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.

What was the point you wanted to make when you replied to the person who said they couldn't socialise with peers by saying they could still socialise with others, then? I can't tell whether you understood or not that the law functionally excluded many children from socialisation with peers then.

@StormShadow

What was the point you wanted to make when you replied to the person who said they couldn't socialise with peers by saying they could still socialise with others, then? I can't tell whether you understood or not that the law functionally excluded many children from socialisation with peers then.

I said:
"Children may have been the lowest risk age group, but they could still spread the disease. Any time they spent at home had a limit in sight and they still could leave and socialise with others. Also, to reiterate - by your own words - they were low risk. Vulnerable people were and are not."

My meaning is children had the ability to leave their homes in the company of another (or family, as the case may be, depending on the time period) and they could socialise with their siblings, with friends over FaceTime, neighbours (I'm certain this would have occurred), whatever. It was also in contrast to ECV people.

I have an only child who was aged 5 in 2020

when she started reception she struggled to make friends at her new school. Her teacher told me she needed to work on things with her peers.

then between March 2020-July 2020 she was legally not allowed to see any other child in person. And this reoccurred in Jan 2021-April 2021

anyone who believes it was ok to isolate a child from anyone else their age needs to have their head read.

in the end, in the second lockdown (when she was 6) we met up with a fellow friend once a week for a walk around the park purely to ensure that she was able to socialise with someone else

@AntQueen pretty sure the poster's child had no siblings. And do you really think Facetime for a 7 year old is sufficient socialising?

You were minimising, it's ok. Lots of people do. Or, they just don't actually give a shit about the impact on children.

So siblings that may not exist, neighbours that may not have had any interest in speaking to them and statistically probably wouldn't be the same age. And I expect you'd (rightly) be unimpressed if anyone pointed out that ECV people had access to FaceTime too. Because it doesn't actually replace the importance of seeing people in person, and if that's true for someone who's ECV it's also true for someone who's aged 6. Or both.

Really, people who want to argue that lockdown was justified would be better off fully acknowledging and criticising the more obviously awful and avoidable aspects of it, rather than offering very thin reasons why they weren't quite as bad as the person you're disagreeing with says they were.

After all, we could still have had a lockdown and made the same provision for every age group to have peer social contact. It surprises me that more of you don't see this. There are some negatives we were stuck with, but lots of people's most legitimate grievances about lockdown and restrictions could actually have been avoided with a few tweaks. You can still have a lockdown without gross ageism, possibly illegal suspension of the right to protest, functionally excluding many people from fresh air and exercise... none of that had to happen.

This is minimising the isolation for children

I don't get it when people say "after the first few weeks I just lived my life as usual".

How?!

My family and friends were mostly still taking it very seriously so wouldn't see me

My children's school was closed

My office was closed

Lots of places I would usually frequent were not open

If you went abroad, it was illegal or you needed to do 2 weeks' quarantine

My DC couldn't "bump into" or facetime their friends because they were children of keyworkers so were still at school, while my child missed two full terms of social, emotional and academic development.

Same here

They were separated from their peers

We thought the whole thing was ridiculous from start to finish, but we lived in a rural area. I think people living in highly populated areas could envisage far more easily how quickly the contagion could spread (as it indeed did) and the statistics we were fed glossed over the very low threat to the vast majority of the population. You had to take time to look those details up.

Yep, that too. Some of us had to be very careful about our children's interactions so they didn't get upset when they realised other DC were allowed in school but they weren't.

In my case, we socialised with other DC amongst our friends and family who also weren't in school, so my DC were luckier than others in that DH and I were in a position not to have to sacrifice our children's socialisation because the state didn't give enough of a shit. But many people weren't able to do that for whatever reason.

@Tigofigo

I don't get it when people say "after the first few weeks I just lived my life as usual".

I agree, I'd love to know how!

My son was at Uni, which basically closed everything down with all staff told to work from home for the year. There was no way he could have anywhere near a "normal" Uni experience! It's hard to attend a lecture or go to the library or common room, when all the buildings are locked and bolted shut!

Same with shops - hard to shop for clothes when the clothing shops were shut, hard to go to the pub or restaurant when they were all shut. Hard to get a haircut, manicure or tattoo when they were all shut.

Couldn't even sit on a park bench or go for a wee in the park loos!

There was so much that you couldn't do, and even if you wanted to, you couldn't!

The only thing you had discretion really was socialising, i.e. going between friends/family homes, etc.

