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.

I think a lot of it was bonkers and I work for the NHS in Scotland where some of the rules were just stupid towards the end.

the first lockdown I can get behind as it was new and we needed time to figure things out but after that I feel the elderly and vulnerable should have been shielded (by choice) while the rest of us continued about our lives

i would like to see the true numbers of those killed by covid alone not as a secondary on a death certificate or a month after having it then something else killing them the cases where it was solely covid.

as a community healthcare worker we have seen a big rise in palliative and end of life patients since covid, there hasn’t been any research into it but I wouldn’t be surprised for a minute if it was due to people not being tested for things and things being missed

schools should never have closed and the young and those who were least likely to die should never have been locked away

those who say what if it had been Ebola? That’s an entirely different beast that kills any age regardless of health etc bit different to covid

Haha! I realise what I did there! 😂😂😂
I got so carried away I think I crossed Patrick Vallance with Chris Whitty. 🤗

But yes, you are absolutely right, especially about outdoor transmission. Remember the hysteria and headlines about the people on Bournemouth beach in that really hot weather? There was all sorts of reports that there was bound to be a spike in cases afterwards and how irresponsible the public were being. SM was red hot with indignation about ‘selfishness’ and how we’d all suffer as a result of their actions. Even then, common sense said that because everyone was sitting on family groups in the fresh air with a sea breeze the chance of passing on infection was minuscule.

And guess what, absolutely nothing happened. Cases didn’t spiral out of control and in fact continued to fall.

Exactly. Isolated means isolated. Unless they are staying isolated from everyone in their household it means their entire household too.

It doesn’t mean having fewer people in a cohort and if we are talking about protecting the NHS then you are looking at everyone over 50 and their households. Probably over 40 as that’s the age at which hospitalisation risk jumps. I think at the bare minimum it involved 1/3 of the NHS workforceand a significant number of school staff so no idea who is going to be doing that work, let alone the army of volunteers.

You’d also need to take into account that letting the virus rip through the community would make it unsafe with for people with underlying conditions to go into hospitals for treatment. Either as an outpatient or an inpatient.

It’s easy to look back and say it was ‘madness’ but in the early days at least it was looking really bad in terms of infections and deaths etc.
The second lockdown was awful though, it really had a big effect on our family. 3/4 of us got covid after all restrictions lifted in the end, none of us caught it from each other so am def sceptical of the contagious aspect.
Someone I know still wears a full ffp mask indoors even if just inside for a minute (or a shop w just me and shopkeeper). I couldn’t live like that. They are behaving now how we were almost 2 years ago.

Probably over 40 as that’s the age at which hospitalisation risk jumps.

While I also disagree with the post you're arguing against here, it's always seemed very disingenuous to talk about a hospitalisation risk 'jumping' with no context to that. If something goes from one in a million to one in half a million the risk has jumped, but it's still extraordinarily unlikely. The risk of hospitalisation for someone in their 40s without other risk factors was still very low in absolute terms, wasn't it? We need the numerical context in order for that point to work.

Yup

The first lockdown maybe.

After that no. Those of use who were not convinced were really attacked on here and called murderers etc.

It was obvious to anyone with any understanding of economics that there would be a nasty bout of inflation afterwards due to all the money that was pumped into the economy so all this fallout was eminently foreseeable. Businesses are still failing and there are years of economic pain ahead.

I was anti lockdown after it became clear it was all a massive over reaction.
amusing now that everyone is claiming they knew it was insane.
we are all anti lockdowners now I guess

It certainly wasn’t as contagious as we were told. I caught what I’m pretty sure was the (highly infectious) omicron variant in late November 2021. No one in the house was yet vaccinated and literally all I had a very wet nose! I didn’t even think about Covid until my DD suggested I test. The advice at the time was to isolate within the house but DH said it was pointless as we’d been intimate, shared a bed and slept next to each other before my test so it was inevitable he was going to get it.

He didn’t. But 5 weeks later he woke up with a slight sniffle and tested positive. Either the incubation period was far longer than realised or more likely he picked it up elsewhere.

