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.

A truly grim time in this country’s history. Let’s hope we never see a response like this again.

And don’t start me on the “it wasn’t a proper lockdown” types who wanted what was going on in China or Spain to take place here

I agree that you can’t compare populations on many variants. However you can bluntly compare case rates to fatality rates and the difference is stark.

ok. But, specifically, who’s that?

How can you say it's "this country's history", when most Western/Developed countries were doing the same, some worse? Surely you mean it was a grim time in the history of the developed world?? Why single out "this country"?

Good point. Interestingly that many of the countries in, for example Africa, didn’t report massive increases infection rates or deaths despite having poorer economies, less money spent on health and generally lower living standards plus no coordinated vaccine scheme on the huge scale seen here.

My medic BIL told me at the height of the wave, 80% of his patients on ICU were obese or morbidly obese. That those at risk from complications tended to be more likely to be overweight, diabetic and had hypertension - not necessarily elderly - which would explain the fact that Western/developed nations seemed to be disproportionately affected

Yes, but also the generally poor health of the developing countries means that the "ill" people tend not to live so long anyway and average life expectancy is generally lower, all due to lack of medical attention, medical care, etc. So they're likely to have fewer "vulnerable" people among their population as they're more likely to die earlier from other things. The ones who survive until middle/old age are probably those with "stronger constitutions" who are more likely to be able to survive an infectious disease such as covid.

I was a student at the time. At the two unis in the city I was studying in, you get randomly allocated to halls when you apply (based on preference, cost, distance etc and all that stuff) - and it's a mix of private providers and a few halls still owned by the universities.

The halls owned by the universities refunded, but the private providers refused to - absolute and sheer lottery whether you'd been allocated to one of the two halls that were university owned or not - and therefore whether you got your money back.

As for the "schools were never closed" shite. If Johnny Bloggs rocks up and can't go into his class = that's school closed for little Johnny Bloggs. If little Johnny's mum AND dad (for schools were blocking access for kids who only had one "key worker" parent) weren't keyworkers:

By comparing the school opening and closure dates, official school attendance figures and data on daily learning rates; the estimated lost learning time stands at between a third and a half of expected days in the classroom (Major, Eyles and Machin, 2021).

In her annual report for the academic year 2020-21, the Chief Inspector of Schools, describes how:“In primary and secondary schools, children struggled with a hokey-cokey education: in the classroom, at home, separated in bubbles, isolating alone.”(Ofsted, 2021, p.7)
I am not a total sad bastard by the way - those are copy pasted bits from some of the intro to my undergrad dissertation where I knew I had some of the figures to hand. When even the Chief Inspector of Schools is referring to educational hokey-cokey - you know in and out was happening on a regular basis!

I get that there were teachers who never wanted schools to reopen and thought there were too many people sending their kids in (too many people whose jobs were key to the country - whoda thunk the NHS was the country's biggest employer and then all those critical bits of critical infrastructure) - but for gods sake OWN the fact that for many many kids, schools WERE closed and schools in their usual format were closed.

We need to at least own up to the decisions we made as a country - if we can't even sit and look at exactly what measures we put in place - how the fuckedy bollocks do we ever expect to be able to evaluate the efficacy of them?!

Some of the shit that went around was NOT "official" - hell MN was one of the chief sources of completely invented interpretations of the rules and some was really iffy interpretations of the rules by police (like Derbyshire Police and their drone footage and assorted other nonsense) but the schools were closed by default, with the exceptional provision for them being open being only for key workers and vulnerable children.

There were also some awful antics deployed by headteachers to keep kids out of school as well. We should have been entitled to a place for the kids for the second period of school closures as the impact upon one child's mental health and language (already had SEN and significant language needs) had been so catastrophic, plus I had key worker status confirmed in writing - place refused. The only way we could get a place despite all of this (and DH also was classed as a key worker but refused to push his employer for this in writing) was for me to agree to a social services referral. I found out that this Head was using this as a screening process to deter parents for asking for access to the school provision they were entitled to. There were also parents who took the piss as well - I know of at least one nurse who admits she photoshopped her rosters to get more slots to have her kids at school. It's not a shining moment of glory for our country all of the crap that went on and I think lockdowns established one thing in terms of the major finding of the Covid enquiry:
We would all go utterly fucking Hunger Games for the last sodding multipack of Andrex.

