Is there going to be another pandemic

[Lookingforwardtoautumnnow]

This winter?

Seen a couple of people posting about it, tbf they are conspiracy types, but I have anxiety after having covid & long covid and can’t go through all that again. Can anyone reassure me?

@PinkCherryBlossoms

Your grasp on reality is delicate.

This is a weak return from you. I expected better!

Sorry you've had a bad time with Covid. You should have some decent antibodies made by now fro your previous infection/s which should protect you from another bad bout, mutation or no. Try not to worry, it won't help anything.

Also you can do masks and carry hand gel to do what you can, if you're particularly worried this autumn-winter.

There will be another pandemic, it’s been one of the top risks to this and every other country for the last 100 years.

With luck when the next one happens we’ll have a much better government and prime minister, one who’ll bother turning up to the first five COBRAs for instance. Someone who can make timely decisions and not procrastinate until there’s just one option left on the table - the worst option.

There will eventually be an enquiry into Johnson’s handling of Covid-19 and nobody in government will come out of it well, although they won’t care, they’ll be long gone by that time. How different things could have been.

So to reiterate - there will be another pandemic and others after that, but no-one knows where it will start and when it will happen. I hope the world has learnt some lessons from Covid.

The fact that the poster you said I'd hounded off the thread came right back did my work for me there. What un/fortunate timing!

@Angrywife I think people generally mean they'll see who they like, and sometimes that they'll use businesses that continue operating illegally.

As an example, during the last lockdown what it mostly looked like for us was getting and providing childcare that didn't meet the bubble requirements, playdates for kids who wouldn't have got any socialisation without it, family meals and parties for kids birthdays. Didn't bother with any of the beauty services or pub lock ins that were operating below the radar, and I'm a bit old for illegal raves. All rather sedate really! But you might be surprised what some people did and got away with last time, particularly towards the end.

I think the first lockdown, where there was no method of control (vaccine) needed to be adhered to. I can understand not adhering to lockdowns when we had vaccine access : in terms of socialisation for children, for me it was travelling to see a family member as she was alone and in desperate need, although I think I was allowed as a carer. The problem with a blanket policy is it doesn’t allow for individual circumstances. Mutual trust where there a recognition that, yes I understand I need to protect myself and others - but there is a need for me/my family to not follow guidelines because greater harm will be caused if I do. An illegal rave in a pub is likely to just cause more harm than for what it’s worth, and will then just cause heavy handed tactics from police/government. And that’s the issue - a ‘fuck you’ rather than recognising a need to protect others. Which comes through from some posters on this thread.

But you might be surprised what some people did and got away with last time, particularly towards the end.

The shit show government partygate hasn't helped.

But I think most people are generally law abiding and most people would toe the line.
There are always people who won't twas ever thus.

As others have said the people outnumber the police and the army 10 to 1, there would be absolutely no way to stop it!

What citizens revolt?

Nope don't see it personally.

Partygate is huge, yes. Done a massive number on trust. I wonder whether it will ever be reversed.

And there is always the issue of restrictions fatigue. It's an inevitability and baked in. Chris Whitty knew enough to be worried about that as early as March 2020. I'm in an area where we had local restrictions too, so by the time the 2021 restrictions ended I think there'd been about five weeks in over a year when we could legally have people in our homes. There is a limit to how long people will stick to that. Perhaps in any future lockdown, if it does ever happen again, government will have the sense to build in more ways to try and pre-empt this. Ways to meet up outside etc.

I don't think we should consider lockdown as a default response full stop. It's far too costly and has had too many consequences - I'd call them unforseen except they weren't.

@PinkCherryBlossoms

The fact that the poster you said I'd hounded off the thread came right back did my work for me there. What un/fortunate timing!

What work is that?

Of making your post look rather silly sausage.

It does interest me Somecatfromjapan how much that's taken root. We only did it for that one pandemic after all, and as much as anything there's the issue of when to do it, as well as whether. A lot of the talk now is about whether lockdown is/was justifiable. Which is to be expected really. But one possibility is that we generally accept lockdowns as a pandemic tool and instead argue about how often we can practically do it. Bearing in mind we've a good idea that pandemics will become more common.

