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?

They could have been segregated by staying at home. What an odd question.

Schools should have remained open.

Possibly in bubbles, with kids going in on a reduced time table in smaller groups. I say that more for the mental impact than the educational impact.

Millions of self employed people including my husband got shit all money due to the dates when he had become self employed.

Paid hefty PAYE into the system for decades, but became self employed not long enough prior to lock down to qualify for help.

We had virtually no money coming in and couldn't even get council tax reduction . Our council tax was £260 a month...... We didn't have that amount coming into the house, never mind trying to feed 5 people.
Other than financial ruin ,we enjoyed lock down. But we do live in a rural and beautiful place where the one hour a day thing was not policed. Spent great times with the children and enjoyed the peace .

Did we know early on who were the vulnerable? Many work places including schools would have been impacted by number of staff being classified as vulnerable

It's very difficult to say.

At the beginning it was killing high hundreds of people every week and we didn't know for a long time how dangerous it was

The other thing is if we'd kept schools open more teachers and children would have died as there was no resistance to it

My DH was not vulnerable (head teacher) THEN (ran 40 miles a week and was super fit) but very unfortunately is now with long covid and had his childhood asthma back since he caught COVID (2 months before the vaccine).

There's a likelihood that if all the schools had been in at the beginning a lot more children and adults would have died due to the high viral load

That doesn't happen now since the virus has mutated and so many are vaccinated

I'm not prepared to have lost more children to this (nor my lovely DH)

We literally didn't know WHO was vulnerable then, we do now

But we still lost children who had undiagnosed conditions, and some who had minor conditions, and some very sadly where it was just bad luck

@Overpayment so say young mum was medically vulnerable so she stayed home. What about husband and children, they carried on as normal?

That's an impossible question to answer now . Hide sight is amazing. I do think the schools should have stayed open but at the time no knew anything about covid and it was deadly according to at the time reports.

Hasn’t there been a rise in Type 1 diabetes in children due to virus triggering that?

Long COVID is an issue, and yes people can get long term impact from other viruses eg glandular fever but I don’t remember everyone getting glandular fever in a class and multiple times

To answer your question, OP, the government should not have spent all that money on buying fake PPE from their mates. They should have spent our money on upping UK PPE manufacturing capacity for proper FFP2 and 3 respirators for healthcare staff, and on making/buying surgical masks and recommending their use over fabric face coverings.

Probably with hindsight the (effective) masks should have been recommended and promoted, not mandated, so the people who couldn’t wear them were not vilified and the people with no scientific understanding and/or the desire to “stick it to the man” could crack on and be goats if they wished, while the rest of us were somewhat better protected.

Instead of throwing money at their pals who wanted to have a go at making ventilators, they should have funded actual ventilator manufacturers to manufacture actual useable ventilators. They could also have spent some money on fitting schools and hospitals with HEPA filtered ventilation to reduce the concentration of virus particles in essential and crowded places, or at least have developed some guidance.

They should not have lied and made stuff up about the law. There was never a limit on the length of time that could be spent outdoors.

They should have “followed the science” instead of just saying they were following the science, and should have explained as soon as it became obvious (April 2020, if not earlier) that COVID is airborne and handwashing, though important, is a poor control measure.

There should have been no vaccine mandate, just a programme of encouragement.

Just for starters.

Can’t help thinking that rules had to be more stringent to make up for these ‘enlightened’ individuals who were bent on breaking them 🙄

I was in Ireland for part of it and you had to stay within 2km of your address and the Irish police were actually enforcing it and stopping people on the roads. You also couldn't buy clothing and the police were also in supermarkets guarding the clothing sections 🤣 the Irish government went absolutely batty altogether. Had I been in charge then I definitely wouldn't have gone quite that far.

It was cackhanded bollocks from start to finish. We are an island. We should have looked across at Italy, seen what was heading our way and closed our borders. Locking the entire country down and leaving the airports open with virtually no checks on anyone coming through was nuts. Boris Johnson and his band of merry idiots chose the worst of all worlds with every decision they made.

We needed a government that took serious things seriously.

It was a mess.

Not locked up parks and removed swings that have not been replaced since.

See, this is what I mean. You have given this no thought whatsoever, have you?

Young people live with the old and vulnerable. The old and vulnerable need the young and fit to care for them.

Or were you proposing that anyone old and vulnerable should have been locked away to fend for themselves?

That’s not a question to fling out there unless you’ve got some evidence?

Would you really base an important decision, like a vaccination on some vague notion you might have read somewhere about diabetes or Glandular Fever?

and yet you people are calling the rest of us mindless sheri.. right?

