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.

So far this year (Jan to May) there have been 17,000 excess deaths as compared to the 5 year average in England and Wales.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales/2023

There were 50,000 excess deaths last year (2022) and our Chief Medical Officer attributed the excess deaths to statin starvation and blood pressure monitoring during lockdowns. (I happen to think that explanation is not the full picture but it is a start)* *

I would think that is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the actual consequences of lockdown - there are so many other hideous outcomes we have created from these useless measures - mental health issues, education fails, criminality, inflation (I often wonder where people think we got the money from the pay for furlough and all the insane measures?), businesses going under - really, lockdowns harmed every single fundamental part of our society. And then, to make it worse, the NHS is still unable to function, it didn't even 'Save the NHS'.

There's the increased deaths from alcohol abuse too.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/alcoholic-liver-deaths-increased-by-21-during-year-of-the-pandemic

Again not a surprise and something that anyone who knew anything about alcohol abuse could've told us in March 2020.

I still don't rule out the possibility that lockdown robbed fewer years off lives than not locking down, but people who are making that argument need to do so in full acceptance and acknowledgment of deaths like these.

What a gem.

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.

Agreed. I think what the pandemic also exposed was a lack of basic statistical knowledge and understanding of risk amongst a high number of people.
I remember a poster on here repeatedly making the case that we should have harsher lockdowns to prevent her 95 year old gran dying ‘prematurely’ of covid. I and other posters kept trying to get across that at 10+ years over average life expectancy her gran wasn’t doing to die ‘prematurely’.

Agreed. I think what the pandemic also exposed was a lack of basic statistical knowledge and understanding of risk amongst a high number of people.

This is true. The number of people who thought we were locking down/having other restrictions so that covid would go away, that if we all observed everything it'd be over sooner, was also mystifying.

But I think that goes back to the point about the public conversation never really being had properly.

Agreed. I think what the pandemic also exposed was a lack of basic statistical knowledge and understanding of risk amongst a high number of people.
I remember a poster on here repeatedly making the case that we should have harsher lockdowns to prevent her 95 year old gran dying ‘prematurely’ of covid

Do you remember what happened to Lord Sumption for stating this fact? For saying that his life aged 70-odd is 'less valuable' than an 18 year old.

I don't think people still get this.

Fair enough, thank you.

Granted I haven’t read the report myself but I remain skeptic all about their methodology. In the summaries I’ve had chance to look through it’s not entirely clear (to me at least) what periods of time they were using to arrive at that figure. So were they comparing weekly average death figures, monthly, seasonally or what. I’ve seen summaries that have compared to average seasonal flu deaths but that doesn’t really tell us much of that figure has only been taken from the lockdown period. That’s ignoring the fact that we simply don’t know, and can’t ever know, what the fatality figures would have looked like if we hadn’t locked down.

Australia and New Zealand famously implemented very strict measures and the mortality figures speak for themselves imho. Pre-vaccine the choices were very limited although it would have been interesting to see where we would have gone without the arrival of vaccinations.

Autocorrect haha sorry, reporting of numbers which were later admitted to have been vastly overestimated

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

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

@Cornettoninja I think what @Swrigh1234 meant to say was she read the figure 1700 of in a headline about a book written by 3 right wing anti-lockdown economists, one of whom is from John Hopkins, that is based on a paper that analyses 22 studies (NOT 20,000), is not peer reviewed and that has been widely criticised as flawed in its analysis, including by the vice-dean of Public Health at John Hopkins and eminent epidemiologists, and despite other (actually peer-reviewed) studies making very different estimates.

So, a flawed analysis by one researcher in economics (not epidemiology) from John Hopkins that examined 22 studies.

Presumably, @Swrigh1234 has never performed a meta-analysis. The first step is a systemic search to identify any studies that might be useful. They found nearly 20,000 potentially relevant studies but that doesn't mean they "examined 20,000 studies". They only used 22 in their analysis.

I am tempted to call her stupid given that she thinks, "The fact that there are still people defending lockdowns, even after everything that’s out in the open, shows that there is no shortage of stupid. And to think that these people have the vote," but I won't, I'll just say just she is "not equipped for critical analysis"...

Yes.
The stats are great (or perhaps they're manipulated and damned lies), but they are here because this is based on the data we have now collected over a blindingly short period in the scheme of a novel disease.

Examples of things we didn't know, for (quite a big) part of this short time. Some have been found out, just as many are still to be determined.

