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.

And with that stricter enforcement, those radicalised groups would be all the more convinced they were right. They would say "we told you that 2020-21 was just the warm-up, and that next time, they'd do it properly. We tried to warn you, but you called us 'conspiracy theorists'." Those radicalised groups are now very much on their guard for so much as a hint of a future lockdown, or "plandemic".

Something often said among those who were dead against lockdowns is "there are many of us, and few of them (government and police), lockdown can only be done with public consent". And because I attended the anti-lockdown and anti-compulsory-vaccination (to which this country came dangerously close) marches, I saw with my own eyes that the numbers of people who thought this way were easily in the hundreds of thousands: the march was about 40 people wide, and literally miles long. It was not "a couple of hundred conspiracy theorists on Speaker's Corner" as reported by the BBC.

@DogInATent

Voluntary altruistic compliance with light-touch measures would be completely undone by these selfish and ignorant minorities.

It would be up to the person/organisation/business to implement and enforce their own rules. Then the "selfish and ignorant" wouldn't have the opportunity to "undo" the measures.

Like our village pie shop. Even when it was allowed to re-open, they didn't admit any customers into the shop. Orders were taken through the window. Same with our village chippie who installed a hatch in their door to pass through the orders. Both instigated a card only payment policy so they didn't need to handle cash. There was no legal requirement for them to do that, no local rules, nothing to do with restrictions/tiers. They did it themselves, made their own risk assessment, decisions, etc.

Long before lockdowns, our village Spar shop imposed it's own form of rationing as they could see what was about to happen. They limited customers to two of anything/everything. No exceptions. As a result, their stock lasted weeks longer than the supermarkets and their local customers continued to be able to buy stuff. As stocks ran down, they started keeping things in the storeroom and only selling the really short stuff to customers they recognised!

The only "downer" in our village was the stupid primary school headmaster who held a whole-school assembly on the day they had to close down - all pupils, all staff, and parents were encouraged too! What a way to help reduce infections by cramming a few hundred people in a tiny, cramped school hall with no ventilation. What an idiot! Yes - it did cause a wave of infections in the village!

My point is that there are plenty of ways that people can take their own measures that don't necessitate trashing the economy, the education and mental health of millions of people!

What an idiot! Yes - it did cause a wave of infections in the village!

And what excellent immunity those people would have had!

And at exactly the right time - i e. well before the first peak when hospitals would have been easily capable of providing care.

Yes, the ones who survived and the ones who didn't pass it onto vulnerable people.

It sounds like you're have preferred to have the equivalent of chickenpox parties so that everyone could catch it!

The damage to social and emotional wellbeing is absolutely proving impossible to reverse for some. The deluge of young people with quite severe MH problems caused by lockdown was part of why I got out of the NHS (was a child/adolescent and family psych in there). I no longer respected the organisation that had in part been responsible for bringing that suffering on so many children and families - and then making them languish on 1-2 year waiting lists for any meaningful help. Disgraceful.

One thing I did notice was getting customers we have never seen before or never came back after early summer.

As they did the rounds. So if they wanted rice, loo roll, bleach and pasta. Went to 4 different supermarkets or essential retailers (defunct Wilko, B&M etc) and each shop had 3 of the four items. So bought all 3 of each category at each shop. So that meant those who don’t have a car for whatever reason couldn’t get these items.

Where I live, Farmfoods didn’t restrict items. Remember on a local FB group someone posted two photos of the same man on different days pushing a trolley of 12 lots of 24 loo rolls. Everyone condemned FFs behaviour . The man looked the type to sell the rolls individually for a £1 each in his corner shop.
If that’s the case £450 profit

'Vulnerable' people as in Vulnerable to infection IF they caught it and IF it was severe for them? But again who cares about people vulnerable in other ways?

According to some on here, schools were never the cause of any infections of covid.

The UK doesn't have anything like the infrastructure involved to strictly enforce public health measures the population don't want. This idea some people have of people being made to behave whether they like it or not is unrealistic. People had to buy into restrictions during covid, and they'd have to buy into them again or we wouldn't have them. This is why the behavioural nudges were considered so important.

And a substantial part of the fault lies in the behaviour of our political class. Shat all over public trust. It might be that a new government not irredeemably associated with Partygate helps a bit, but I've seen no evidence of that as yet.

I don’t think you can pre determine how people will behave as the pandemic variables may differ

Also people acting based on their own perception of risk is just that, the word ‘selfish’ was overused

Mmm, we didn't hear much about the selfishness of people who wanted stricter restrictions based on their fear for themselves or someone they cared more about than all the people who were fucked over by restrictions. Some people were given a lot of encouragement to think their selfishness was better than other people's. I think that may have caused some of them to struggle more when it came to the end of restrictions. Maybe that could've been avoided.

Agree

Lockdowns brought damage and many used ‘selfish’ to stop that discussion

You consider the NHS was responsible for lockdown?

And if you’re a psych who left the profession, surely you contributed to treatment delays? I mean, of course you can do what you want for a living but bemoaning lack of support whilst leaving the one job that could help seems a bit….contradictory?

