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.

Same with universities who conned students into signing up for expensive accommodation and courses on the promise of "blended" learning, when in reality, it was all online for most courses for the whole year! No "in person" lectures/seminars/tutorials even when allowed by the law because the staff weren't on campus at all - they'd previously been told to work from home for the full year so they knew there'd be nothing on campus, yet the Unis still peddled the lies of "blended learning" just for the money!

Yep. I got kind of stung by this (although I'm way way way beyond the age of expecting to rave it up at a nightclub for uni). I remember sitting in an online session at the end of my first year as a mature student when we'd just gone into lockdown and being briefed about what was on the cards for second year - we were promised no large scale lectures, seminars and tutorials face to face as much as possible, online recordings just for the "bang out a lot of information" lectures... our course was a healthcare one, so allowed to carry on face to face when others were sent home during subsequent "waves" and we got something like 3 face to face sessions the entire year.

Result is I ended up having to arrange shadowing in a hospital myself to actually get clinical experience for a particularly important and potentially "deathy" area of clinical practice if you get it wrong - because it was just NOT possible to adequately deliver this module online, but the uni bloody well tried to do so! So instead of a relatively small tutorial to do some of this stuff - I was doing it in a hospital where Covid is still really rather prevalent on Covid+ patients instead two years down the line... slightly illogical way of doing it to me!

Very sobering but useful post @CoffeeWithCheese

My DD got her halls rent refunded from lockdown start to end of academic year.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas

How can we be sure that it was the vaccine that slowed down the virus or was it just the fact that the virus (Omicron) mutated into a milder but more infectious version and we’ve now all been exposed anyway?

That wasn't my meaning - I was referring to the claim that Pfizer didn't test the vaccine for virus transmission (they did not, but really, if this is given some thought, it isn't a reasonable scenario to test).

However, the original (not bivalent) vaccine appeared before Omicron did.

Not all Universities provided refunds. My son's didn't. He still had to pay the entire term and a bit between Christmas and May when students were told to stay away and security were challenging any students actually on campus to prove they had a reason to be there, i.e. for courses involving labs etc. Ironically, they were then all told to return in May, but still there was no reason to be there, as exams were online for most courses!

Universities were horrendous. At my son's uni, they would use key cards to come into their hall flats unannounced and fine them if there were people from other flats there too - fines that were payable to the university! The UNIVERSITY! Not the police, the university. Un fucking believable.

Not only were they entering a residence unannounced, illegally, they were then fining them and making money out of it.

It was such a breach of any code of conduct you would want to look at, I still struggle to understand where they were coming from. And this is all on the backdrop that there was barely ANY work coming out of the lecturers and they could not get out of the rental contracts for their accommodation. An absolute stitch up

And who can forget the infamous FENCE put up at Manchester University to literally imprison students. https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=52105

Did they do anything to challenge this, out of interest? Complaints processes etc. I understand if they didn't, power imbalance there.

The utter disregard of the impact upon children in terms of the way education was treated - as something that was dispensable, that could be easily outsourced to a computer

This from CoffeeWithCheese’s post absolutely hits the nail on the head. Almost overnight education was reframed from a vital human right to an optional extra. People, most of them parents themselves, queued up on Mumsnet to mock and criticise anyone who dared suggest the school closures were damaging. You were treated as deviant or negligent for believing your kids needed to be in school.

I’ve never seen anything like it in my life and hope never to do so again.

dd enjoyed online classes for uni, you could join whatever time you liked! so that was a bonus.

@StormShadow
When I found out about it I wrote to them to express my concern at them breaking the law and breaking every moral code that ever existed to that point and to be fair it did stop pretty soon after that. But they will have made a shit load of money from it. And just to actually even think that was acceptable behaviour told me just how much people had lost their minds.

I was absolutely abused by one on here when I said my son was struggling with online learning. Told he must be thick and that I’m a lazy shit mum making excuses and if he fails it’s my fault.

Such a lovely side of human nature came out at those times

People, most of them parents themselves, queued up on Mumsnet to mock and criticise anyone who dared suggest the school closures were damaging. You were treated as deviant or negligent for believing your kids needed to be in school.

It was pure selfishness. These people were obsessed with their own safety and were absolutely and totally prepared to sacrifice children in their pursuit of what they perceived as their own safety. The irony being that their perception of what danger they were in was almost always overblown due to all the deliberate fearmongering that went on as shown by the WhatsApp messages.

Yes and it was so obvious at the time. That’s the sad part.

Again, no consistency. There were some lectures that were flexible like that, i.e. recorded where you could "attend" when you liked. But other lecturers read out a code which the student had to enter on their portal, and imposed a time limit on entering it, so if you weren't watching live, or nearly live, you were "timed out" and couldn't log your "attendance". Very petty really, especially when other lecturers/other subjects didn't mind when you watched their lectures!

