To think a short, hard, lockdown is better than a soft one dragging on for months?

[PrincessNutNuts]

Would you rather go hard for a shorter duration? (YANBU)
(Stay at home order. Daily exercise outside, only see your bubble, shop as infrequently as you can, work from home if you can, most things closed, schools and universities closed.)

Or have a softer lockdown for longer? YABU)
Unlimited shopping, schools open, Tier 3 rules, I guess.

No. Because at the start and end of every lockdown there are massive get togethers and celebrations that spike the infection rates. Lockdowns don't work, if their intention is to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed. They cause steep rises, so the shorter they are the closer the spikes will be. Longer, gentler versions - the tiers - should work better.

Suffering, I agree why on earth did it take them so long to allow businesses such as hairdressers and beauticians to open? After the first lock down. Ridiculous.

They won’t close schools again and I agree. My kids would really suffer if they did that. They should have let the schools open way earlier after the fist lockdown when infections were low. Now kids have missed far too much school time and would be too detrimental for them to miss any more.
If they had just done till the Easter and opened schools then I could accept schools being locked down now. To keep them off in the summer term was madness.

As much as i really don't want it i think the only answer right now is a full lockdown, schools closed to everyone but keyworkers, everyone who can working from home and companies legally being made to let staff wfh instead of insisting they go in, all shops apart from pharmacies and supermarkets closed including shops like the range and wilkinsons. These half hearted restrictions dont work all the time schools and workplaces are open.

My son has asd and homeschooling him whilst looking after 2 toddlers was hard so the last thing i want is to go back to that but the numbers locally are scary and all 3 of our nearest hospitals are at capacity with no icu beds available. People travelling between tiers for work/exercise are just going to spread it until every county is in the same position unless we stop movement.

My partner is self employed in the film industry and has barely had work since March and im a sahm so im absolutely not someone sitting in a big house with massive garden and huge savings to cushion me, its been a tough year but i cant see any other way of making sure the NHS doesnt collapse.

Actually to be clear i think tier 4 areas should be a complete lockdown with no movement in or out but areas that are tier 1 or 2 should carry on with lighter restrictions. The problem being if there were road blocks stopping people leaving or entering tier 4 (accept key workers) people would kick of about their human rights

We have never had a real lockdown, the government is unwilling to have real penalties for those who break it, have not got the police and not engaged them, and any chance of everyone complying ended when Dominic Cummings was allowed to tell his tall story instead of being sacked.

A real one in October instead of the half a one in November would have had much more impact (indeed so would a half-hearted one).

No chance of anything more than tier 4 happening because the government is desperate to keep schools open.

If only the pandemic was that simple, unfortunately the virus doesn’t understand your logic

I don't support any lockdown that closes schools.

Would rather have the soft lockdown and tier 3 style.
I’m not interested in a harsh lockdown.

Early and hard worked for NZ

I agree but the UK no longer has the option for early.

But even when strict rules are implemented, people are still bending them and I'm not sure how we tackle this.

Round here, (Birmingham area) I am still seeing too many without masks/masks under noses and chins in stores and on public transport, people visiting friends and family in groups and big queues where whole families are out shopping, people having mobile hairdressers in, visiting T4 areas etc. unnecessarily.

There is a thread about 'nobody following the rules' where many posters seem surprised and even questioning the thread's author, because their experience is different to the author, their sleepily little village is following the rules etc so they can't believe there's non compliance.

Part of the problem is that even in the toughest lockdown a huge number of people do still need to go to work to keep the country running. It's literally impossible for everyone to stay home and the economy cannot withstand another period where non essential businesses are closed and furloughed. Those on 80% of their wage.. That's doable for a few months maybe, but I couldn't take a 20% pay cut over a year and not face serious problems. As others have said the aim is not and never was to make it go away, but too slow it, smooth the curve, allow the NHS time. Huge resources should be going in to fund training for staff for the Nightingales so we can cope with higher numbers and treat non Covid issues also. If we'd started that in March, we'd have a good start. Yes it takes a long time to fully train specialist care but you have to start somewhere.

Hard lockdown until Feb haifterm and really push with the vaccine rollout.

Everything closed, essentials only to be bought and limited trips for those, no travelling for exercise so staying local only. Drive cases down, save lives and gives chance to get as many vaccinated as possible.

Not for businesses it's not better. At least some can keep ticking over etc. Covid isn't going to disappear it's endemic now and lockdowns are only being done to ease pressure on NHS.

Part of the problem is that even in the toughest lockdown a huge number of people do still need to go to work to keep the country running. It's literally impossible for everyone to stay home and the economy cannot withstand another period where non essential businesses are closed and furloughed. Those on 80% of their wage.. That's doable for a few months maybe, but I couldn't take a 20% pay cut over a year and not face serious problems. As others have said the aim is not and never was to make it go away, but too slow it, smooth the curve, allow the NHS time. Huge resources should be going in to fund training for staff for the Nightingales so we can cope with higher numbers and treat non Covid issues also. If we'd started that in March, we'd have a good start. Yes it takes a long time to fully train specialist care but you have to start somewhere

Agreed. Also the people say it's just kicking the can down the road, maybe it is (although Chris Whitty said right back in April we would be likely subjected to a series of restriçtions/loosening of restrictions for the next year to 18 months) but that wont be indefinitely because by the middle of this year hopefully a significant proportion of the vulnerable will be vaccinated, meaning less pressure on the NHS.

