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.

And I agree with @Doagooddeed - your sort dominated the board. Not the other way round.

@CoffeeWithCheese Absolutely disgusting, did you report the post and the MH effects it had on you at the time?

I have had some horrible things said to me, i report, stating how upsetting found them and on every occasion deleted, feelings do matter on site boasting of supporting parents.

The posters and the general messaging on CV, esp the scary stuff were done by the Govt, Boris Sunak Gove and Hancock, these were the 4 big beast who decided policy that had such a damaging effect on your family and gave the eefing twats a voice.

It was utter insanity. And millions went along with it unquestioningly.

I'm extremely glad now I was one of the questioners.

Vast tracts of those two years of measures were not protecting the NHS. March/ April 2020, I won't argue, but all May-September did was stockpile exposure of new cases up for the usual pinch point over the winter. And repeat in 2021.

And since then people's health has declined because their immune systems haven't been used and "updated" or lack of access to diagnosis or routine treatment has aggravated conditions. Death rates are still above the 5 year average (inc Covid peaks) and higher rates non-Covid causes are consistently high.

School attendances have not recovered to pre-2020 levels. DS1's is his worst ever at 95% due to having 3 rounds of winter illness requiring multiple days of Sept-Jan with several more in between. He was ill every 3 weeks. It's normally a "bad year" for him if he misses a couple of days. That's aside from children struggling in many ways including being stuck for years on long waiting lists for developmental/ mental health assessments.

School wasn't closed... from home the DCs and I could hear the playground sounds of children including their classmates playing together while they spent nearly 5 months being prohibited from crossing the threshold. Ds2 was 7 and forgot how to play because there was no one his age to legally play with for so long. By the time he went back to school he'd forgotten who his classmates were and his keyworker friends had grown and matured in his absence. In the winter lockdown, he sobbed on my lap daily during the online lessons, taunted by the sight of half his class that the law banned him from meeting. It was worse than closed.

If it's so abhorent to facilitate a "two-tier" system of vulnerable people being facilitated to shield if they wish while others can live more freely, why did we basically impose it on children based on parental occupation? Children were the lowest risk age group, but by the winter lockdown couldn't even legally meet the exercise with another person exemption if they were over 5 due to the need to be supervised. Again, they were often hit by the Rule of 6 as it was easy to exceed with standard family sizes. With over-zealous policing and curtain twitching it took a lot of confidence to be willing to be seen to break the law in public.

In my youth groups, there's so much more separation anxiety and difficult behaviour than usual. The children coming in now are those that were around starting school age when their social development was interupted, plus the loss of learning experiences.

It seems it’s going to take much longer for that kind of conversation to happen. People are still hurt/angry and lashing out or elevating expectations of some sort of apology. I only refer to it as ‘some sort’ because by and large the people those feelings are directed at aren’t responsible for their upset.

The facts are unchangeable and for a large number of grievances the only answer to avoid them for one group would have been to pass that burden onto another group. There is no fair. Sometimes shit happens and the hand you get dealt personally just ‘is’ regardless of any measure of deserving.

I don’t think this is true. But it probably also depends on which threads and topics people were commenting on

Some were particularly bad as per @CoffeeWithCheese post but you may have felt differently on other topics

I do think the hindsight claim is not right though as many did try to say it at the time - and yes often met with abuse

Where is the peer reviewed evidence that lockdowns were bad? A relative of mine died in the 2nd wave. Had we locked down sooner, she probably would not have. Surely, the only way to prevent a virus from spreading and thus mutating is to lockdown? What am I missing? I'm genuinely mystified.

It also now seems that Mr Sunak was also one of the Questioners though it does seem no one heard his questions at the time.

I recall he backed and hammered home the LD message at every occasion he was able too.

Well that's nice, but "Mr Sunak" is nothing to do with me

And presumably Mr Sunak didn't have the same challenges as I did during lockdown, not least the overwhelming majority on MN insisting I was selfish, stupid and didn't understand "the science" etc etc etc.

Thats a very good point, very few would be on all threads and read all posts, so opinions would vary on abuse and anti Lockdowners based on what was read etc.

Certainly from my experience, the anti's in the first LD were as rare as hens teeth but at the risk of being a stuck record, our elected Govt dictated policy, not MNers.

Vast majority of people based their opinions on ignorance, very few knew about Covid before January 2020, so our beliefs were formed via media etc.

