(Covid) To think these recommendations are bonkers?

[NoCharnce]

So the government commission into how to memorialise the Covid pandemic has recommended the government implement “A UK-wide day of reflection should be established and held annually.”

Other recommendations include national memorials (10 sites already identified!), oral histories and museums plus additional funding for local authorities to set up their own memorials.

I can’t be the only one who thinks this is nuts and hope the government ignores the recommendations? I genuinely cannot believe people get paid to produce this crap.

One of my FB memories popped up where I lamented the bag restrictions at DD’s primary school. No rucksacks allowed, because they were very covid-y. So they could take their things in in carrier bags instead (same one every day), as they seemed to possess covid-repelling properties. However, bizarrely they were allowed to take book bags in, which are made out of the same material of rucksacks 🤷‍♀️

Yep @Yestostructure I am with you - nhs and all of us deserved better.

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/jeremy-hunt-officials-cut-back-ppe-stockpiles-covid-pandemic-austerity-2397905

And this will be achieved through enforced silences?

Perhaps more effective governance might be more effective?

Good luck with the army support and the like happening in the event of a major outbreak with high pathogenicity!

Honestly, in that situation, all bets are off.

In terms of the funnelling more money towards research and development, the commission have tried their best to emphasise that. Understandably so, because pretty much everyone thinks this could've been done better. One of the most striking things we know is how much we don't know, still.

But they've not really linked the two convincingly. The stuff they're proposing appears to be free access, and the benefits they posit wouldn't exist if people were going to be financially excluded. I can't see them going for sponsorship for it, either. These things are going to cost money, not make it. And nobody has really explained why a day of reflection, which we know full well would be divisive, is going to facilitate any of this.

This is bonkers. The school got to tick a box to say they were doing something though! Some of the measures were just so pointless and awkward without any logic or purpose behind it. Don't get me wrong, I will always be furious at the fear campaigns and the house arrest, but what they did to children was beyond forgivable, Hancock masking kids in school because it was easier than having the debate with Sturgeon? Just throw the kids under the bus so Hancock could avoid public debate.

*So the government commission into how to memorialise the Covid pandemic has recommended the government implement “A UK-wide day of reflection should be established and held annually.”

Other recommendations include national memorials (10 sites already identified!), oral histories and museums plus additional funding for local authorities to set up their own memorials*

That all sounds a bit....Soviet to me. Are children going to be taken on school trips to the memorials and museums every year and told how the Great Leader Hancock led us to victory? and what exactly does a 'day of reflection' entail? time off work to reflect how batshit some of it all was?

Oral histories are, OTOH, a good idea. My local museum has asked people too donate any diaries they kept during the pandemic.

As to memorialising it...I shouldn't imagine anyone who lived through it needs reminding about it, let alone every year. Some shops STILL have screens up and the local supermarket hasn't removed the 'keep 2 metres apart signs' they laid outside when we all had to queue.

I agree the oral histories idea is really interesting.

Good luck with the army support and the like happening in the event of a major outbreak with high pathogenicity!

I saw a lot of posts on here and Twitter when people wanted a harder lockdown and that the army would do this and the army would do that - man barricades to stop people loving around and distribute food were two suggestions. I had to point out that the army is about 75,000 strong, which is one squaddie per town in the UK. It also assumed that the army wouldn't be decimated by sickness.

One museum would be good, and really interesting.

As for an annual day of remembrance, I think many of us can agree we’d rather spend as little time as possible thinking about the bloody thing. The amount of people’s lives that was lost due to lockdown… the families with new babies who had no support and barely saw their extended families for nearly 2 years, the toddlers whose development is still delayed, the teenagers with anxiety from barely seeing anyone during the time of life where socialising outside the family is crucial to development, the students who spent their uni years in their dorm watching videos, the young people who missed getting a real introduction to working life, the people in their late 30s who felt like they were going to miss the boat for finding a partner to have kids with, the elderly and chronically ill people who spent 2 terrified and isolated years shielding, the people who died alone, the people who couldn’t have a proper funeral for their loved ones… and that’s just the half of it.

I followed all the guidelines to the letter at the time and I don’t regret it, for the sake of the lives it may have saved, but I am thoroughly sick of thinking about it now. I honestly have a minor recoil reflex whenever I see vestigial Covid signs that places have forgotten to take down (you know, the “hands, face, space” and 2 metres and all of that). I honestly think all of us are going to find we have some sort of collective trauma. I certainly don’t want to be reminded of it annually.

Yeah our combined police and army aren't actually that big. Combined, it's less than a quarter of a million, and that's before some of them being too ill for duty, some in isolation or quarantine and others just plain refusing.

It would come down to whether people bought into any lockdown response or not. Whether they wanted to do it again. Really that's true regardless of the death rates.

For what its worth I forgive the government up to about 15 April 2020. The rest? I want to see Hancock, Johnson, and Gove in prison. Especially Hancock

My loathing of Hancock is visceral. If I ever met him I'd love to strangle him with that fucking pink tie.

And yet back in 2020 nearly everyone on mumsnet was all for lockdown.
When I questioned it everyone jumped down my throat. Apparently I was a ‘conspiracy theorist’.
What short memories everyone has.