Same with online exams, Some exams required you to do the exam with your laptop camera turned on, so they could randomly monitor you to check you were on your own, weren't surrounded by wall chart crib sheets, weren't googling the answers, etc., yet others trusted you to do it under the rules or changed the format of the exams so that they were harder to "cheat", i.e. less reliance on knowledge that was easy to google!

It was overall an absolute mess. I can't quite believe our DS managed to stick it out, especially when his Uni continued with online learning for some modules in the second year (Sept 2021) and he even had one fully online module as late as January 2023 with the lecturer still apparently "shielding" so refusing to attend Uni in person!

When it all first happened I knew that there were going to be massive issues like tax hikes, interest rates going through the roof etc. to pay for furlough and everything else. I think it was a colossal global overreaction, but to what end, I don't know, as I'm not really one for conspiracy theories. It just felt like leaders were inept, everyone got whipped into a frenzy and it just ran away with itself because we allowed it to. I always thought lock downs would be catastrophic for people needing to see doctors, and for children at critical social development stages. I think we should have been given the option whether or not to lock down, rather than it being forced upon us. It all got very dystopian to me, signing away our rights to a fairly dodgy set of government cronies. My biggest concern was that we would lose the right to gather and protest and, well... that's exactly what happened. If anyone tried to make me do it again it would have to be a zombie apocalypse. I think what should have happened is cost of living be covered for vulnerable people and they be properly provided for, and the rest of us choose if we wanted to stay home or not. But the media did a bang up job of scaring everyone witless, so it was not to be.

I’m so sorry. I was told my daughter’s mental health problems were my fault and that I was ‘projecting my anxiety onto her’. No, it was because she was forcibly isolated from all her peers for months on end.

No. Not for one moment. The alternative was a damn sight worse and there is a lot of hindsight and speculation being used by those who are now coming out with theories as to why it was all mishandled IMO.

DS went into first year in University in Scotland in September 2021. A science degree, with labs, tutorials, lectures. He was told that all the lectures would be online, but that he would get labs and tutorials in person. Didn't happen. Because the university were taking a "cautious" approach and basically making up the rules as they went along, he was in university three times between October 2021 and May 2022. Each time he went in for a lab it was with a different group of people so he never got to know anyone on his class.

I was also told during lockdown that it was my fault my kids were struggling with online learning. 3 kids, all teens, all different stages of schooling, mum and dad working full time from the kitchen, oldest child studying things like A-level standard biology and chemistry when my knowledge in those topics is a GCSE from 30 years ago.

Anyone who said that schools should open were told they wanted TEACHERS TO DIE and lots of other nonsense about this mythical "safe".

Some people being encouraged to think their selfishness was morally better than other people's is another one of those things that wasn't good for anyone in the long run. Including the people who received the validation. And it didn't have to be that way.

Anyone who said that schools should open were told they wanted TEACHERS TO DIE and lots of other nonsense about this mythical "safe"

Sigh. Schools were open. Teachers had grave concerns about transmission both within schools and then it being taken out into the wider community.

But you know that. It just doesn't suit your narrative.

My biggest concern was that we would lose the right to gather and protest and, well... that's exactly what happened.

Adam Wagner had an excellent point when he said that the (potentially unlawful) functional removal of the right to protest at various times during lockdown acted as a dry run for subsequent attempts by the government to criminalise it. When you start treating the right to protest as conditional, something the government gets to take off you if they think they have a good enough reason, that's a dangerous path to go down.

And that's yet another thing that didn't have to be that way, especially once we'd clocked that outdoor transmission wasn't a concern.

No. Schools were not open. Between March and august 2020 and December 17th ish 2020 and mid April 2021 my children’s school was closed. Locked. Teachers at home. SOME key worker children looked after in large groups in a central hub.

Don’t tell me my experience is wrong because yours in another part of the Uk wasn’t the same. Sigh.

Sigh. Schools were open. Teachers had grave concerns about transmission both within schools and then it being taken out into the wider community.

Schools were not open for the vast majority of children.

@lazyakita

I think we should have been given the option whether or not to lock down, rather than it being forced upon us.

I'm not sure it could be considered a lockdown then, and it certainly wouldn't gain enough volunteers to achieve the results a community-wide lockdown might.

I think what should have happened is cost of living be covered for vulnerable people and they be properly provided for, and the rest of us choose if we wanted to stay home or not

Going by the amount of whinging posts saying exactly this (in not so kind words, though) at the time, a great many people agreed with you. However, the vulnerable are not simply elderly people: they can be children, or teenagers, or working parents. You cannot shut people like this away for years while everyone else gets on with life. And remember, they do interact with other people.