Lockdown report/Covid enquiry - if you supported lockdown do you regret it?

[Hell121]

I haven’t seen a thread on this so sorry if it has been done. In light of the report yesterday I wander if people have changed their minds on whether lockdown was a good idea. I remember the threads of utter lunacy on here and the mask hysteria/schools debate. I was against lockdowns and masks very early on but complied - I don’t think I’d ever do it again. I genuinely think it was a massive overreaction which has damaged things in this country irreparably and left many children and adults far worse off than they were pre covid.

in England, not the UK - of course Wales and Scotland competed to outdraconian each other.

Ha ha at the Boris 'ads', I can't see them as I have an Adblocker

Yes, we shouldn't refer to masking as pointless but harmless- because it can reduce infection rates by 15-20% in a pandemic, which is worth having.

So there was a point to it.

The discussion about the balance of positive and negatives is ongoing, but if it reduced infection rates by that amount, it undoubtedly saved live

Again though, there still isn't and wasn't 'the science'. Prioritising virus spread over eg early deaths due to increased inequality and obesity is a value judgement. Epidemiogists would've given different answers to scientists specialising in childhood obesity, and neither would've been wrong. It's really important we're precise with terminology here.

I'm concerned that we don't seem to have a good plan about what to do if it all happened again

These are the questions that I would like to have answered as quickly as possible so that we are better prepared

We had a big problem with not enough PPE in storage- is that now fixed?
We shouldn't send older people out of hospital into care homes; they need to go to a quarantine space first. How could these be set up quickly?
Are lockdowns a good idea while we work on a vaccine?
How can we better calculate the cost of a lockdown on people's health?
How do we maintain people's access to treatment and cancer screening in a health crisis?

Thank you, @welshweasel for all you and your colleagues did.
I think it's easy to forget how many people died of Covid or had their lives so badly affected by it. I took food to an elderly person who thought he had a chesty cold. He unthinkingly gave me a hug. I'm now certain he had a mild dose of covid and gave it to me. My life has definitely been changed by it as I have Long Covid. My father's partner died of it - a previously very active and healthy woman.
Sweden didn't close down, but comparing their decision and outcomes to ours is almost impossible. They have different lifestyles and different living conditions. I'm glad I didn't have the terrible responsibility of deciding how to deal with the whole lockdown policy.
Closing down our schools and universities brought huge problems, but our schools are very overcrowded and many of them are old buildings. Some of the classrooms and university lecture theatres have no opening windows. Students and teachers would have been sitting in germ factories. There would have been many more deaths.

Completely agree with this. My experience exactly. I don't believe that poster.

I think the moment it became clear that ventilation and being outdoors reduced transmission massively, the rules should have been updated.
Imagine being able to visit relatives in care home gardens.
Pavement cafes open again.
Kids back in classrooms (bundled up with the windows open).
People able to socialise outdoors.
There would have been a boom in sales of coats and hats (and perhaps modified portaloos with better ventilation!) but so much would have been better.

Properly attended funerals outdoors...

An evidence led approach where a trusted neutral person like Chris Whitty said, this is what we know, this is why you MUST NOT do X because of the transmission risk, but we think Y is reasonably low risk so that's fine.

I know no staff who died or were severely infected with covid 19 and we had wards of dying covid patients. I never got infected either that I know of and I tested pretty much everyday.

The revisionism surrounding the pandemic is the strongest since the millennium bug led to so much disappointment

The other thing is that The Science wasn't clear from the start.

The two big things that were not correct and should have made a difference to policy but didn't were a) knowing that asymptomatic transmission was possible, all gov't policy was about testing people with symptoms and b) that Covid was airborne and not just transmitted through touch. This has implications for keeping schools safe e.g. could use HEPA filters (which weren't implemented in the UK and still aren't).

I think it was madness and harmful. However I caught Covid within weeks of the original lockdowns and still get out of breath walking along the street - so it did do damage. Hard to look back now and understand what we were all thinking at the time, some days I feel like I have PTSD.