(there you go Boris, I've saved you figuring out how to turn on your old mobile phone and concluded the whole shebang)

I hope people read and understand your post. Sending you lots of love as ICU staff, all of them, were the utter utter heroes of Covid.

As someone working in a hospital during COVID, especially at the start, the lockdown was absolutely needed. I don't think people could possibly understand how awful it was unless you were working in acute services at that time. Our ITU ran at 300% capacity, we had to phone people and tell then that their mum had died of COVID and then they would say that they were expecting it because their dad had died of COVID just a few days before as well. Even during flu epidemics I never saw so much death of multiple family members. We were almost overwhelmed as it was, without lockdown at the start it would have been much worse.

The poster on the first page of this thread who announced how they threw caution to the wind during her pregnancy and was oh so liberated - I worked in a unit where a pregnant woman came in with COVID, went to ITU, the baby was delivered by C section on ITU and she died a couple of days later without ever seeing or holding her baby, and leaving her other young children without a mother. I'm very happy that that person felt great about not giving a stuff about COVID, but terrible things happened to many people during COVID - so many people died and lots are left with lung damage.

So yes, I supported lockdown and no, I don't regret it. There would have been many more people who lost both parents, or loved ones, and there would have been more children left without a mother. I'm not blind that there were downsides, and I cannot tell you how furious I was to discover that the govt were flouting their own advice - because that was a big part of changing things from the feeling of "we're all in this together" to "I'll do what I like, the rest of the plebs can take the hardships"

I'm in the wedding industry.

I find it very hard to believe that it was that bad in acute services for one simple reason.

I retained just one wedding booking in 2020.

The bride was an A&E nurse.

The number of guests she had significantly outstripped the number she was allowed to have according to the rules at the time.

I wasn't in a position to turn away the work - I was on the verge of losing my home because my business had been shut down and yet I was receiving zero government support, despite paying all my taxes, in full, for many years, so I facilitated it.

When everyone from A&E nurses to politicians - supposedly those in the know - were partying like nothing was changed, why would the rest of us take it as seriously as we were told to?

I understood why the very first lockdown was necessary because Covid was then still pretty much an unknown quantity.

Beyond that though, subsequent ones were irksome and pointless, causing more harm than good.

I never understood either why so many essential public facilities were closed, such as toilets. Why did Covid apparently mean that people no longer needed to go to the toilet when out and about?

I was also very quickly done with the absolute bollocks about "don't sit on park benches to eat" and ignored it. Likewise, the criticism of people buying Easter eggs in supermarkets reinforced how batshit it all had become.

I still support it to this day the lockdowns we had and e en more so as being a carer I worked in a. Are home and witnessed 12 deaths from residents who had covid, I have ptsd now because of what I witnessed and how real covid was

Some of the replies on this thread leave me feeling like we are doomed 😂
@Topseyt123 covid clearly doesn’t stop people needing a wee when out and about, no. But not allowing people into very small spaces with poor ventilation and lack of hand washing facilities prevents the spread of airborne virus and illnesses. Because the space is closed, people don’t go in, and therefore it removes the risk in this area.

The lack of empathy on some of these posts is shocking. People died all over the world. It’s like people have forgotten this fact!!!

My experience is direct experience, yours is second hand, based on the behaviour of a single person.

The first day of our hospital running under the new COVID conditions, within 3 hours of starting my shift, I sent 3 patients to intensive care to be put on a ventilator (and almost sent a 4th, but they just managed to stick at their current level - even a tiny deterioration would have been enough for them to have been sent to ITU). That's more than I would normally send to ITU pre-COVID in 3 months - all within a couple of hours.

I have been a dr for 20 years and have never experienced anything like it, and I hope never to again. Your A&E nurse client was an outlier and their behaviour didn't represent the vast majority of healthcare staff (I also know some doctors who were deniers regarding the scale of the COVID issue, it's not like it was 100%, but 99.9% of us were very conscious of the enormous impact that COVID had). There were also some geographical variations as well - I was in an area that was one of the top 3 affected in the country. My colleagues at work - doctors and nurses - were all very worried at the start that we would bring COVID back home and infect our families. One of my colleagues who was a head of department spent the first 3 months of the pandemic in a hotel at his own expense as they had a child with health conditions and they didn't want to run the risk of infecting them.

I suspect that nothing I will say will alter your opinion, however.

Don't really know what the alternatives were?

