To think the U.K. should have just shut the boarders in March

[Lardlizard]

Surely that would have saved the country millions

@Nc135
That’s your prerogative. I personally wouldn’t look at things in such a black and white wya though and wouldn’t let European and Americans off the hook for their collective responsibility so easily. One million deaths (many, many preventable) and untold economic damage is not something to dismiss with a “I’m glad I live in a free society”. 2020 was certainly one of those years where “freedom from” trumped “freedom to” quite easily. Effective governance should be able to deal with both concepts as and when necessary.

@Cam77 and that’s your opinion. And mine is that freedoms trump the severity of this virus. The untold economic damage you talk about has been caused by the lack of freedom. The reason the government is panicking is because they don’t want the nhs to be overwhelmed. That will make them look bad. Not because of the severity of the virus as such.

@Nc135
Some people think that people travel only to go on holidays.

You followed this sentence with a long paragraph. But nobody has claimed this, certainly not on this thread and certainly not me - you are arguing against a strawman.

Of course people travel for all kinds of reasons. But they shouldn’t have. The borders should have shut.

Yes I said that at the start and everyone had endless reasons why it was impractical or too expensive. But anything is possible with some forethought. Surely it would be better than where we are now. I am in Scotland and we had pretty much eliminated the virus in the summer. So we even missed a second chance to shut borders 🙁

Read back up thread @cam77

Oh, are foreign travel and holidays abroad a human right now?

Said earlier on this thread

@Ninbus we didn’t nearly eliminate the virus in the summer. A lot of viruses die down in the summer but then pop back again in the winter. It wasn’t eliminated.

They said the other day on the daily briefing that we had been very close to eliminating. Something to do with the genomes. We brought cases back in from Spain etc when people travelled in the summer

@Nc135
And mine is that freedoms trump the severity of this virus. The untold economic damage you talk about has been caused by the lack of freedom.

.... and the lack of freedom has been caused by the virus - which we were unwilling to take all measures within our grasp to limit said spread.

You are employing a weird circular reason that makes literally no sense!

The lack of freedom to travel abroad has given 1.4 billion Chinese people the freedom to travel domestically, the freedom to go shopping as normal and the freedom to stop their economy going under. And the freedom from unemployment. And the freedom from catching Covid. You are insisting on talking of “freedom” as some absolute concept when, at the very least in 2020, it clearly, clearly isn’t!

@MercyBooth

Yes and yes absolutely agree with your post and the little attention those issues have been given in the press.

Personally I believe borders should have been closed completely in February. It was too late by March.

By mid March, CV was well established in the UK, we then had a long lock down that dramatically reduced infection rates... instead of keeping up the pressure, Johnson relaxed all the SD measures, allowed foreign travel, no testing at airports, didn't put in place trac n trace BUT then when rates rose, he sat back and did nothing until once again too late..

He reacts too late and too little.

We are not where we are because of travel in March but because of inaction over the summer/autumn.

We now head into xmas with confusion and heading toward an over whelmed NHS in January.

Borders should have been closed and / or effective quarantine eg flying into NZ you had to pay extra (approx £3000 I think), to cover the cost of 14 day quarantine in a hotel

I know someone who came over from Spain to see their grandmother before grandmother died. This person did not quarantine, and travelled by bus to and from the hospital every day for 3 weeks.

Question is will they learn this lesson before next virus appears? Maybe next one will have 10% fatality rate

I don’t have much confidence in the current government. They will probably just repeat the same mistakes next time. Maybe we need a female prime minister from now on

Pretty sure when things were v bad there were borders that were shut in Europe. Also, closer to home I think Isle of Man and Guernsey have v strict restrictions and been quite successful.

It’s not impossible to do that sort of thing in U.K., there just isn’t the appetite. I do not think that U.K. have learnt and I don’t think that they would do things differently if they did it again - there is no good system for quarantining people who come In From abroad (even now) and checking on them (apart from illegal immigration - but probably checks for this do not need to be done 2 weeks post entry).

I agree. We're an island. It's the obvious action. It wouldn't have been hard to minimise the spread from overseas and contain the cases we already had.

@jasjas1973
@notanothertakeaway

I think most government across the West have been given a very, very easy ride by the media on their pandemic handling generally. It beggars belief that the UK government is still polling at near 40%. Yes, yes perhaps Labour is useless whatever, but personally I’d put a fair amount of that down to the British media and press. They’ve handled the government with kids gloves. As far as I’m aware Boris Johnson has never once been grilled on his irresponsible offhand, “it’ll all be fine” posturing in March. Of course that’s just one issue among 100 others.

But what about all the people on here and IRL who were insistent that " they needed a holiday " in the summer so flew everywhere ,yes cases may have been low in the summer ,but suddenly all the kids where back in school and cases sky rocketed in the North West anyway , hindsight is a wonderful thing but people need to take some personal responsibility too.

@Ninbus

I don’t have much confidence in the current government. They will probably just repeat the same mistakes next time. Maybe we need a female prime minister from now on

I can't seriously see the likes of May, Truss or Patel doing much better, to be honest.

I said this in about May and everyone told me I was wrong we couldnt have done it here, there is no reason we couldnt have done it at the end of summer too when numbers were low!

Agree. I said back then the govt should have said the only flights in and out were cargo. Set aside a 2 week window in which to get any UK resident back into the country (via a quarantine centre) who wants to return for the duratipn of the pandemic, and let any non UK resident leave (and not return)for the duration of the pandemic.

So do mumsnetters think we are just to stay locked down until we are all vaccinated? ie middle of 2022, which is when the restrictions permitted by the Coronavirus Act 2020 expires?

Because by then, a lot of us will have gone bankrupt or be unemployed, the economy will be ruined and many will have died from untreated or undiagnosed conditions or mental health problems.

Is the average age of death from coronavirus still 82 years in the UK?

I saw reports of the genetic origins of much current UK covid leading back to northern Spain in the summer of 2020.

So yes op I agree.

And also that the current Draconian restrictions on ordinary family life seem something of a bitter joke when I hear flights over my house.

@DramaAlpaca

Yes. I remember being horrified when I realised that flights from all over the world were being allowed in with no checks or controls. What a mess it all is.

This, with a futile open borders lockdown. Which we still have.

There was no point closing the borders once the transmission rate domestically was higher than people would bring in from outside.

It might have made a difference at Feb half term, but how long would you have left them closed for?

The whole WHO mantra of open air travel to facilitate movement of supplies and medical aid seems rather blind too but it gives cover to the governments who can claim to be following "the science".

God help us all when it's a massively fatal newly emerged virus.