Did the benefits of lockdown outweigh the harm to children’s education?

[PoisedKhakiUser]

AIBU to ask whether the benefits of lockdown - saving lives and protecting health - outweighed the damage it did to children’s education and future life chances? I feel like kids lost out on so much during this time, and I wonder if the cost was too high.

So 4 years on and people still think that it's just the elderly who were CEV?

If it were to happen again I would not comply - not a bit.

I'd be actively organising get togethers and homeschooling gatherings for the local kids!

Another point is that cases were starting to fall just before the first lockdown. That was because people had already started taking precautions in the 3/4 weeks beforehand once it was obvious that a pandemic was taking hold. People were voluntarily avoiding crowded places, etc. Yes, some people were ignoring it and continuing as normal, but a significant number were actually trying to take their own precautions and it was starting to work.

It was/is, almost entirely.

No, or I'd have written that rather than something so completely different.

I still don't understand why children were expected to suffer horrific abuse for the benefit of people in their 80's.

I also think, given the choice, very few OAPs would have wanted lockdowns to continue for their benefit at the expense of everybody else.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/03/lockdown-has-left-children-like-arthur-labinjo-hughes-risk-serious/

One 11-year-old child told the charity: “My dad has been sexually abusing me nearly all my life … but in lockdown dad is doing it five or six times a day.”

This is how I feel.

We had the most wonderful lockdown. I was furloughed and my DH worked from home.

I also think, given the choice, very few OAPs would have wanted lockdowns to continue for their benefit at the expense of everybody else.

It's an interesting point, we never really got to hear from the ones who didn't buy into the idea. My elderly loved one was very much against lockdown and did not feel it to be protective.

There are 130k children who never returned to schools and nobody know where they are.

What??! How can this be possible? I don't live in the UK and in my country you cannot home-school because it's usually religious nutters who try it

No it wasn;t worth it. I know so many young adults who found being locked up and spending huge amounts of time online at a crucial stage of their emotional and social development catastrophic. It had a very negative effect on the mental health of my oldest DC (now 21) and am in a support group with other parents who all say "it started in lockdown". I have friends who say the same thing - dropping out of university, going completely off the rails once they got there, losing all sense of routine. We have no way of knowing what the real long-term impact has been.

Sadly, 3 million people were excluded from support and most certainly didn;t have a "wonderful" lockdown!

At the start of lockdown we had no idea of which groups would be worst affected - in the last flu pandemic young adults were worst affected - more people died of influenza than in WW1. In 2020 72,000 people died of Covid in the UK. Without lockdowns that would inevitably have been higher. Not everyone who died was elderly although that was the biggest group. Children and young and middle aged adults died too.
There will be lockdowns in the next pandemic (and it's a when not an if that there will be one). Will they be the same? Who knows - it'll depend on the organism. How would you manage an ebola outbreak in London?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-reported-sars-cov-2-deaths-in-england/covid-19-confirmed-deaths-in-england-to-31-december-2020-report#age-and-sex-distribution

I was retired so lockdown didn't affect me too badly but I think it wasn't worth it

Yes. I think so. If they hadn't then it would have ripped through the population and it would have been terrible.

@Fluufer it wasn't
CEV didn't go off age at all it went off medical so people with blood cancer, immunocompromised etc etc
People who were shielding due to being most at risk were all ages

My dad is 75 and never had to shield, I was 36 and shielded and have more vaccines than he does due to being more vulnerable than him

There were no benefits whatsoever to lockdown, absolutely zero.

That isn't strictly true.

I remember looking at data from china in march 2020, that was crystal clear that Covid outcomes were strongly linked to age.

Granted, I still understand the desire for caution in the first lockdown. After that though, not so much.

Another pandemic with a higher fatality rate among under 65s would be a completely different kettle of fish. You think key workers would happily skip off to work if they had a serious chance of dying because of it? No. We would be looking at societal breakdown.

But did your children not miss their peers, or did they manage to still get together with them?

Yes they did. We were faced with an unknown virus, it was sensible to limit its spread until we knew more about it and had a vaccine. Education can ge made up, once you're dead you're dead. Hindsight is a wonderful thing

Apologies, I must have misread/replied in haste. My response doesn't particularly make sense.

At the start of the pandemic I visited my father's village. Him and all his neighbours were late 70's or early 80's.

We were all chatting on the pavement and they were quite sanguine and had the 'you've got to die of something' attitude.

My wife later commented that "the older generations really are made of sterner stuff.".

My elderly father spent the first lockdown caring for my disabled brother who is incredibly hard work and barely got to see his newborn grandson. He stopped caring about the rules after that and just went where he liked during subsequent lockdowns.

Thank you for this thread. We must never forget the wrecking balls which lockdowns threw at children, no matter how much politicians try to remain silent about the extremely damaging lockdowns they nearly all supported, mostly without a shred or remorse or regret. And the deliberate fiddling of figures to make things look worse than they were. When I saw rainbows in windows, I did not see hope: I saw isolated children.

Lockdowns were bad enough. But what was ten times worse was the way the government communicated with the public; their strategy of “frighten the pants off the public”, and nobody could fail to see that the government kept moving the goalposts to drag out lockdowns for months, hoping we would not notice. What started as “reviewed in three weeks” became “three more weeks, we can turn this virus around in twelve weeks”, “normalish by Christmas”, “significant normality by Easter”, etc. Parents’ mental health was shot to pieces as Saint Boris smilingly destroyed their businesses, billionaire Sunak shrugged “we can’t help everybody”, and the government partied. And the phrases “new normal” and “restrictions every winter” made it look as if it would never end. The government massively squandered the public’s good will on this ONE threat, threw in partygate for good measure, and i think that much of the public will never take any future “emergency” seriously again.

And I think it is extremely dangerous that debate on lockdowns was not even allowed. Anybody who tried to speak about the harms to children, or the possible harms of vaccines was met with “SHUT UP, GRANNY KILLER!” Scientists who were going to deviate from the narrative were swiftly silenced: you could watch BBC interviewers interrupting them. Mumsnet was a hotbed of hysteria.

Our children will inherit the government’s crippling national debt, which came as a direct result of prolonged lockdowns. The government recklessly and ruthlessly terrifying the public meant that many people were too frightened to return to work.. The government bullying the public into compliance means that many people, including myself, will simply never believe, respect, or trust government again. And Starmer is guilty by his silence: he failed to be the opposition, he failed to speak up for the children. The only question he asked is “why did lockdowns end?”

And remember the lies:
”The multi billion pound app will prevent a third lockdown.”
It didn’t.
”you’re only allowed out for an hour a day, once a day.”
this was never true, but the myth was allowed to become fact. The government failed to correct the record.

I thought it was almost universally acknowledged that the lockdowns were an utter failure and actually created more problems than they solved. I'm surprised you're even asking the question as if it's up for debate.

Sweden’s primary age schools didn’t close at all and their high schools closed for a week. Their constitution made lock downs impossible to implement. In all measures overall they did better than the UK and most of Europe.

We should have done this