Health service's just never had the capacity to deal with even larger numbers of CV patients, so the no LD supporters will have had to see these people die in even large numbers, outside of medical facilities than they did already.

Thats not to say the way LD was done or all the rules were correct, some were stupid, like eat out to help out! or the 6 at a table crap, why not 5 or 7 ?

Masks should have been used far earlier.

It is funny how all the anti LD ers come out now, yet at the time, esp the first LD, it carried huge public support.

It's not really that funny that having lived through something might change people's views about it.

Especially when we never really had a societal discussion about how we were choosing between two bad options, that lockdown was going to kill some people early as well as save others, and that it was going to come at significant financial cost. Add to this the frankly horrifying behaviour of the governing class, who whatever one's views on restrictions clearly abused the trust placed in them, then lied and gaslighted their arses off afterwards. Obviously these things are going to have an impact!

I say all this as someone whose views haven't changed. I didn't think I knew whether lockdown was the least worst option in March 2020, and I don't think it's a question that can be answered now either. But it's pretty fucking obvious how the massive societal change and political events in the meantime might lead some people to change their minds.

You realise that A&E is not he same as ITU,Critical care?
Based on your one anecdotal booking🙄
why would the previous poster lie about how bad it was ?
my son was an inpatient on critical care a few months ago the staff are incredibly dedicated and do an amazing job I can't even begin to imagine the pressures they must have been under at the peak of the pandemic,why would they lie,why?

What you say applies to the way many germs and viruses are spread, not just Covid. It always has. Still does too. People seem to forget that.

Lockdowns were traumatic for me. My Dad died during the second one, alone and frightened in hospital, and it wasn't even related to Covid because he didn't have it. That thought will always colour my view of them.

I'm honestly glad that in the fortnight leading up to his death I did decide to go and stay with my parents at their house. He was already very ill, was wrongfully discharged from hospital and they were both vulnerable without sufficient care in place anyway. We now know that it was because he was dying, so if I hadn't done that then I'd never have seen him alive again. Once he was admitted back into hospital that was it. We didn't see him there at all until after his death.

I'm glad I broke some rules for my dying Dad. I'd do it again too if a similar situation occurred.

I was also unable to get some significant medical issues of my own treated for over a year, because the NHS had become the National Covid Service. I know that was needed for a time, but those of us with other issues were mostly shut out. Some services are still playing catch-up.

Some of my medical issues could require urgent use of the then closed public toilet facilities when out and about. Until places stopped being so ridiculous about that then I was almost housebound at times. That felt almost like discrimination.

Of course I'm aware that people died all over the world. It's why I believe the first lockdown was necessary as we knew so little about what we were dealing with. Subsequent ones were not so much.

But you carry on feeling that we are doomed through lack of empathy.

It is funny how all the anti LD ers come out now, yet at the time, esp the first LD, it carried huge public support.

People did say it at the time but we’re faced with a barrage of abuse, on mn for sure

Absolutely. I think the majority supported the first lockdown as we had no idea what we were dealing with.

After that, many spoke out about the subsequent ones but were shouted down as granny killers on SM.

Yep and good luck if you wanted to raise the damage of dc out of school.

No chance on this parenting site. Mn was overrun which meant the alternative view was met with abuse.

People just kept quiet I think. You were absolutely ripped to shreds if you dared question things - look at the constant abuse on here and the nasty tones that have come out from some of the usual lockdown lovers on this thread.
It was absolutely Orwellian some of the stuff that went on - the constant rewriting of history and narrative was horrendous.

I think the rewriting of history goes two ways here! I hope that some historian of public memory is reading this thread because it's absolutely fascinating to see what we've forgotten over the past 3 years. My sister was/is an NHS anesthetist and, like a lot of medical professionals posting here does not think the lockdowns were an overreaction.

I think the rewriting of history was on both sides tbf,you couldn't have e a rational discussion about it because sides were so polarised ,they was , the we need to lockdown forever side, and pandemic what pandemic side .

Absolutely. I think the majority supported the first lockdown as we had no idea what we were dealing with.

Yes, that raises another good point which is that people who supported or at least accepted the first lockdown were doing just that- supporting that one lockdown. Nobody in March 2020 was consenting to, say, two years of legally required isolation. Or nearly two terms of school closure for most children.

There's no reason whatsoever to think that being ok with an initial lockdown would mean continuing support for further restrictions over a lengthy period. Many people's rationale was specifically rooted in covid being new.