DD is a teacher and was exposed numerous times, pinged loads by the app, shared a long car journey with and sat on a day long course next to a positive case, plus sharing a house with us two infected. She didn’t get it until the end of 2022.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas i still haven’t had it unless I’ve been totally asymptomatic, I’ve been in close contact with a patient who had it recently was coughing and clearly unwell but had been in all week with them with no mask or anything all week, and another patient in the same week who only tested positive due to hospital admission, still nothing and I’ve been testing every day since I was told I’d been in contact 🤷‍♀️

I bloody regret supporting lockdown. I thought it was the right thing to do.

It was wrong.

I was 50/50 and still am.

We knew from contact tracing studies carried out in South Korea before we had even locked down in the UK that outdoor transmission was very rare, so I thought the whole "only go out once a day" thing was ridiculous and I ignored it.

I remember being shocked at the time at how awful some people were being in terms of judgemental etc. One person I knew posted a picture on social media of an elderly man not stood on the social distancing spot for a queue in the shop. He was stood just ahead of it.

A nurse had checked into a holiday let so she didn't bring the virus home to her family and she had her tyres slashed by villagers thinking she was breaking lockdown rules.

A local family blamed the death of their Dad, a retired family, on people touching the gate post that was at the start of a public footpath through their land. Utterly, utterly bonkers.

I hated how political it all became. Wales and Scotland having seemingly pointless extra rules so they didn't look like the Tory government.

And the media throughout were so irresponsible. I remember one shocking example where the WHO had said that there was no evidence of immunity from Covid, as in, they hadn't completed evidential studies of immunity. They were not saying that there was no immunity, but that's how the media spun it.

By May 2020 I was pretty appalled that we hadn't allowed some form of outdoor education to take place for all children. There was no good reason why this could have not taken place.

On the other hand, can we really say how the hospitals would have held up without some sort of restrictions? Look at what happened in China recently when they decided to lift all restrictions after years of failed lockdowns and a poor vaccine performance. Their hospitals quickly became overrun.

I don't think there's an easy answer here and I think that's ok. There's such pressure on people to pick a side in all arguments but life is never black and white!

Wales and Scotland having seemingly pointless extra rules so they didn't look like the Tory government.

I'm in Wales and it was ridiculous.

Drakeford decided that supermarkets weren't allowed to sell "non essential" items. I had a new lodger moving in October 2020 - a foreign student I had picked up from the airport, and then had to explain to her the government had decided she wasn't allowed to buy bedding for the next fortnight. There had only been a few hours warning of this new diktat and she hadn't space in her suitcase anyway.

As it turns out, bedding is pretty sodding essential when you don't have any.

Likewise, a pastry chef friend having to negotiate with Tesco customer services to get a stopgap set of scales when his broke. They're an essential tool of the trade!

For a time, during a local lockdown, I was allowed to drive 6 miles east but only 1 mile west. Bizarre.

agingweightlifter here is a discussion of a recent one. If you search for 'lockdown harms' there's several more. The harms caused by most governments' responses to the pandemic are incalculable, but will manifest more clearly in years to come. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/legacy-of-harm-study-details-wideranging-collateral-damage-of-covid-lockdowns/news-story/f04a9008b346b7026124cd2c49163fb3

The very first weeks I supported, after that, it was pretty clear to me that it wasn't sustainable, that the human costs were unjustifiable, much of it didn't have much effect, and the long term health outcomes might well be worse than the deaths prevented.

I am not in the UK and it was actually crazier here. There were insane decisions like increasing covid testing capacity by stopping routine STI tests on pregnant women. Guess what increased here over that period - cases of congenital syphilis, something that has serious lifelong effects on infants like deformities, brain damage, blindness, and death. Who thought that was a good idea? Testing more for covid, on the other hand, did fuck all.

I don't accept the hindsight argument. There were all kinds of people pointing these things out, or the lack of evidence around masking, etc. Had they been allowed to speak, maybe there could have been a reasonable discussion about trade-offs. That did not happen though. Where I am, even people involved on the medical side were sidelined, even let go, if they went against the fear narrative. The media also demonized them and worse refused to allow any real discussion. The national broadcaster acted as a propaganda machine.No one was allowed to question the legality or civil liberties elements either.

It was certainly a lesson in how easily people bow to authority, and how much some people seen to like doing so.

@JohnPrescottsPyjamas

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.

