To look back on the things we did in lockdown and cringe?

[Applescruffle]

Isn't it all just really cringeworthy when we look back?

The clapping on our doorsteps, all that false commradarie and "we're all in this together" and the drawings of rainbows in people's windows?
Condemning our neighbours for buying Easter Eggs because they weren't "essential" and wondering whether we would get arrested for sitting on a park bench?

At the time I, and probably loads of us, thought we were doing the right things but doesn't it all just look so false and hollow now when we look back and see that number 10 were having parties and Dominic Cummings was running around the country testing his eyesight? My kids missed out on so much while this was going on, my mental and physical health has still not recovered from the effects of lockdown, and for what?

Know what I mean?

I thought I had. Lockdown may have contributed to my father's death, but it didn't cause it. It certainly contributed to many deaths, but unlike covid, it didn't kill millions across Europe.

Our hospitals simply couldn't cope. Even post vaccine, with triple the number of non-vaccinated patients vs vaccinated.

Are you seriously suggesting we should have gone for the "let the bodies pile high" approach to a virus we're still learning about now?

I agree.

No it wasnt the perfect solution but pre vaxx it was all we had. The care home situation was appalling but I am not sure what else could have been done. Should we have simply left them to rot with no carers? Because that would have been the only realistic alternative to risking carers who were asymptomatic but carrying the virus to be there.

I think tha tthe only thing that should have been changed was refusing visits to dying patients from their families. Isolation for those visits could, and should, have been arranged. I can understand the anger.

I worked all through covid with a local authority public health team trying to administer the various tiers led by government. The public's response to covid was largely very measured and hugely admirable. (The government I do not have a good word about)

I'm a bit pissed off at all the attempts to undermine all of the altruistic actions people took. Covid was (and still is) dangerous. It is a national scandal that the government behaved so abominabley

I would have respected the possible need for lockdown, if it was not accompanied by the following:

A cruel, inhumane and unnecessary campaign of fear. A government which deliberately terrifies its citizens is a tyranny, not a democracy.

The massive price which children paid to "protect granny". I work with children, and I have seen first-hand the damage lockdowns caused.

The complete lack of acknowledgement from the government that their lockdowns were causing any damage at all.

The silencing of any scientists who dared to contradict the official narrative.

The infantilising briefings and three-word slogans, such as "don't kill granny". It was obvious from Saint Boris's body language that he did not believe a word of the script which was put in front of him.

Restrictions which were pure theatre, such as the park benches. Even some scientists have admitted that the "two metres" figure was plucked out of the air.

The gradual "boiling frog" approach to restrictions, gaining the public's "consent" week by week by confusing and terrifying them out of the wits, and constantly moving the goalposts: "reviewed in three weeks" became fifteen months. Many of us felt a very real fear that restrictions would become permanent by stealth, with phrases such as "new normal". If they had admitted early on that lockdown was causing much more harm than good, it might have been different.

Bullying, bribing and coercing the public into taking an untested vacine, and bring this country dangerously close to the passports.

Partygate: the real scandal of this was the proof that the government knew full well that the virus was nowhere near as deadly as they were telling us. "Killing Granny" was not on their radar as they partied.

An extremely biased inquiry whose mission is clearly to cement the narrative "we should have locked down harder, faster, longer, and we will next time".

Tony Blair's vanity project of war in Iraq, because of "possible" weapons of mass destruction.

A hysterical media with a long history of crying wolf about many other "impending disasters": the Millennium Bug, terrorists round every corner, your mobile is killing you, weapons of mass destruction, etc. Heard it all before.

The result of all this is that I will never believe, trust or respect any government again, or the media, especially the BBC.

This.

I don't know about that statistic or where it comes from (although I have seen it quoted a number of times in science reporting in the news) but I will tell you that I have severe long covid and am in a number of online groups that have huge amounts of members - i.e. 60K+. Also, I (plus 2 friends that have long covid) have not been referred to any Long Covid clinics despite asking repeatedly - so Im fairly sure we are not being counted in official numbers.

There are lots and lots and lots of us. we are just invisible.

Its funny when I think back, I got to know more people in my village during covid than I had before (despite running the main pub!) or have since.

I seemed to meet the same people at the same times every day. We would all be out on our walk at the same time and it became a bit of a May Pole dance of " in and out" as we each took our turn each day to walk in the road!

There is a lovely family that we met who used to take their toddler to the brook that DD and I would go to every day to paddle and cool down. They kept to "their" bit and us to ours but we talked every day. We still keep in touch and they recently sent me photos of his 5th birthday party.