Yes, the point the “kicking the can down the road” brigade aren’t acknowledging is that we should have people vaccinated on that road soon. That will be the game changer. A tough lockdown knowing it WILL end in xx weeks would be much more acceptable imho.

A hard lockdown means stopping travel. Just look at the Flightradar24 app. Its shocking how many flights are operated. Thus virus will spread and spread. In all the shops I've been to people do wear masks. We have a low infection rate where i luve, thankfully.

Close non essential shops. Work home if you can -I’m bloody trying todo this but its nit happening 😡.

Schools/colleges is a difficult one. We need them open, but the kids are spreaders.

Sports- should go ahead, esp elite athletes as they are tested.

The short sharp shock firebreak in Wales didn’t work. The month long lockdown in England didn’t work.

So no, I’d rather have a longer time in tier 2 measures to mitigate the virus than full lockdown to try and contain a horse that has bolted. It’s endemic, and only a full mega hard China style lockdown with full borders closures will get rid of it. Then it would only come back when you open the borders again.

Neither
Zero evidence that restrictions work at all

I think a short sharp lockdown (although in reality I doubt it would be that short). If we get enough people vaccinated in that time then a lot of the risk would be taken away.

Of course cases will rise when we unlock but its about keeping capacity manageable until the vaccine is sufficiently spread.

Also, firebreaks didn't work as they weren't strict enough.

It is just impossible to stop people moving about, or to only allow some people to move.
How do you identify key workers? Not all of them work for the NHS and have photo ID.

For example, someone working in a small nursery with 5 staff won't have photo ID, because they don't need it as part of thier job. But they could be looking after 15 children of nurses and doctors.
And if you stop people, even if they have ID, how can they prove that they are travelling for work? What if they worked 9am till 3pm then at 4pm wanted to go shopping in a tier 2 area? How could police establish that?

I'm sure they don't have time to stop everyone and contact their employers to ask their shift pattern.

And if you do stop the nursery worker for 20 mins whilst you check thier ID and shift pattern, then a bunch of children are waiting outside the nursery because they can't go in as there are not enough staff, so people waiting for vaccinations have thier appointments cancelled as the surgery is short staffed as all the nurses are waiting outside the nursery doors.

Society is all interconnected, and we can't pick and chose who gets to move around and who doesn't.

It worked, sort of, during the first lockdown because everyone was terrified, and thought it would only be a few weeks until we beat this. Now many people are not as scared, and its been almost a year, so compliance will need to be enforced.

It's a balancing act now isn't. Now the virus is Endemic?
Control it enough so that the NHS isn't overwhelmed and people aren't dying at home and we can still access A & E when needed. We also need to keep the economy ticking over. Apparently tier 1 and 2 are ineffective so we will have to all bob in and out of tier 3 and 4 until the vaccine has been administered to the vulnerable.
I work in a school and it is a failure that the govt have not thrown more money into better mitigation. If the virus gets in they're the perfect breeding.

@110APiccadilly

I'm in Wales. We had a two week firebreak, which more or less equates to your short hard lockdown option, in October/November. It doesn't work - we're back in Tier 4 already. So your choices aren't equivalent.

This is an endemic virus (in the UK) and it's time we all understood that lockdowns only ever kick the can down the road. It is not the case that a harder lockdown means less restrictions in future.

Yep Wales shows short doesn’t help or with very well.

Melbourne shows it takes ages

@JacobReesMogadishu

I think if they did a hard lockdown for a month it would help. Mainly it would buy time to get a load of vaccinations done. Rumour is the Oxford vaccine will be approved in next few weeks.

So even if numbers would have crept up after coming out a hard lockdown if hundreds of thousands of people got vaccinated in those 4 weeks the immunity might negate this.

The key is the vaccinations. But the nhs is at the brink now and vaccinations by themselves won’t have an effect quickly enough.

That would have been a good plan. Had it been a plan instead of a reaction.

But we are going into a peak of hospital transmissions that can only get worse because of Christmas. That means our HCP (who are a finite supply) either need to helping the sick or vaccinating. They can’t do both. And no the army can’t do it all. The mass programme needs HCP to supervise. It will happen but it will be slow.

Our fucked up approach to restrictions and lockdown has scuppered our only way out in the short term. We needed a 2-3 month lockdown in Nov through to January to clear the decks to vaccinate. Then we would be home and dry in April. Now it’s likely to be the autumn before we can relax.

Schools wouldn't be such a problem if all students had to wear masks all the time.

I would prefer a shorter one, but realistically it's kind of what we did this year, locked down until the schools went on summer holidays basically and then once the schools went back, the cases rose again. It's kids spreading it mainly, plus more places opened which didn't help and people were stupid. So really because we've now got another new strain (or is it two new strains now?), which likely the vaccine won't work against, we'd need to stop the flights or any kind of transport in or out of the country other than food and products transportation, keep people working from home, stop all big events like weddings and keep funerals to a minimum number, and keep social distancing going until we get rid of all cases in the country. Pretty much be more like Australia. No one will go for it so we will be in and out of lockdown and changing tiers all year next year. Yay.