You're still unaware of the reason for this? Covid - particularly at that stage - is contagious and virulent. If someone brings it into the care home environment, it has the capacity to spread quickly among the extremely vulnerable inhabitants- not just the person you're visiting - and result in high numbers of deaths. Perhaps it doesn't matter to you what stage of life they're at, but it may matter to their families (and not all people who live in care homes are elderly.)

I am not in the UK and it was actually crazier here. There were insane decisions like increasing covid testing capacity by stopping routine STI tests on pregnant women. Guess what increased here over that period - cases of congenital syphilis, something that has serious lifelong effects on infants like deformities, brain damage, blindness, and death

Oof that's pretty terrible. How on earth could anyone think that was a good idea? We never officially had anything like that here at least, afaik anyway, for all the problems with antenatal care during the pandemic.

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

Boris had a birthday party with friends long before Omicron!

The Omicron variant was what did it for me, it became very clear CV was always going to mutate and the data from South Africa was very clear, Omicron was a mild illness, still serious for some but not requiring a LD, i think this view was common place, also the public were fed up LD, round me, rules were widely ignored.

I think Sunak is just trying to re invent himself as knowledge has changed on lockdown.

On Hunt, i liked what he has said when he was on the health committee, maternity services, nhs staffing he even said he regretted some of his decisions, however now, he has just reverted to being anti NHS, so i think no one really knows what he thinks.

People only have one chance at death and it must have been extremely distressing for the elderly etc to have no family with them or visits suddenly stopped.
Yes CV would be terrible if it got into a CH but that didn't prevent the Govt allowing 1000s of untested elderly from Hospitals going into CH's yet also stopping all visits and "imprisoning" residents.

Staff in homes were often also working in more than one CH, going home, then going back into work, the infection spread not because of family visits.

To me, denying the elderly/the dying the chance to have proper contact with family was the worst and most regrettable aspect of LD.

Drakeford and Sturgeon looked bad from here. Many loved them of course on mn

So as much as I disagreed with the prolonged use of lockdowns in England I was relieved I wasn’t there

I think Sunak is just trying to re invent himself as knowledge has changed on lockdown.

It was always known that he didn't want another lockdown for Omicron, wasn't it? It's more that he's now trying to make out that his opposition was important.

Which it wasn't, because it would've been functionally impossible to lock down in December 2021. Even if Rishi had desperately wanted to. It was very obvious at the time that the public weren't going to accept it, and Tory MPs didn't support it in sufficient number either.

He has engaged in a bit of reinvention in the past, but it wasn't about that lockdown. There was that Spectator article last year where he talked about how the financial costs of the lockdowns hadn't really been set out straight to the public. Which was true, but he was writing like he wasn't the Chancellor at the time!

@Doagooddeed

People only have one chance at death and it must have been extremely distressing for the elderly etc to have no family with them or visits suddenly stopped.
Only one chance at death? Weird phrasing. Yes, of course it would have been distressing not to have family visit. Also distressing is being extremely ill and dying.

Staff in homes were often also working in more than one CH, going home, then going back into work, the infection spread not because of family visits.
You know this? Also, the infection spread into care homes due to known vectors: care workers (not their fault), assistants, medical staff, aides, admin staff etc. Most family couldn't visit anyway.

The point I was trying to get across to you was to allow more vectors into that equation - family, friends etc. - even at the end of life, then the capacity to spread infection across a vulnerable community is increased exponentially and uncontrollably.

There was talk of providing indication of economic costs at one point from Sunak, maybe overruled as it’s a wider political decision

A bit like the daily death and case count. The trouble is if they’d done daily costs and harms we wouldn’t have complied as much

It was an annoyance to me that it was so one sided focusing on the virus alone but once fear messaging was established they could only switch tactics if they were ok with more people refusing to comply.

The later LDs didn't cause the financial and emotional effects the one in spring 2020 did.

I just remember him being full square behind the Govt decision making machine.

On Wales and Scotland, whilst they did do a few things marginally differently in regard to timings, it was all pretty much the same as England fwiw my sister lives in Wales, we chatted a great deal at the time, she didn't feel it was so different to England.

On Sturgeon, i think what has subsequently gone on with the SNP has wrecked her reputation.

On Wales and Scotland, whilst they did do a few things marginally differently in regard to timings, it was all pretty much the same as England

It really wasn't.