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.

True. That annoyed me too, whether to left, centre or right it became too pigeon holed

I get what you’re saying now having seen your other posts on harms

I would be interested in reading that too because most things I've read up until now aren't reliable sources.

Didn't support it, didn't really follow it and carried on as normal. Too much panic and hystria. Obviously you hear what the government or news wants you to hear. I just got in with life and i don't for 1 second regret it

I didn't really follow the rules. I didn't have parties or large gatherings but I left the house a few times a day for walks by myself as I didn't think that it would really make any difference.

I also drove to the hills to exercise and I saw my family in person before we were meant to because I wanted to.

In my head I weighed up the risks of these activities and decided they were fine. I have no regrets.

This was insane wasn't it, I suppose it's all the ridiculous and unintended consequences of rushing rules through like happened (and I guess no choice in a lot of ways)

@NowZeusHasLainWithLeda
This meta-study is a good source of underlying studies (some peer reviewed, some not):
COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis in young males: A systematic reviewBenjamin Knudsen, Vinay Prasad
First published: 28 December 2022
https://doi.org/10.1111/eci.13947

In terms of the pregnancy guidance, I am currently 31 weeks pregnant and the advice from my antenatal team has been to not have the covid vaccine. I queried this and understand from the responses I have been provided that the official guidance is due an update.

Agree some of it was inevitable. Because it wasn't part of the UK pandemic planning, there was no legislation or policy waiting to go. That's what happens when you rush something through that you'd previously decided against doing. So it had to be thrown together at that point.

But that had stopped being an excuse by the time the sausage roll debacle happened. After a while, it becomes a choice.

The quantifiable benefits (reduced deaths where Covid is a cause/ contributing factor) may be deemed 'negligible' but I thought everyone understood that in the UK at least, it was about preventing the NHS from becoming overwhelmed by hospitalizations. Lockdown may have saved many thousands of lives (largely unquantifiable) by virtue that those who went to hospital because of non Covid related but life threatening conditions were largely able to be treated. What is needed now though is a massive injection of investment to deal with all those people with chronic conditions that are now becoming acute due to delayed GP visits and virtual consultations. We went through all of that and the Government is instead allowing the NHS to die a longer, slower death.

I wasn't a lockdown zealot. When people were busy reporting apartment dwellers for picnicking in the park, from the comfort of their 4 bedroomed houses with gardens, I was defending them. We followed the advice of scientists, but took a balanced view of different circumstances. It was unprecedented after all and most were just trying to get by in the nest way they could.

Do I feel like a fool for adhering to the rules while those in power partied their way through the pandemic? Yes, I do a bit. Would I do things differently if it happened again? Probably not, I'd continue to follow the scientific advice. Which may of course be different now with the 20/20 benefit of hindsight.

The point is, this was never about directly resulting deaths. My husband was rushed to hospital with an obstructed bowel due to pancreatitis during the pandemic. He may not have been here today if he'd gone to hospital while it was completely overwhelmed with Covid cases.

You fail to remember that we didn’t know how long a vaccine would take to develop - or if possible at all - and if we’d see worse mutations.
Now with the benefit of knowing how that went, we try to rewrite history.
Also remember that the whole of the world was saying we were insane as we were so lax here compared to other places.

The biggest mistakes were eat-out-to-help-out, the vastly abused bounce back grants and the extent of furlough which went on too long and was too high.

What level do you think furlough support should've been at?

While I continue to reserve judgement on lockdown, I'm very much of the view that once we were having it, the government had no real choice but to pay millions of people enough money to keep them at home and pacified. The amount could maybe have been tweaked a bit, I'm not wedded to 80% over 75% unless anyone has a good argument why I should be, but it needed to make as many people comfortable as possible.

Additionally, I really don't think the whole of the world was saying we were insane, although that was a favoured claim by some on MN. We weren't that important or interesting. A few, sure, but most of the planet had their own problems.

Anyone who thinks they're right because of a politically motivated, non peer reviewed report by the opaquely funded IEA, is, frankly, bonkers.