Lockdown brought a lot of benefits for some people. it accelerated / normalised wfh. I now wfh at least 2 days a week in an industry where this would have been unheard of before lockdown. It meant uni could be done online which massively suited one of my DCs.

So i was classed as on "maternity leave"

I went to my mums, had people over, had many a bbq.

So what i mean by that is i lived my life as usual as i would do with things being closed, my circle of friends and family were same as me really bar 1 in my friends group.

At xmas time i still had 22 people for dinner, so yeah pretty normal as it could be in the circumstances.

Yep indeed. We live in a generally rural area with just a few "largish" towns within a lot of countryside/seaside areas. The numbers of deaths reported in our area's only "big" hospital was ridiculously small, as were the reported numbers of covid infections, even at our local University which saw tiny numbers of just a few hundred in total out of something like 15000 staff and students! The covid deaths at the hospital were reported in our local newspaper and even at it's height, the numbers were in single figures each week.

Bogroll's other posts do mention a sibling.

I am aware children were unable to go to school or their activities etc. for a good period; I do have my own. In fact I live in a place where our lockdown was much longer than yours. However, children's periods of lockdown were relatively short (months) compared to those of ECV people (for some, 2 years, and still going).

Children don't have to be exactly the same age to play together, BTW.

Apologies if my posts challenge your worldview; I'll bow out now. Carry on.

Look, you just made a poor argument and everyone pointed out how bad it was. It's ok, that happens sometimes. You don't need to leave, but you'd do better not to minimise the reality that many DC here were functionally excluded from socialisation by lockdown laws, particularly to their mothers who know much more about what happened than you do.

Great post 👏

I don't get it when people say "after the first few weeks I just lived my life as usual

It meant breaking as many rules as was possible. I remember being told I couldn't see my boyfriend of 8 years (at the time, now 10)

I mean, honestly, truly, it still scares me that people complied so easily with a government telling you that you cannot see your partner. They literally don't own me.

And all these people who complied simultaneously declaring how much they hated the government. Work that one out!

According to their rules, I think it would have been at least 2 months I couldn't see him. I can categorically state that I broke that rule at least three times a week. Guess what? No one died.

I think now those of us spraying shopping etc was insane but still believe staying away from people when you’re sick stops the spread (of anything!!) BUT the kids and old people who lost out, the businesses that closed, they should have figured out a less stringent approach. I don’t think it’s as easy as ‘it was all wrong’, I think lives were saved

Hotels are not suitable for housing CH residents who need specialist care and where would the staff come from?

How about building CH's that are actually suitable to house the elderly and the infirm?

People complied because it was the law, with penalties, many people could have lost their jobs if caught for breaking the law, students got thrown out of Uni and were still levied the tuition fees.

Yet our rulers and masters broke the rules with impunity, Boris, Hancock nor Sunak suffered anything at all really for breaking their own rules, all 3 have gone onto bigger and better things or improved their bank balances.

Thank you.
In fact, the Mental Capacity Act really could have applied to all of us at the time.

“Do not assume the person does not have the capacity to make a decision just because they make a decision that you think is unwise or wrong.”

The government - and a lot of the pro lockdown public - made exactly that assumption.

“Always assume the person is able to make the decision until you have proof they are not.”

Perfectly sensible and logical people were patronised and insulted because they questioned policies.

“All decisions and actions must be the least restrictive of the person’s rights and freedom of action.”

Were lockdowns the least restrictive decision or action?

I also forgot in my earlier post that a very important part of the MCA is the deprivation of liberty

“In certain cases, the restrictions placed upon a person who lacks capacity may amount to "deprivation of liberty". This must be judged on a case-by-case basis otherwise, an unlawful deprivation of liberty will occur. This system is known as the Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards.”

Whilst I appreciate a case-by-case judgement wouldn’t have been practical, a blanket judgement was also inappropriate without any reference to individual preferences. There was that awful case of a daughter being refused permission to collect her mother from a CH in order that they could isolate together. In just whose interest were the authorities acting then?

We stuck to the rules, my mum is 75 and there's no way I would have let her live it out/or die if she caught it, she has many good years ahead of her, age is nothing when Covid strikes, so many people lost their lives, nobody knew anything about it and we were all petrified. We just had to do what we could

People complied because it was the law, with penalties, many people could have lost their jobs if caught for breaking the law, students got thrown out of Uni and were still levied the tuition fees.

If everyone had not complied though....things would have been different.

There is such a thing as civil disobedience, I think it was one Martin Luther King Jr who said “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”

Yet, in 2020 and 2021, civil disobedience to unjust laws was literally unheard of, worse, we had neighbours spying on each other.