To ask what we SHOULD have done during the COVID pandemic

[tunainatin]

So I realise the government made mistakes at the time of COVID. They also acted completely immorally by not following the rules they imposed on everyone else.
However, I suspect any government in this country would have been criticized whatever their response.

I was mulling over the rules and restrictions and trying to work out which ones were actually worthwhile. Some rules seemed so petty (e.g. the one a day walk) but there has to be a line drawn somewhere, otherwise the parks would have been full of people.

Once we were allowed to attend things with restrictions in place, I went to an event which was meant to have masks and social distancing but everyone kind of got carried away and forgot about. Everyone got COVID, including me, badly, and one person was hospitalised.

So if you were the government what would you have done during the pandemic. Which of the bizarre rules we followed do you think saved lives, and which just causes stress or distress?

What's with the emoji?

Why are you confused?

Same. I knew that closing the schools was a bad decision. Plus, deeply resented all my friends being on a furlough and bragging about it. I wasn't furloughed as self employed. Still all of us , our children and possibly grand children will now have to pay in taxes to cover that black hole of deficit. Awful government decision. Should only have sheltered - sick, old and vulnerable.

Schools should never have closed. Old people and anyone vulnerable should have been told to stay at home and the rest of should have been able to get on with it.
The rules like only being able to be 5km from your house or only 5 people from the one family in a house and all that shite was ridiculous. Another one was you could only eat in a restaurant if the food was €9.
Having your temp taking going into a gig..the list of crap we went along with is endless.
A major gripe for me was at Christmas when the pubs opened but kids still couldn’t go to school or see their friends. That actually upset me.

Many school staff fell within the vulnerable criteria or have family who lived with them who fell within the vulnerable criteria. If schools stayed fully open what were schools meant to do with limited staff?

Vulnerable staff should have worked from home doing online/remote teaching to vulnerable children (or children in vulnerable households).

Non vulnerable teachers continue to teach in schools to a much reduced number of non vulnerable children (or children in non vulnerable households).

So basically half teachers/children in school, half at home. Added bonus is that there'd have been space to spread out in the school, i.e. using the larger classrooms, halls, etc., rather than smaller classrooms with poorer ventilation and being cramped. Better spread out in the usually cramped staff rooms, etc

Yes, it wouldn't have been easy to swap classes/forms etc., but a hell of a lot easier than the open/closed/open/mornings/afternoon nonsense they had to work out that constantly changed seemingly according to the colour of Boris's underpants (considering the changes happened so often and often without sound logic behind them!).

And those of us who were single, along with everyone we knew single or otherwise, ignored that blatantly silly bit of advice. At one point I was in 7 different bubbles 😂😂

While I'm pro furlough, I think this post is valuable because it touches on an aspect that hasn't really been discussed in this thread yet. That is, the realisation that there's a piper to pay for some of our pandemic choices.

Things like paying for furlough and changing the social contract on school attendance weren't at the forefront of discussion at the time. I notice a lot of frustration with those effects now. It's arguably easier to get your head round them if you'd clocked they were coming. Whenever there's a thread about school attendance, there are always people who clearly didn't realise that long term closures were liable to have consequences well into the future, and are very peeved with the idea that we can't just wish them away.

I don't think the government could necessarily be expected to make some of those arguments at the time- cost of furlough maybe an exception. But it's not good that so many people never heard them.

I don't think the government could necessarily be expected to make some of those arguments at the time- cost of furlough maybe an exception. But it's not good that so many people never heard them.
Exactly. It needed to be said.
"We are aware that furlough is extremely expensive, and that it will bring about massive national debt. We are aware that closing schools will cause massive damage to your children's education. We are aware that forcing children to isolate will affect their social development. We are aware that these restrictions are disproportionately affecting your children. For these, we are very, very sorry, and we will keep lockdowns as short as we possibly can."

If they had grovelled about that, instead of pointlessly grovelling about deaths, I would have respected lockdowns and restrictions far more.

DH is extremely vulnerable so I didn’t want DD to go to school. They even rang and asked if she wanted to go in. What they should have offered was an outdoor school, they have massive fields. Even a few hours a day would have made a huge difference.
She is still suffering the consequences and we actually got Covid anyway and we’re fine, we had it recently and it was worse.
Some of the primaries near me shut their doors and offered no support or anything during lockdown, they just declared themselves closed.

Single people should absolutely been able to bubble with someone. We lost someone who was destroyed by lockdown.
My neighbour actually used to go and stay with her DD and family every Friday night. They were all staying home and it broke the monotony up for all of them.

I have a friend in NZ who because they weren’t effected has become a huge conspiracy nut and anti vaccer because ‘they were fine’ and never saw or heard of anyone getting covid.

For anything but this topic I would believe it was a joke... but this...😬

I really don't know what should have been done differently. I have no delusions of being able to understand this scenario in its entirety.

I do know that what happened for those in nursery, primary and secondary was devastating.

We'll be dealing with the legacy of that for years to come.

My DS 18 was in secondary when it started and somehow he has come out of it better than DD14. He hit some key milestones like P7 camp and a trip abroad in S1 before lockdown and then was able to sit exams properly in S4,5 and S6.

DD missed P7 camp, there have been no school trips. Her world has been so much smaller than DS'. It shows.

We have (well had, all gone now) vulnerable and very elderly people in our family so I understood the need but wish it could have been different/better for schools.