Mindless sheep obeying the rules set by the government!!! Ok to vomit theft or murder then! I know a huge amount of people who didn't "obey" the rules,my neighbours had a birthday party in lockdown. Local barbers were open, doing hair in the back yard. Both my DD were in retail, one, one of the big supermarkets the other a large well known toy store. I was shocked at the number of people not wearing masks, when they were mandatory. I looked after my dgks while my DD worked, obeying all the rules, I stayed outside,or downstairs, with the door open.I worked for the NHS, nursing for many years, I saw colleagues seriously ill with Covid, older folk withering away after spending 2/3 years isolated. Was very shocked to meet the new local vicar,who told me Covid didn't exist! I'm not sure anything different could it would have helped, maybe more people would have died, maybe less. I was always very careful, I have done barrier, reverse barrier, isolation,seen the virus and bacteria under the microscope, but 5 jabs in and last September, caught COVID,no underlying health issues and was ill for 2 months. Ended up under lots of different consultants, completely deaf in one ear, and still waiting on seeing a consultant.

MP's only taking 80% of their salaries, to share the pain they inflicted on the rest of us. Then we might have felt a bit more than we were "all in it together".

For me this is definitely right at the top of the list. I recall Chris Whitty in one of the very early press conferences saying, “firstly the great majority of people who get this virus, irrespective of age, will recover from it and most will have a mild or moderate illness that won’t require hospitalisation.”

As someone has already mentioned things like the “tiers,” especially when you have/had so many people travelling in and out of them every day for work etc. This is especially so when the areas in question are actually quite small.

Wales introduced “local” lockdowns from September 2020. I think an example from that time illustrates the stupidity of many of the restrictions. Everyone remember how garden centres were open for most, if not all of the time? I met a friend at a garden centre that’s only just within the boundary of one city. In fact the welcome road sign for the neighburing city is a few feet away from the garden centre. My friend lives 4 miles up the road from the garden centre in the neighbouring city. We were going to have a coffee in the garden centre’s coffee shop after looking around and buying a few bits. However, we couldn’t because my friend’s postcode was for the neighbouring city. As a reminder she lives 4 miles away. I came from 16 miles away but my postcode was in the city this garden centre is technically in. If I’d have been on my own I could have gone in. The poor member of staff was so apologetic and said they were actually turning more people away than they could allow in.
End result was I went back to my friend’s house for a coffee. I have no regrets for doing so either.

Yes I think this was a mistake though. Idiots are always going to idiot; persuasion and explaining is better than forcing and banning. But Johnson was a complacent fool who saw us all as the little people.

Not sent covid patients to nursing homes. Provided adequate PPE. Told elderly and vulnerable to Isolate and supported them to do so with bubbles and home deliveries etc. Taken the risk more seriously in the beginning. Had actual grown ups in charge.

The government didn’t know what we were facing. They didn’t know what percentage of people would die, they didn’t know how it was transmitted at first, and they didn’t know which groups of people would be most likely to die. We could have been facing a second or third virus mutation that was many times more deadly and where children were the most vulnerable.
For me, the government were not strict enough at first and then too strict later when more facts were known.
I know so many people who are told their malaise/ disabling symptoms are caused by ‘long covid’. We don’t know the real toll of this virus or the vaccines.
Lastly, I think we got off lightly. At some point a Spanish flu or Ebola type virus ( accidental or deliberate) will sweep the globe and take out large numbers of us. Hopefully we have learned something from COVID and that something is NOT to downplay the risk.

I agree totally it was cackhanded bollocks, but the virus was already here by then, and there were no real checks possible at that time, so there was no point.

All the advice (whether to stay at home totally, wfh, rule of six, social distancing, mask wearing etc ) should have been advice rather than crossing the line into compulsion. That would have allowed people to make their own judgments of risk for their own health.

The bubbles was a nonsense though. Not allowed to mix during the day but if you had a sibling in a different bubble, and most of our children did, then off you go and get into a car with them. Or in the case of secondary schools, all get on the bus together. Even in school - everyone is using the same toilets as kids from other bubbles so how does that even work? There wasn’t a TA in each class (not enough adults for that) so if a child wets themselves you get pulled from one bubble into another to sort them out. Bubbles were done because it looked like the govt were doing something but they were utterly pointless.

When Covid got into our school it ripped through every single bubble despite complicated, annoying, time consuming and ultimately pointless precautions at school. Because children weren’t in the bubbles once they got home.

I think schools did need to close initially while people figured out what was happening. Maybe a few weeks. Remember st the start they had no idea what was happening or what might happen- all they had was the images from Italy of people dying and hospitals overflowing. Schools could have opened after the May half term for example, once they’d had time to properly assess it. But we need to be realistic- whatever they said about increasing safety measures, it actually doesn’t work in reality.
So we needed (need?) to be clear that if schools were open they were open as normal. Not ‘schools can open with increased safety measures.’ There aren’t practical increased safety measures that really make a difference, certainly in primary.