Precisely!! It was literally
"SELFISH!!! YOU'RE NOT DOING WHAT'S BEST FOR ME!! STOP PUTTING YOU AND YOUR FAMILY BEFORE ME AND MINE!! SELFISH!!"

I'm using selfish to describe the attitudes that have hardened after the pandemic.

You could play "selfish arseholes" bingo with threads on Mumsnet.
"AIBU, my selfish arsehole neighbours have their grandchildren over! And worse, they are hugging them! No social distancing!"

Partly responsible, yes, because the top brass drove policy making. But the NHS got screwed over as well. As did patients, of course. Mostly patients.

Please do tell me as a front line psychologist who was a key worker during the pandemic and went into work with vulnerable young people and families every single day, worked overtime and did extra in-person work to compensate for colleagues who decided it was too scary to come in the office in person how exactly I am responsible for treatment delays?

If you didn't go through and see what we did in CAMHS during that time, you can't possibly understand. The harrowing cases we saw, the exhaustion, burnout and vicarious trauma, with very little access to the things that usually supported us to be able to do the work, colleagues stretching themselves to the end of their resources trying to plug the gaps. Those of us who left after the pandemic left because we had no more left to give. I was crying every day before going to work. I wasn't sleeping, I was so burnt out I couldn't give anything to my own family or friends any more. I reckon the ones who stayed in their nice leafy suburbs behind the screens and got to swerve all the complex cases can take a turn now aye.

Unless you've been through that, and hand on heart you can honestly say you'd still be able to keep chipping away at that waiting list, seeing one desperate family after another at their wits' end, primary age kids saying they want to kill themselves, teenagers too terrified to leave their bedroom, then you can absolutely fuck off to the moon and back.

I think it was worth it to protect the vulnerable, yes.

I think how much damage it did to a child's education depends on the age of the child and family circumstances though.

I'm probably in the minority but my child went into reception in 2020 and I think she actually benefitted from the home learning.

@Crankyracoon who do you class as vulnerable? Only those with physical health issues?

@notbelieved "Was the NHS responsible for lockdown?"
Not exactly. You could say that lockdown happened because the NHS is allegedly in such a bad state. But because the NHS is such a sacred cow, that no politician will dare to touch, it became a handy stick to beat the public with. "We must lock down or the NHS will collapse." "Protect the NHS." "Thank you, NHS." Some of those signs are still around. Some churches were flying a flag saying "Thank you, NHS." There were memes "This is the new religion of England." It almost became a religion, worship the NHS, because absolutely nothing else matters, certainly not the education of children. And now massive demands are on the mental health service provided by that very NHS that lockdown was supposed to "protect".

This is a separate debate, but some people think that one reason the NHS is always "on the brink of collapse" is because money is thrown at it all the time, so it doesn't need to operate efficiently, and has endless layers of management: no government will dare to cut it. You can see montages of the headlines which appear every winter "NHS on the brink of collapse", for the last twenty or thirty years.

Does no one question why so many people were psychologically vulnerable?

Everyone is quick to criticise the lockdown, but doesn't look at why the UK came out of covid measures in a much worse position to other countries that imposed similar (or greater) measures.

Support services had been rundown for decades, the government was underprepared, mental health issues were already on the rise. The irresponsibility was in the lead up. If the country had been better prepared, if mental health services and young peoples services hadn't been slashed to the bone, if Sure Start had been continued and a generation of parents were better prepared to cope, would lockdowns have been as damaging?

This is a separate debate, but some people think that one reason the NHS is always "on the brink of collapse" is because money is thrown at it all the time, so it doesn't need to operate efficiently, and has endless layers of management: no government will dare to cut it. You can see montages of the headlines which appear every winter "NHS on the brink of collapse", for the last twenty or thirty years.

This old chestnut about NHS managers. The NHS operates with a lower management headcount (as a percentage of the workforce) than the average for the private sector. There is a strong argument that throwing money at the NHS is seen as the cure for all its ills and this attitude prevents genuine improvement, but that's largely due to the short termism of politics, constant political interference, and politically imposed budgeting and procurement processes that wouldn't be seen as fit for purpose outside the public sector.

In my experience, people who aren't trying to excuse austerity and defend the Tories usually accept that we went into the pandemic hamstrung already.

Does no one question why so many people were psychologically vulnerable?

Well, this is a real simple one to answer.

Human beings are not meant to live in isolation from each other, or social distance. We literally need each other, we need social, emotional and physical contact, community, connection. You deprive people of that, especially children, young people, the elderly and frail, they will suffer emotionally. It's why long term solitary confinement in prison, or psychiatric hospital, is a form of psychological torture.

I don't know what behavioural management specialist thought. But in terms of public health, no one thought they could lock down for more than a month. Both getting people to comply,and the mechanics of the whole thing.

The latter of course was only possible - it seemed - due to changes in tech. Though there was a bit of an illusion there, as I think we see now.