’t get to play that card. I think vulnerable people matter too. I think vulnerable people matter and I think the lockdown is a folly that will cause all manner of harm to all manner of vulnerable people. Meanwhile I think there are ways to protect vulnerable people from COVID without lockdown.

We are potentially heading for a winter of discontent when coronavirus will be the least of our worries.

Yup.

Bizawit what would you have preferred? Eg say Financial support for vulnerable people, everyone else working.. Or other?