👏👏👏!

@EdithArtois

"The lockdowns did slow the spread and stopped our hospitals being overwhelmed and people really seem to forget this."

The thing is lets say we never had lockdowns during COVID and there were delays of 8 hours in A&E, delays in getting an ambulance and queues of ambulances lined up outside A&E because there were no beds then people at the time and right now would be saying that there should have been lockdowns to prevent this.

Now scroll forward to 2024 and after £450 billion has been spent on Covid there is no available money for the NHS and there are 8 hour waits in A&E, there are delays in getting an ambulance and there are ambulances queues up outside A&E.

Yet no one says that of the £450 billion it would have been better to "save the NHS " by spending even a quarter of that money on the NHS.

It was always going to be a shitshow. I didn't do the clapping or even bothered with the news much beyond what can we/ can't we do now.

I was working FT (the only one not bloody furloughed in the business) and studying on top and homeschooling 2 kids. DH was classed as a key worker so had to carry on at the factory as before whilst I was struggling.

It was shit for those working through it, shit for those who lost their jobs, shit for those that got seriously ill or died.

Totally agree that my mental and physical health took a huge hit from lockdowns which I am still trying to recover from. OP, hope your health situations resolve soon. I can’t imagine any of us would react the same again, but it was a new and (at the time) scary situation, we all did our best whatever that looked like.

Hospitals should currently be overwhelmed, dozens of times over. They're however generally operating just at capacity, they don't become overwhelmed because full beds means you'll either not be admitted or (if you were fortunate enough to present when a bed was free) you'll be discharged on the flimsiest observation of 'fitness'.
So no, it's not remotely 'simple'. Our hospitals were on a wobbly peg pre 2020, and the 'utter carnage' you refer to as a possibility has been the reality for the past 4 years. And, year on year, its getting worse.

There is an epidsode of Red Dwarf called "Back to Reality" that is a parody of 1984 in parts.

There is a poster "Betray your family and friends, fabulous prizes to be won!!" and many many people at the time would have cheerfully signed up to that. Ant and Dec would have been the faces for that one, I bet.

ETA apologies....meant to quote @IcedPurple about the "offering incentives to dob in neighbours...."

Spot on! Any tiny bit of trust I might once have had in politicians, medics and the media has been totally destroyed (with the exception of a tiny number of heroic people who spoke out against the nonsense, at huge personal cost).

Well I didn't either but wow, no compation at all for people having to deal with a pandemic? , they aren't trained for that!! I can tell you that the LD and MH nurses didn't chose to or train for a job in general nursing but they still got drafted in to help on wards

@EdithArtois

"It’s really simple. The lockdowns did slow the spread"

I totally agree that the lockdowns slowed the spread of COVID but at the greater cost of economic, social, mental health and educational damage that continues to this day.

There’s no “evidence” for parachutes either but I doubt you’d care to jump out of an aeroplane without one

I think it’s easy to say what you think was crazy in hindsight but working in the hospital and watching people go from well to dead in a matter of hours was terrifying. I didn’t want to go through that so I did everything I could not to catch it in case that ended up being me. And yes, looking back I probably was a bit crazy about it but we didn’t know.

The two images that stay in my mind are 1) The Queen sitting alone for the funeral of Prince Philip and 2) Boris Johnson raising a glass at a party.

This says it all. I hope you're ok

I wish I'd seen this earlier, it really does say it all.

Even some general nurses who hadn't been on wards for years and done drug rounds because they were community nurses ended up on wards working shifts again

Honestly not sure about that one; I don't pretend to be an expert on these things, but with human systems "naive" to a new virus it always seemed to me that many would get it no matter what we did

Besides, people had got the bit between their teeth by the early summer, and I'm convinced that any early return to school would have been called a mass culling of children - after all it was bad enough when they went back in September

The clapping was weird. I generally went out on my once a day walk then and waved at people who were horrified I was out walking when I should be clapping (sibling of four doctors here and I can announce the clapping made no difference to the number of people who died of Covid and those who we clapped for were generally working when we clapped 😂!).

My MIL liked to wash her carrier bags. The issue we had is so many of us were key workers in my family we still had to go to work, so it was strange.

What this thread does show is that despite the surface veneer of "let's put it all behind us and try and pretend it never happened " there is a still a strong undercurrent of embarrassment, cringe and anger at how politicians and ordinary people behaved.