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?

The whole point was to "flatten the curve", not eliminate Covid. Even the vaccines havn't eliminated it. Lockdowns helped keep the numbers of people with Covid at any one time limited, and within numbers that the NHS could cope with. Hence why we were in and out of lockdowns and had fluctuating restrictions over the 2 years, rather than a continual lockdown.

The fact that a lot of the restrictions were completely bonkers and illogical and the fact that "some" things weren't restricted/controlled, is a different subject really. But ultimately lockdowns and restrictions "did what they say on the tin" to control the spread, which was the plan all along, until either we achieved herd immunity or we had a working vaccine.

Even vaccines aren't a "real" solution as you can't vaccinated everyone and for some people, they don't give full protection.

Basically, the question is whether the things we got from lockdown, ie slowing the spread with pre Omicron variants, are worth the negatives. It's not an easy one to answer, especially because some of the relevant information is in the future.

Much more nuanced than that. It's whether we could have slowed the spread without lockdowns, or with different kinds of restrictions. I.e. alternatives that could have achieved similar end result without trashing the economy, causing business failures & bankruptcies, job losses, massive increase in national debt, massive increases in mental health problems, increases in non covid deaths and health conditions, etc. etc.

Yes, those things are vital parts of the discussion about what would've been best.

I worked in person a fair bit. I get it. Even more reason to reduce non-essential contact to keep numbers low.

Edit: and once the vaccine was available, the numbers didn’t go up again at the same speed. Even before that, they went up from a lower base after a lockdown. I still think travel was handled badly.

Problem is who decides on what is "essential"?

Will the government properly support ALL businesses and self employment in the future if they, again, stop them from working and earning a living? How can the country afford it?

Can the entertainment and hospitality industries afford to be banned from operating again? It's easy to say pubs, fairgrounds, restaurants, etc aren't "essential", but they are to the staff working in them and their owners.

You're also back to the stupidity of supermarkets being forced to block off aisles of non food items as they were "non essential" yet otherwise fully open for food etc which is essential.

But even then, people were arguing that "essential" food was only basics and that takeaways, cafes, burger vans, etc should have stayed closed as "hot food" wasn't essential as people could make their own at home!

So you see, even the word "essential" has very different meanings for different people. Nothing is easy!

Of course it isn’t easy. Nobody ever suggested it was.

Some restrictions were too strict, but at the same time it did slow the rate of infection down which helped the hospitals a bit. Just before it exploded here there were stories in Italy of being complete overwhelmed with too many patients. I don't think things got quite as bad here.

I find the idea of imposing on peoples freedom as a tool to manage NHS capacity a highly offensive proposition.

You would prefer allowing people to die because there aren’t enough ICU beds/ventilators? That seems more of an imposition on freedom to me…

People should have been able to make their own decision r.e. their health. If you're at risk, you stay at home, double mask and take all these extra precautions.

It is a horribly complex dilemma, but my sense looking back is that we put too much value on the lives of sick and elderly people at that time at the expense of the economy and the lives of future generations. The policy seemed to be dominated by epidemiology without much thought to economics and inter-generational ethics.

But even then, people were arguing that "essential" food was only basics and that takeaways, cafes, burger vans, etc should have stayed closed as "hot food" wasn't essential as people could make their own at home!

I do remember those discussions on social media. Very ignorant and privileged. The reality is that some people do rely on food that has been prepared by someone else for their nourishment. And these people are disproportionately likely to be vulnerable in some other way: chaotic, MH issues etc. I was very glad takeaways were allowed to stay open.

And if Covid had been allowed to go unchecked almost the public moving about, where would the additional patients gone for treatment? The hospitals were already struggling during lockdown.

Infection rates were already falling before the lockdowns. People were already starting to moderate their behaviour, avoid large gatherings, avoid cramped indoor spaces, etc., just from watching the news and seeing what was happening in other countries.

It was the height of stupidity to still have lockdowns when infection rates and death rates fell to very low levels, and to come out of lockdowns so slowly. It was as if they were trying to eliminate covid by long unnecessary lockdowns, which was pointless when we still had open borders, and lots of places/people that had to remain open couldn't social distance!

Not all hospitals were "struggling". Some were, but lots were pretty quiet as they'd also stopped lots of other treatments/services, so some were basically ghost towns with tumbleweed blowing down their corridors, as they, too over-reacted and cancelled virtually everything which turned out to be an unnecessary over-reaction, and again, far too slow to start re-opening once it was obvious they weren't being over-run.

We don't exist to "protect the NHS".

We should have done what New Zealand did

Because people modified their behaviour. We have seen the pictures in Italy. We got scared. Look at the carnage Covid did in South America like Brazil where Bolsonaro was a Covid denier. That was a true Darwinian experiment. Dead bodies decomposing at home for days where they died because there was no help in hospitals and morgues were full to capacity and there was nowhere to put the dead bodies.

This is true, the NHS is not an end in itself, it's only there to help us. Whether the NHS was overwhelmed or not isn't really the issue. The issue is the number of deaths that would have resulted and whether preventing them was worth the costs and other consequences of doing so.

@taxguru vaccines need something like 85-95% of the population inoculated to reach "herd immunity" stage and be effective in halting infections like polio. Sadly as we later found out, with Covid mutating so fast it escapes herd immunity. Our only chance was to hope for the virus to mutate into a less deadly form and to keep inoculating the most vulnerable groups every time a new variant took hold.

Unfortunately, yes. What we did was far worse.

OldJohn
Perhaps not what we SHOULD have done during the COVID pandemic but now we should be forcing China to pay the full cost of the pandemic. It started there and they failed to contain it. They have a huge economy and so should pay for this. It seems that it was either produced in a laboratory or spread due to poor hygiene at a market. In either case make them pay"

This kind of idea makes a great Daily Mail headline to sell copies but practically impossible to do. As they say "nice idea, in theory".

You would prefer people to die unnecessarily?
Wow.

Of course it would gave helped to have had the extra beds the Tories refused
Covid inquiry told Treasury blocked NHS bed request https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gpwz3qyr0o

In a situation where not protecting it means many more dead, don’t you think it’s a good idea to protect it?
I mean, I don’t exist to protect my car tyres either, but I tend to avoid potholes and broken glass anyway…

Also a dangerous precedent. What happens if we'd done that but the next pandemic was caused in the UK? We'd be completely bankrupted for ever more if we'd had to pay compo for everyone else in the World. Likewise any other smaller country besides the USA or China. Just because it was China and they "could" afford reparations, doesn't mean we should have different rules for them. Such rules and compo obligations need to be based on cause and negligence, never on how much money one party is perceived to be able to afford!