To worry the impact of our lockdown will be worse long term than if we’d just lockdowned the vulnerable

[abreviation]

I think the proverbial is just about to hit the fan regarding redundancies. We have just started to receive hundreds of cvs from people who have lost their job.
It’s common knowledge how cancers are going undiagnosed and treatments delayed. God knows how many will die now needlessly.
Most other medical appointments cancelled or delayed. How many years will it take to catch up? Brain tumours missed, lazy eyes, hip displacements etc etc undiagnosed.
Education broken for loads of dc. How may dc just hanging on in there will be lost to education now. This will impact thousands of dc long term.
Struggling today with the way CV has been prioritised with no thought to anything else and the long term consequences of this.

Nowilive - the government is still saying those are the high risk categories. Of course people are going to go with that.

if we’d just lockdowned the vulnerable firstly we didn't really know who all the vulnerable were until they died. We had a list of some people we guessed might be vulnerable but it wasn't just those who died.

Secondly you are looking at how serious this has been and forgetting that this is the good outcome because we were careful. You wouldn't have liked the bad outcome.

"CV has been prioritised with no thought to anything else" and why is that do you think? Why would a Tory government hand over money to just about every worker in the country like it didn't matter. Could it be that CV was more serious than you have understood?

"I see no evidence whatsoever that the NHS would have been overwhelmed had we not locked down." There wouldn't be would there. I suppose you'd also argue against seat belts and air bags on the grounds that most people survive low speed car crashes (saved by belts and air bags)

I believe that lockdown was the right thing to do and now we're slowly coming out of it in a managed way. Government probably could have acted sooner but they didn't so here we are now. Businesses are opening up and medical treatments for cancer etc are either continuing or restarting.

Secondly you are looking at how serious this has been and forgetting that this is the good outcome because we were careful. You wouldn't have liked the bad outcome.

This still isnt a good outcome.

There will be so many keyboards experts in the months to come, confusing their opinion with facts, but with the luxury of insight.

Measures too strict? only means the numbers going down or staying low.

So you decide that it proves the measures were useless, because you think not enough people died and you are invincible. That's what social media like MN is designed for anyway, let people express their opinion in public, thinking it matters and they are experts. As if.

OP I get that. But I literally can't leave the house, go for a walk (the R is high near me and it's too busy, go to home bargains, Asda, a car showroom, do my own food shop, meet up with friends in a park, go to work...

I'm pissed off. Sorry but fine, the schools aren't all open and you might not be able to go to work. I haven't seen ANYONE since mid March or spoken face to face or even been able to pick my own bloody veg
The shielding aren't the issue, we are still shut inside because most of us aren't taking the risk to go for a walk because it's too busy and people aren't distancing. There's babies and small children having to shield too

The whole economy would have collapsed very quickly and would have been irrecoverable if only the vulnerable were in lockdown. The NHS would have been overwhelmed and collapsed very quickly. Mortuaries overrun. Infections would have been so high. There would be people lying dead in the streets. Decaying corpses at home unable to be buried. How long do you think you'd hold your job down for with people dropping dead around you?

Sounds like you are writing a book or a script for an episode of Spooks.

Decaying corpses at home unable to be buried

there has been enough documented cases like that to at least stop you from laughing at the idea. Whilst no one is pretending people would just drop them in the street, others are a little bit too casual about the actual seriousness of the pandemic.

If there was no lockdown then maybe 95% of those unemployed people would have caught it, recovered and carried on working. For them it would have been better not to lock down. But for the other 5% (or whatever the figure is now) unemployment is way better than death. When you say there shouldn’t have been a lockdown you’re assuming you and your family would be in the 95%. But here’s the thing - nobody knows. You could have been in the 5%. Would you prefer to be unemployed or dead?

If there was no lockdown then maybe 95% of those unemployed people would have caught it, recovered and carried on working. For them it would have been better not to lock down. But for the other 5% (or whatever the figure is now) unemployment is way better than death.

The problem is, a percentage of the 95% you talk of could well end up taking their own lives due to the stresses and issues of being unemployed.

If there is laughing, it is obviously at the posters with their overdramatic imaginings of no lockdown Britain. Dystopian fan fiction writing at its best, poverty porn at worst.

@abreviation

I think the proverbial is just about to hit the fan regarding redundancies. We have just started to receive hundreds of cvs from people who have lost their job. It’s common knowledge how cancers are going undiagnosed and treatments delayed. God knows how many will die now needlessly. Most other medical appointments cancelled or delayed. How many years will it take to catch up? Brain tumours missed, lazy eyes, hip displacements etc etc undiagnosed. Education broken for loads of dc. How may dc just hanging on in there will be lost to education now. This will impact thousands of dc long term. Struggling today with the way CV has been prioritised with no thought to anything else and the long term consequences of this.

You are 100 per cent right. 👏👏👏👏

I know several NHS doctors who think lockdown is a crock of shit.

I know several who don’t. There - I’ve balanced the anecdata.

@NotEverythingIsBlackandWhite

The whole economy would have collapsed very quickly and would have been irrecoverable if only the vulnerable were in lockdown. The NHS would have been overwhelmed and collapsed very quickly. Mortuaries overrun. Infections would have been so high. There would be people lying dead in the streets. Decaying corpses at home unable to be buried. How long do you think you'd hold your job down for with people dropping dead around you?

Oh my God do people actually think this?

The problem is, a percentage of the 95% you talk of could well end up taking their own lives due to the stresses and issues of being unemployed.

Which has nothing to do with lockdown, and everything to do with how we support people living in poverty.

I think that the issue is that without lockdown the NHS would have become overwhelmed as there would have been even more sick with Covid and so those cancelled operations still wouldn't have happened.

I agree that it's there right time to start lifting lockdown now though (gradually).

Lockdown is not about individuals, it's about the bigger pictures.

If we had locked away all the vulnerable, old, ill etc they would still need staff to look after them. And the higher the incidence rate in the general population then the bigger the chance that these people doing the caring would have COVID and pass it onto these locked away people, So in turn more of the people being cared for would be COVID positive, in turn passing it onto carers.

just locked down the vulnerable

Because they wouldn’t have suffered greatly? People who already are treated poorly by society and ignored, receiving a lack of care. People for whom a link with the outside world, visits to respite and education centres are their whole life? People who often are least able to understand or cope with this kind of change? We’ll “just” lock them down for months whilst we all play Covid roulette, in order to ensure we can have coffee and cake at the tearoom.

We locked down care homes. That didn’t go well, did it.

Do people not grasp that Universal Credit claims have gone through the roof and to fund that and the NHS we need a functioning economy? Extending furlough was a huge mistake

No, Enlightened, they don't. It's all some nebulous planet that churns out money so everyone can stay at home.

Which has nothing to do with lockdown, and everything to do with how we support people living in poverty.

And the unemployment is caused by?

@NowImLivinInExeter

The week we went into lockdown our ICU was full.

Throughout our theatre recovery was redesigned as icu, our theatre staff redeployed, our outpatients nurses redeployed.

This was with lockdown. Not to mention the risk of patient to patient transmission in hospital

When I am calling patients to come in, it is the older patienrs, he vunerable patients who (understandably) arent coming in. Its not healthy 30yr olds.

I dont think theres any doubt about our hospitals ability to cope had we continued on the trajectory we were. Yes now the hospital is relatively empty (getting busier actually as routine care resumes), but that doesnt mean it would have coped fine. There may have been hospitals that would have coped, but there were certainly many that wouldnt.

We locked down care homes. That didn’t go well, did it

No we didn't.

This says it all and it's just the start.