@Doagooddeed I think for me it’s a frustration at knowing it was problematic at the time but not seeing an allowance for those views

I’d also say public sentiment did heavily impact political decisions though

Once we went down the fear of Covid route we kind of lost it a bit and it was like a spiral. We got the headlines then the government got the fear reaction and people pushed for more

You’re right Rishi Sunak has since questioned it, I saw his view on schools closing, it’s a shame it wasn’t earlier but hopefully learnt from.

I don't mind anyone changing their opinion on a decision made, we all make mistakes,

i get annoyed when he says he was against LD at the time, he was not, he was 100% behind it, he was chancellor and developed the policies to enable LD i.e Furlough, Loans, School catch ups.

Own it Mr Sunak and tell us you were wrong if you now believe you made bad errors of judgement not be a smart arse and think we have no memory.

Was he for it though?

He argued against - there’s WhatsApp with some one saying he was losing it over costs and I think he said no to lockdown for omicron

Once those restrictions were in place he had to give people money and he was just the money person.

If anyone was pro lockdown in that party it was Hunt and then there was SAGE coming in with their circuits etc at every chance and WHO lambasting U.K. for opening up

Johnson was not that keen but a shopping trolley in the end

I think we also lost all sense of proportion too. History is littered with incidences of Mass Sociogenic Illness, and the pandemic became yet another one.

Yes, there was no doubt that for a few Covid was a killer, but the hysteria fanned by the media and SM was unbelievable. The questioners were accused at the time of selfishness, but there was certainly a lot of ‘what about me’ from the other side too, but well wrapped up in virtue signalling. The reporting of people that were non compliant - I unfriended someone on FB who regularly posted what his neighbours were doing and his proud comments about how many times he’d called the police. The confronting of the maskless in supermarkets - Really? Was it anyone else’s business or right to do this? The accusations of granny killing - emotive and over dramatic. Covid wasn’t an automatic death sentence to the elderly. All because these people actually wanted to feel safe themselves, not because they cared about total strangers.

I was unable to visit my dying mother and DH could only see his mother whilst dressed totally in PPE, as if covid would make any difference to either of them at the stage of life they were at. She clearly didn’t recognise DH either in the gear which made it even harder. So many in CHs said they would rather have risked catching it than lost those 2 years of quarantining.

Worth bearing in mind, in England we have mostly Nicola Sturgeon to thank for our extended and unnecessary lockdown. The government didn’t want to be out manoeuvred by her so when she said she was extending restrictions in Scotland, we were forced by our leaders to carry on with the nonsense so she couldn’t claim that she had been more successful in controlling the virus and thereby gain more credibility for the independence vote.

Finally, if you believe in “Following the science” Patrick Whitty and his colleagues told the government in September 2020 that the isolation period could safely be reduced from 14 days to 3-5 days but it was believed by those in charge that to reduce it that much in a short period of time would make it look as though they hadn’t been handling and understanding the true risk of covid, so an executive decision was made to reduce it to 10 days. Totally pointless figure not based on any facts, so another unnecessary and continued cost to the economy.

Another unfathomable decision was to still have restrictions once the numbers of infections, hospitalisations and deaths were at really low levels in late Spring/early Summer 2020. It was as if they were aiming to eradicate covid (which we knew was impossible) or keep infection rates at stupidly low levels, far below what the NHS could cope with. Same happened coming out of the early 2021 lockdown, again, numbers were stupidly low and yet there were still restrictions in force.

We kept lurching from peaks to troughs throughout the 18 months of restrictions, despite the whole point of the lockdown first announced as being to avoid the peaks and troughs and steady the number of infections so the NHS could cope.

The politicians simply lost sight of the stated aims.

The politicians simply lost sight of the stated aims.

No, they kept changing the aims as we went along. At the start Nicola Sturgeon was saying the same thing about flattening the curve, protecting the NHS. And then gradually morphed into the Zero Covid Queen over Spring/Summer 2020 when she realised that it was winning her more political support than Boris and Co's approach.