They're far right money obsessed bastards, who would have approved of de Pfeffel's "let the bodies pile high" remark...

Careful, you will be accused of not ‘following the science’ with your pesky data and facts.

Lockdowns didn’t save many thousands of lives. They saved 1700 lives.

Was it worth sacrificing the lives of many more thousand of younger people for decades to come to save 1700 elderly. Crude, but that’s the reality.

I didn’t support it at the time but went along with it

That’s a very specific number. How did you arrive at that?

I’ll just leave this here. No conspiracy theories, no massaged figures, no smoke and mirrors. Just the ONS.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/averageageofthosewhohaddiedwithcovid19

This seems important, does this counter the earlier posts regarding this report

Hell121, thank you. I had already read The guardian about the John Hopkins report/book but did not realise it was the one you were referring to because the tenor of the article seemed to be far removed from the way you presented it.
There have been several criticisms of the review, now turned into a headline catching book, written by economists, not epidemiologists, which has not been peer reviewed.
From the Guardian article, a quotation from Dr Joshua Sharfstein:
“Whether the interventions should have been required by law or purely voluntary depends a lot on local circumstances, among other factors,” he added. “But it’s important to make sure people don’t get confused and think that we would all have been fine just living our lives as usual in the spring of 2020. That would have been catastrophic.” Dr Joshua Sharfstein, is vice dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
For me, it I obvious that lockdown and other public health measure saved lives and even more lives would have been saved if proper care had been taken over Care Home admissions. The danger was that the NHS would have been overwhelmed. I saw the lockdowns as a way of slowing down transmission so that every cases were at a manageable level for the resources.

One thing I am curious about with regards to the left/right thing is whether Labour were privy to all of the information that the government had access to. If, as I suspect, Starmer (or Corbyn depending on the time) were not invited to the Cobra meetings etc, then we don't know how Labour would have reacted if they had all of the facts.

I think that our borders should have been shut as soon as we locked down.

To put so many restrictions on personal freedom but still allow 1000’s to fly on every day caused huge resentment.

Other countries managed this successfully so no idea why is as an island couldn’t

Researchers at John Hopkins arrived at that number after examining 20,000 studies on measures taken to protect populations against Covid across the world.

What deleting of numbers? There was no deleting of numbers - there were updated numbers - a basic understanding of the reporting would have you understanding that.

I think that our borders should have been shut as soon as we locked down.

To put so many restrictions on personal freedom but still allow 1000’s to fly on every day caused huge resentment

Some of us were required to fly to aid in the pandemic response - personally I flew more during the pandemic than most other times, about every other month for two years.

I still feel as I do about Labour taking harsher route but I take the pp that this didn’t need to be aligned this way

They could have cared about harms to vulnerable to lockdown if they wished as a more general position and still been compatible with the an overarching idea of the left

Unfortunately that wasn’t the case but it annoyed at the time that everyone questioning lockdown was automatically seen as far right

It was just another way to close down debate

I agree.

Unfortunately, most of us will die ‘of something’ Very few of us will fall asleep in our armchair and not wake up. Usually it’s pneumonia that is the primary cause of death, even if someone already has dementia, cancer etc. This time it was a novel virus called Covid and because the world had had several years with low flu epidemics, there was a lot of ‘dry tinder’ hence the high death rates in the first wave. I think if we tested as diligently for flu in CHs as we did for covid, I think people would be surprised at the killer of elderly people real flu is.

If you have a look at the guidance given to doctors at the time, when certifying a death it wasn’t necessary for evidence of a positive test result to record covid as a contributing factor. Sorry to be graphic, but very often part of the dying process involves respiratory difficulties and symptoms very similar to covid. Without doing a PM on every death, we can never be sure of the true figures attributed to the virus.

I’m not a covid denier - I’ve had it twice, both before and after vaccination - but we allowed ourselves to be panicked into a form of world mass hysteria. If you’re in any doubt, reread Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages to realise how manipulated we all were at the time.

Yes. And bearing mind, these figures were published in the very, very early days of the vaccine - long before it has reached the majority of the population - and after the first and most significant wave.