@PinkCherryBlossoms I'd personally push back very had against normalising lockdown as a standard response. For better or worse, economies are not designed for random artificial shutdowns and we can now see quite clearly the result of the spending to mitigate those, and that's in countries where people were lucky enough to actually receive compensation.
That's before we actually get into the social ramifications.
To me, things feel altered for the worse, still, and quite damaged. It's definitely a different world to pre 2020. Not a great start to the decade.

I'm trying to think of when the benefits of a lockdown would outweight the harms and it would have to be quite a sweet spot, as a low IFR means that the overall costs far outweigh the benefits, and a high IFR means that no-one is going to risk their lives keeping the lights/water on so others can sit at home so that won't last very long anyway.

To me the obvious, cost-effective answer would be a more robust health system so we didn't have to shut down the entire country just to stop that getting overwhelmed (which is really why they were implemented). But I suppose that's a whole other argument about what that should look like - and who pays.

To me the obvious, cost-effective answer would be a more robust health system so we didn't have to shut down the entire country just to stop that getting overwhelmed (which is really why they were implemented).

Well that's the dream we're all wishing for anyway.

Yeah I'd broadly agree with all that, especially the 'sweet spot' part. It might even be that the lockdown question becomes somewhat moot, because future pandemics don't fall into that narrow ground.

So I guess what I mean is that even if we come to a broad consensus that lockdown does more good than harm and we should keep it as an option, that's potentially only one part of the argument iyswim.

We can see the level of harm lockdown caused, but the level of harm caused had we not locked down is a prediction and more of an unknown. Therefore open to interpretation. Economists will be biased one way, those concerned about saving lives another.

https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/impact-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-on-covid-19-transmission/covid-19-examining-the-effectiveness-of-non-pharmaceutical-interventions-executive-summary.pdf

@PinkCherryBlossoms

Of making your post look rather silly sausage.

Oh, right. 😂 Okay, then.

Lots of people have slipped with hand washing. I notice it in public toilets. Or people just wet their hands and pretend they've washed them. No idea why they do this tbh. Hand hygiene is a major factor in stopping transmission of anything transmissible. Any reason why people have stopped doing this?
Interestingly, people wash hands more when there is someone else in a public toilet with them.

I'm almost certain there will be as we continue to encroach on the ani
al world and over/misuses antibiotics. I've seen that scientists are worried bird flu will make the jump to humans before long. It may not be bad and science does continue to advance but I can't see another lockdown happening unless it's a significantly more dangerous disease than covid. I'm sorry you've been so affected by long Covid, it must be awful. Try not to worry too much about things out of your control and try not to listen to conspiracy theorists!

I'm genuinely worried about antibiotic resistance. Having become used to a world with them, it will be horrifying to lose them again. Once of the most amazing advances ever for human health and they've been squandered and mismanaged.

I definitely agree on this point. It only seems like a matter of time that regression in effectiveness ramps up and emergence of new resistant strains make them redundant. Just even thinking of MRSA, most antibiotics don't work against it.

Well yes and no. Rory Stewart made the really valid point that antibiotic resistance is being driven by OTC sales in the majority of the world, not doctors in Uk overprescribing. It’s impossible to say to countries with no functioning public or free at point of use primary care system that people shouldn’t be able to buy these things in shops.

So I kind of agree with you but I don’t see how it could have been practically prevented.

@illiterato Yes I mean globally. The UK is probably one of the better counties for not over prescribing and the overuse in agriculture aspect.

It's also driven by agricultural use.

Our lovely government wanted to make it possible to buy antibiotics OTC here too. Way to go - lets do our bit to foster resistant strains, rather than working internationally to reduce other problematic practices

And some people quite openly sneeze into their hands and just carry on touching everything around them. I didn't expect that habit to carry on after the pandemic, it was gross enough in 2019.