I’m hoping that all the grievances people are relating stay in the memory when it comes to future voting for a new Government. The one consistency that did come out of the pandemic was just how woefully unprepared the UK was in terms of dealing with a pandemic, just how piss poor, greedy, bad communicators, selfishly uncaring many of the decision makers were, how decisions made well before the pandemic around training, being prepared, being ready in certain ways were either ignored or shelved for austerity reasons.

Future Governments need to take note.

I think it probably already has. The economy would've probably ended the Tories regardless, but Partygate meant they managed to also make themselves the focus of so much of people's pain and grief over the pandemic experience. Labour were barely visible for most of the restrictions period, they were still regrouping from the 2019 GE.

That said, not sure it'll be a long term thing.

So we should have quarantined. No need to shout. I’m aware when tests were introduced. We didn’t test at airports even when they were, or put any restrictions on anyone coming in. It was silly.

Keeping the borders wide open in the early days was definitely stupid. Obviously we couldn't have closed them completely, but surely closed to non-essentials (supplies, food, returning citizens only). Then quarantining people returning from abroad (only citizens returning from holiday; with supply chain stuff let them get on and we'd take the risk). Although covid would still have been brought in by lorry drivers and so on, it would have been a lot fewer people spreading it.

It was just so odd to go from normal border controls and mass gatherings to lockdown within a couple of weeks. Various measures earlier on would have bought us time, with slower spread, and potentially avoided some of the more extreme measures later.

The timescales that people mention about shutting the borders on are a moot point; the virus was already in the UK before Italy really hit the news. It's hard to find a virus that you're not looking for when it closely ressembles the usual range of winter illnesses. There have been samples of people with no travel connections that were found to have Covid prior to this period though. China was slow to declare the virus in late 2019 and that leaves months of the virus being able to spread undetected.

I will give the benefit of the doubt to restrictions in March/ April while pressure on the NHS was rising and more was being learned about the virus.

All children should have had the opportunity to attend school in the summer term. All children should have had access to socialise outdoors, play in play areas. "Rule of 6" from the autumn was harmful to families and casual outdoor socialising should not have been discouraged.

It should never have been illegal to have supervised my son and his friend playing in the park in winter 2021... meanwhile 200m away, half their class were allowed to be educated together in person and play together.

Too many re-openings were deferred until the autumn which was inevitably going to push infection rates up. In the absence and uncertainty of vaccines, low-risk people should have been able to take their chances on exposure and pace the rate of infections more evenly. Re-opening in 2021 was too slow when CEV people had had the opportunity to be vaccinated.

Most people were compliant on restrictions.
Indeed a lot of damage has come from the scaremongering and additional layers of measures that were applied. There was a cult-like stance of the more measures, the better the person you are. At all levels from individuals, to organisations to devolved governments.

The Great Barrington Declaration and Swedish approach seemed to be pragmatic balances to reduce the potential impact on vulnerable people without such extreme impacts on society.

It seems a reasonable opinion in 2024 with what we know now... I had a huge amount of flack for holding it in 2020.

@SoiledMyselfDuringSomeTurbulence

While I'm pro furlough, I think this post is valuable because it touches on an aspect that hasn't really been discussed in this thread yet. That is, the realisation that there's a piper to pay for some of our pandemic choices.

When I heard they were shutting workplaces, my first thought was "Wow, all those people needing to claim benefits". I thought it would prove an interesting sea-change in opinion towards benefit claimants, when a critical mass of people suddenly realised you could end up out of work through circumstances beyond your control.

Obviously that didn't happen because of furlough. I guess if it had, people would have realised earlier on that closing businessess had a financial cost. Furlough kept people under control because people wouldn't have stood for that.

They were calling for longer harder lockdowns.

As an adult I couldn't go out except for an hour a day. I could not go to work and had to work from home with no human contact. I could not see anyone for a big part of lockdown. Literally no human contact at all. I could not do any of my 'hobbies'.

Schools were closed for much less than non-essential workplaces. Children's activities were allowed to be open when adults' weren't.

Pretty weird to say that adults could do what they wanted. Single adults were totally isolated.

The hour a day thing was never actually a thing, you could have formed a bubble. Yes lockdown was crap, bit baffled why people wake make it harder for themselves by making up additional fake rules.

Which barely registered. They didn't even have a proper leader until well into the first lockdown, and I doubt most of the public could've picked Starmer out of a lineup at that point. Labour were irrelevant at that time.

Yes, it was a thing in Wales actually.
We were also not allowed to sit down outside and all toilets were closed so even walking outside was very heavily restricted unless you wanted to pee in a bush.

For a long time in lockdown, no bubbles were in operation. You just weren't allowed to see anybody. Even when bubbles started, loads of people didn't have one because they weren't anybody's one and only friend.

Lockdown was hell for loads of single people (and loads of non-singles I imagine).

Whole heartedly agree. Then, the population would accumulate herd immunity and the virus would swiftly evolve into a less virulent form.

Instead, we locked up and masked the healthy and young population and encouraged the continual movement of carers and elderly between homes, hospitals and care settings, which meant the most virulent forms of the viruses were given the head start on circulation.

@BogRollBOGOF
The timescales that people mention about shutting the borders on are a moot point; the virus was already in the UK before Italy really hit the news.

But it's not about keeping the virus out completely, just reducing the amount of it being introduced to the UK. Slowing the spread, not eliminating it completely.
Yes, it was already here. But that doesn't mean throwing our hands up and saying "Might as well let even more infected people in". Each one would have added to the spread.

And the next time there is a genuinely awful virus, one that kills children, the economy will already be too bankrupt to be able to weather a couple of years of lockdowns.