Whether this was airborne;
Whether it spread well on surfaces, paper, or through waste water;
Whether temperature, humidity, or light affected the transmission;
Whether malaria, saline nose drops, or HIV medicine were any use as a medical cure (all tried);
Whether the danger zone is in the presentation as a respiratory disease, a circulatory one, or a neurological one. Perhaps no good consensus yet.
Whether it would show the seasonal pattern of the existing coronavirus family - peaks in early January whatever you do; drops off after April. Jury still out but not looking quite as similar to the rest right now;
Whether certain herd or domestic species had the ability to pass it easily to humans.
What the pre-symptomatic infection potential was (looks to be between 3 and 15 days of potential infection before being aware, while upright and functioning - unusual, not at all like flu);
Whether iron lungs or CPAP was our best option for most, in the long run;
Whether medics would get adequate PPE in a wave of unknown size.
Whether very sick patients might fare better if allowed to be positioned on their front and not laid on their back.

This was finding things out on the job, with what seemed like the most bizarre and non-pharmaceutical discoveries being more or less the best we had to throw at it, while the numbers were against the wards, the people with the skills to care for patients, and the oxygen cylinders. The political layer may be clowns but you won't get me regretting the actions I could take, so that those who actually have the training to research improvements and treat people, had the best chance to do it.

The fuck they did:

The paper, which is an analysis of other studies, has been touted as a “Johns Hopkins University study,” but it’s not a product of the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose vice dean — among other public health experts — has criticized the paper.

“The working paper is not a peer-reviewed scientific study,” Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in a Feb. 8 statement sent to us in an email. “To reach their conclusion that ‘lockdowns’ had a small effect on mortality, the authors redefined the term ‘lockdown’ and disregarded many peer-reviewed studies. The working paper did not include new data, and serious questions have already been raised about its methodology.”

What We've Learned About So-Called 'Lockdowns' and the COVID-19 Pandemic - FactCheck.org

The ignorance of the anti-lockdown keyboard warriors is unbelievable. Also those saying NHS staff ignored Covid rules when we were trying to save lives and putting ourselves and our loved ones at risk. They also forget that the Wuhan virus was far more deadly with no treatments.

Not vastly overestimated.

There were two reporting mechanisms. One, basically deaths reported over previous 24 hours with suspected cause of death. This was then updated after approximately 10 days with cause of death from death certificate. This is because death certificates are rarely available within 24 hours - this sort of reporting takes time. There really wasn't an enormous difference between the two, and the second was often higher than the first.

The paper, which is an analysis of other studies, has been touted as a “Johns Hopkins University study,” but it’s not a product of the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose vice dean — among other public health experts — has criticized the paper.

Thats a thankless position. I’m sure there was another paper that carried John Hopkins credentials that as an institution they distanced themselves from:

Looks like a lot of people are now feeling a bit duped for being taken for mugs and complying with lockdowns. They will do anything to prove that they were right, because it makes them feel less stupid. Unfortunately the more they protest and defend lockdowns, the more stupid they look.

Irony meter overload...

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And this week we've 'learned' that lockdown was awful and that Eat Out to Help Out contributed to the second deadlier wave. Both these things aren't true.

As I said in my post, those are the quantifiable deaths - I.e. 1700 didn't catch Covid and die due to lockdown measures. The many thousands I refer to are those who were able to be treated for other life threatening conditions because hospitals never became so overwhelmed by dealing with Covid cases that others died indirectly.

Well that's an opinion rather than a fact. But I agree, a lot of people simply wouldn't have it that we were making value judgements about who to prioritise, that the vulnerable aren't one monolith with the same interests. There's some evidence of that in this thread even now, with the moralising.

Not really. The point of lockdown was to help the medical care services. The NHS was under water at the sudden spike in hospitalisations. I have not seen a single NHS worker say that it wasn’t horrendous.

All the money spent on furlough etc would have been far better spent on protecting and targeting those who needed it rather than locking down and paying healthy, fit people to stay at home and closing schools. I said this at the time and even with hindsight, my opinion hasn’t changed.

I appreciate ‘the vulnerable’ don’t fit neatly into one cohort, but we all know what our own particular risk is and what we feel comfortable with. We forget that those that supplied our food, worked in warehouses and served us in supermarkets just had to get on with it, otherwise the country would have ground to a halt. Provisions within that group who would have been classified as ‘at risk’ were clearly made, they weren’t forced to work and the same arrangements could have been made within other professions.

I complied with lockdown, stuck to it rigidly.
Now it turns out the Gov seemed to be doing what the fuck they wanted and having gatherings , can't see myself doing it again.
Bet a lot of others don't either

As I said in my post, those are the quantifiable deaths - I.e. 1700 didn't catch Covid and die due to lockdown measures

But this figure sounds mad enough. It’s so low

Is it disputed?

I think there are quite a few people who feel as you do. The level of public trust in government this time 3 years ago was pretty high. It's not any more...

Thank you for pointing this out. I fucking hate that this shite gets touted as fact despite it not being peer reviewed and flawed- the poor souls that wrote it are vilified by the scientific community (usually), because they refuse to do as they are told.

That a respected University is being used to give it respectability is also par for the course. The damage this and similar is doing to vulnerable people who believe it as their truth is wrong.

Again. Thank you.