I quite enjoyed the lockdowns actually. Weather was nice. I had plenty of work to do. Loads of stuff to do online. No social pressures. Oh and the supermarkets were a joy with their one in, one out policy. I was quite content with it all to be honest.

What people miss is it was always about hospital capacity (not saving people). Society won’t watch healthcare collapse. Comparisons with Sweden who have double amount of Doctors etc than uk don’t really work as they were able to be more hung ho knowing they had more capacity (and v high % of single households etc).

I LOVED flying during lock downs, no crowds, plenty of cheap seats, etc

Trouble is that lots of people wouldn't have bothered social distancing. I remember when Boris announced on a Friday that pubs would have to close that day. Our village pub was absolutely rammed with people wanting "a last drink" before it was closed for an unknown number of weeks. People were queuing outside and drinking on the street, so much so, that the police had to come and instruct the pub to close as the drinkers were blocking traffic on the road! Those who did that, i.e. choosing to go into a crowded pub when they knew we had a pandemic were just plain stupid. Unfortunately, legal lockdowns/restrictions were needed to stop that kind of stupid behaviour.

Likewise, on the day our village primary school had to close, the headmaster got all pupils, staff, teachers, etc into the school hall for a final assembly. They even put up pictures on social media. Of literally 300 kids, and a couple of dozen staff, all crammed into a small school hall, standing room only, and the pictures showed the doors were closed too! Just what planet was the headmaster on for doing that when he knew schools we being closed to stop the spread of a contagious disease!

Sadly, you can't fix stupid, so you do need laws and restrictions.

Not hindsight, anyone who tried to question the obviously naive, senseless, evidence baseless and mostly contradictory measures that would harm millions not just at the time but for decades to come and called out the mostly empty hospitals and HCPs letting people die while diagnosing and misdiagnosing from their sitting room sofas was called all sorts of names by a wide proportion of bleating baapulation who only believe what The Television Authority tells them rather than what they see with their own eyes.

They tried to shame people for buying Easter eggs, but other shopping was fine as long as you followed The Rules. That was when I was done with the whole thing.

I loved the 'he's been moved closer to a ventilator' update.

DH and I worked, had to use public transport and were in jobs that contact was quite high realistically (teaching). In primary schools in deprived areas surprising numbers were in as key worker children, or as vulnerable children. You can’t really keep young children apart, well as least not without destroying their mental health for the future.
Many children had parents who were carers, nurses, teacher, delivery drivers etc so realistically my exposure with public transport was high. I’d had covid before even the first lockdown!
I lived my life pretty normally, I figured it was the only way to go on. I went to the supermarket after work, walks in the forest etc for my mental health. Didn’t party obviously, but didn’t hide away. Let our children lead pretty normal times on bike rides etc, didn’t take them to old people’s homes. Kept a balance.
We didn’t really watch the news at home, or get papers. Did a lot of activities and didn’t talk about it too much. Managed to keep them in quite a bubble from it all- and I’m glad I did.

Well you can't complain now when you're faced with higher prices, inflation, higher taxes on the way, business closures, shortages, etc. There is always cause and consequence.

Oh yes and in answer to your question- most of those who supported it would rather die than admit they regret it such is the nature of fool.

You are lucky then. I think your post is pretty ignorant considering how many NHS staff died of Covid.

It was a Pandemic and some now seem to think we should have acted differently and been able to look back and say wow didn’t we have a good Pandemic. That will never happen as Pandemics cause damage it’s just a trade off as to who is damaged more.

No, it was necessary contextually in that given moment. The world had no idea what was about to happen. It is likely many lives were saved as a result - not necessarily of covid but what could have been the result of an over-worked health care system where issues were overlooked. There is no doubt in those early stages that the health services would have faced bigger challenges if we had kept calm and carried on.

I think it's easy to criticise in hindsight but this thing didn't come with a management manual. My fear is that if we were to go there again but with a higher death rate, many would die because of off-centre thinking based on covid.