It’s a hard one. I think:

1. Yes we needed some lockdowns
2. Lockdowns could have been less harsh and prolonged if govt hadn’t made some awful decisions such as a. Locking down too late and b. Releasing people into care homes without testing, thereby adding massively to cases and deaths.
3. First lockdown was ill thought out - the lack of any bubbles or support for single adults was criminal. In general, single adults (whether with U18 children or all alone) were horrible unsupported and disproportionately affected in terms of MH.
4. More should have been done in terms of the obviously increase of DV and child abuse. I dread to think what some people went through.
5. Some rules were ridiculous, such as limits on time spent outdoors on your own - a woman being moved on from sitting on a bench springs to mind.
6. Children were disproportionately affected and more should have been done to help esp disadvantaged children.
7. The fact the govt broke all the rules means they’ll never have any credibility to do this again, and that could cause a real danger in future if it happens again.

Basically it was the lack of forward planning and contingencies for a pandemic that required lockdowns that was the problem not lockdowns per se. Along with the even worse lack for forward planning re for example PPE, and the profiteering and corruption that took place.

Yes for some bizarre reason zero Covid started to get public and political attention

They should have known better

Who knows? he stayed as Chancellor and backed it up on the daily briefings, so we can only judge on what he did say then in 2020, not on what he says now or did he put his personal ambition to be Chancellor and more above the national interest and what he believed to be correct?

Sunak has always taken praise for Furlough etc as his ideas, so i think he was a bit more than a Money Man.

Hunt wasn't in Government, can't really have ago at him.

Don't know what a Shopping Trolley is in relation to Boris, would he fit in one?

Yes Austerity and the running down of stockpiles and Pandemic preparedness appears to have been a huge factor in the decision making process, however we weren't France or Spain, they had awful LD rules, Germany seems to have done the best of any European country.

Hunt had fair amount of exposure with the select committee he was leading

Trouble is for furlough it was a good idea to start with but it all dragged on too long, hence Rishi losing it at some point about more

If he did stop the omicron lockdown as said then good on him, it meant my dc could have a birthday party after not having any and attending friends’ in summer. And the rest of the damage avoided

I don’t think anyone has said schools closing was bad - Any other leader? Yes it’s a big shame no one advocated for then at the time I agree on that, I thought that at the time though

Another unfathomable decision was to still have restrictions once the numbers of infections, hospitalisations and deaths were at really low levels in late Spring/early Summer 2020.

I got the impression at the time that it was because the public had been keen on the idea for longer than the government had expected. We know they were expecting lower compliance rates than we actually got, and had been worried about restrictions fatigue all along. Whitty said as much.

It's would actually have been very hard, after the granny killing messaging, to say to people we want to lift restrictions now while it's warm and cases are low, because it's better for more of you to get covid now rather than pushing all the cases back to flu season. That would've been a tough sell in May 2020, especially if the government knew the press were aware of Cummings and his Barnard Castle trips before it was publicised.

I'm a bit reluctant to use the term political when it comes to decisions about restrictions, because the whole thing was unavoidably political. The implementation of restrictions, and the lifting. The idea that we could've had 'the science' without politics is for the birds. But the delay in lifting restrictions after the first lockdown is really one of the most obvious examples of that.

If he did stop the omicron lockdown as said then good on him

I don't believe Rishi stopped an Omicron lockdown. It wasn't happening anyway. Neither the public nor the parliamentary party would've had it, so his opposition wasn't needed. He's just trying to bolster his image by associating himself with one of the few pandemic management decisions that was undeniably correct.

I remember the backlash from the WHO and backed up by majority on here on opening early after summer 2021 (I think years are hard to recall)

UK was called an outlier and unethical etc and many thought it wrong on here

Finally, if you believe in “Following the science” Patrick Whitty and his colleagues told the government in September 2020 that the isolation period could safely be reduced from 14 days to 3-5 days but it was believed by those in charge that to reduce it that much in a short period of time would make it look as though they hadn’t been handling and understanding the true risk of covid

I don't know if it was deliberate @JohnPrescottsPyjamas but I love 'Patrick Whitty' 😀

Part of the issue was that 'the science' was constantly changing and evolving – not surprising as we were dealing with a novel virus, and that's how science works – but politicians don't like changing messages as they are worried it makes it look as if they got it wrong at first. So they doubled down instead, as per Hancock's quote about 'scaring the pants off us'.

As you correctly say the scientists recommended reducing the isolation period but the government decided not to. The scientists also knew in 2020 that outdoors transmission was virtually impossible so all the rules about not exercising outside, not sitting on a park bench or not using a children's playground were rubbish. These are just the examples I personally know about, I'm sure there are more.