I lurked on here during lockdown. Periodically muttering 'fucking hell, you're bonkers,' to myself.

@WestwardHo1

Didn’t you read the recommendations??

It isn’t just a Memorial Day or minute’s silence.

There will be a website, other commemorative activities, dedicated spaces of reflection and a funding scheme to add covid memorials to pre-existing parks across the U.K. along with a symbol (think the Manchester bee type thing), to placate those bereaved/wronged and keep covid and pandemics in the public consciousness.

Any museums will do the same thing - remind those who lived through it and education the young who didn’t and provides an income stream to feed back to research and development/pandemic preparedness… the post doc fellowship will do that too and they need tighter cohesion with scientists and policy makers.

You can’t govern people easily when they are angry about bereavement etc or those who have become complacent nor those who are uneducated.

And you can’t have effective policies on disease outbreaks/pandemics without good preparedness strategies and as such strong collaboration with scientists trained in this area.

So all in all I see the strategies as feeding into good governance in future.

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain

Army would probably be deployed where most needed ie major cities

In Sri Lanka they had total lockdowns where you had to get your food or whatever in and then go sit in the house for a week or two.

If you needed to leave for some reason or required emergency food they’d send the army or police to deal.

Then they had a system where say peoples passports that ended in an even number were allowed out Mon, wed, fri and odd tues, thurs, sat (something like that).

It was really much more extreme, nobody complained, they got on with it.

I can see that kind of scenario playing out in the event of more serious outbreaks. Hazmat suits at the ready…

I was all for lockdowns. I reasoned that if we were shutting down the country it was something that was really deadly and threatened our existence, and that no government in a million years would do such a thing without being threatened by something truly existential. I thought it was our generations blitz. I banged the pots and pans because I thought that doctors and nurses were in the trenches, and "going over the top" on a daily basis. Well, when my husband who is a surgeon was coming home at 3pm every day because operations we cancelled, nurses were doing their tick tock dances, and the only person I knew of that had died was someone that a friends friend once played a round of golf with I started to realise, around 15 April 2020 that this was no real threat to me, my family and society as a whole, and that this was a massive over reaction.

You’re right it was madness on mn

I could have accepted a short initial one but the incredible damage became too high. Starting to point that out at any time meant people went bonkers on the attack

People did indeed go a bit mad.

I put it down to pnice, isolation and some people never having had any experience of challenging life events. Also visible actions and restrictions help people feel as if something is beigngdone.

People washing shopping and quarantining post were just insane. I lived through various locaised and national outbreaks of diseases growing up on a farm and so took in pretty much in my stride, however it occured to me early on if covid was a respiratory virus dousing your shopping in detol was going to be of fuck all use.

I can see that this would work fine logistically if the bulk of the population were in favour of it, like in your example here. Especially if, like in Sri Lanka, things were still functioning. It sounds like you're talking about food shops still being open. The army might not even have that much to do in this situation, if most people were indeed ok to just get on with it.

It's much less clear how it would work if the population didn't want it. The deciding factor is public buy in.

@TrashedSofa as far as I know the food shops and everything were closed. But the army had access in the event of an emergency (think 90yr old who’d nothing in due to dementia).

Agree - the deciding factor is the public buy in which is why the recommendations are largely a propaganda campaign to stop us from forgetting what a pandemic is like and what is required of us.

I would expect there will be a lot more education in schools as well as many people didn’t seem to grasp even basic biology.

I'd rather not have a memory of that utter shit.

I mean forcing people to stay in their houses unless the army allow them to go shopping would be seen, rightly, as a massive human rights violation in most western countries. This is like people asking why we didn't take the same apprach to track and trace as South Korea not realising that what they did to enable it (trackign via smart phone, sharign banking and location data) would be massivlet illegal in europe due to our data protection laws.

*It isn’t just a Memorial Day or minute’s silence.

There will be a website, other commemorative activities, dedicated spaces of reflection and a funding scheme to add covid memorials to pre-existing parks across the U.K. along with a symbol (think the Manchester bee type thing), to placate those bereaved/wronged and keep covid and pandemics in the public consciousness*

State mandated mourning, in other words. I can see this placating of the bereaved/wronged (who the heck gets to decide that? hundreds of committees I bet, all on a nice perdiem) opening up all sorts of grievances and anger. It'll be like the saucepan bashing - 'number 13 didn't attend the annual reflection and memorial service again. Denounce them on the town FB page.'

As for the keeping it in the public consciousness - why do you want that? do you think people are like to forget it??

And commemorative activities such as what? the mind boggles, frankly.

@Ginmonkeyagain

I think in the context of what was going on in Sri Lanka economically, the healthcare capacity and the ruinous impact of covid on their gdp (tourism 12%)… they didn’t want to stoke the fire of the beast.

Considering flagrant disregard for vaccination/lockdown rules led to a prolonged exhausting experience in the U.K. At the time I did wish for things like mandatory vaccination and more controls because people (including in gov) were taking the absolute piss and it just drew the whole thing out in agonising fashion.

Suck it up, get on with it, get it under control asap would be my attitude.

Agree on the data protection. But wish people weren’t such selfish dicks.