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?

Depends on the "damage" caused by trying to protect.

Your car tyre example is a good one actually. What if trying to avoid a pot hole to save a tyre, you crash into a lorry and write off the car? You can't just look at one side of the "equation", you have to look at other potential consequences too.

Re the NHS, what about all the people who got their treatments delayed, many of whom will have suffered, some will have died, many will have lost their jobs or incomes due to protracted delays in diagnosis and treatment.

Nice idea in theory for the NHS to virtually close down for anything other than Covid, but in reality, lots of hospitals weren't badly affected, and could have carried on doing a lot more routine work, operations and treatments than they did.

Again, 10000 beds would have helped.
Letting Covid rip would not. What do you think would have happened to other healthcare with more covid patients in hospitals?

@taxguru I was being sarcastic. You need international agreements to "make pay" an entire country for things like causing a pandemic. Without it I do not see how they can do it. Who do they pay to? Every single country that had dead and disabled by LC and economic damage?

You would need a way first to agree how and what happened? Man-made or natural source? If natural you could argue it could be classed as an "act of God" ie unfortunate but could have happened anywhere. MPox, Ebola, Bird flu are scratching at the doors.

Something like an internationally recognised court would be needed to establish first how and what happened? Then you need to internationally agree what reparations should look like? Impossible. Look at the infected blood or post office scandals. Victims still not had compensation decades on. If a country cannot manage to compensate its own citizens how do you make an entire country, that is by the way a super power, like China pay? It is an utterly simplistic and naive suggestion.

There was no option available that didn't involve people dying unnecessarily. The only thing we got to do was choose which deaths we preferred.

Not at all, just not at the expense of the economy, personal freedom, and the life chances of young people.

I would love to have seen NHS capacity expanded and reinforced. But again, not at the cost of freedom.

I think an equation is a good way to look at it.

What's the damage v the risk and not only to delayed treatment but to the social contract, mh, abuse and financial impact

Hi Boris
People who followed the rules weren't "mindless sheep", they were just more considerate and caring than you.

The “essential workers” list that was in place during the depths of lockdown covered a whole host of occupations, many of which really did need to be allowed in and out of the UK without a quarantine period if healthcare, a lot of industries and even the UK utilities to continue to function.

That is what they said at the beginning, and the only logical idea. I think that even the authorities lost sight of that to a significant degree though. Partly because the discussion of long term effects, tradeoffs, and evidence was so restricted in public life and the media, normal social processes and brakes didn't seem to work as well as they ought to.

If you can't even have a proper evidence based discussion of masking, to the point where scientific reviews in line with decades of research were not allowed to stand alone, how could expect discussion of trade-offs?

After the very initial stages, when you listen back to public statements about lockdowns, it became harder and harder to see what their metrics really were.

The UK was actually a lot better than other places. But here on MN plenty of posters thought that early hard lockdowns would have eliminated the virus. And seemed happy to carry on with them indefinitely.

I think what we've learned is that we can't really do those things, that we will be decades recovering as will much of the developed world.

Which has it's on costs in terms of deaths.

Tell the extremely vulnerable to stay at home and give them whatever support they needed to do it, including support for the people they live with to quarantine with them if necessary. The rest of us get on with it.

I broadly agree with this. I can see that the first lockdown in March - June 2020 was probably needed, while scientists, economists, and other experts of all kinds got to grips with understanding a novel, complex and fast moving virus and situation.

But once the nature and health risks of COVID had been identified then there should have been a switch in policy towards encouraging and enabling at risk individuals to lockdown, and for others to get on with life as much as possible.

There would always be some grey areas eg what do healthy people who live in a house with higher risk individuals do? But I think virtually every policy has some grey areas and ’it depends’ questions associated with it.

Here is an interesting example of this trade-off.

A relative of mine, not in the UK, lived in an area where there was huge emphasis put on testing people to control the virus. At the time they believed this to be highly effective.

At the time this meant people going to testing centers, so their tests had to be handled by the health system's labs.

In order to handle the volume and keep it fast, they decided to put aside many other kinds of testing. Some went down on their own, like cancer, because people weren't going to the doctor (big spike in later stage skin cancer after COVID.)

But another way they freed up capacity was to stop routine testing of all newly pregnant women for STIs. Which are of course intended to prevent infants being born infected.

So - for the ability to test more for covid, a disease where the median age of death is 80+, they found that they had a higher rate on infants born with syphilis than had been seen in many years. Which has results like blindness, malformation, intellectual disability, and death, when it is contracted in the womb.

I still struggle with the fact when Covid hit, in Italy it was a huge but the government still allowed 40 flights a day into the UK from Italy absolutely bloody ridiculous.
so much common sense was ignored with that with British we could survive anything crap New Zealand got it right we didn’t personally made my own decisions in Covid about Wen to stay home and how to protect my family. I think if a woman had been in charge it would’ve been different.

I am truly bored with dealing with this nonsense.
Where does their food come from?
Care?
Medical aid?
What about children involved?
etc etc

The person you replied to literally doesn't care about the old and vulnerable. They're in her way and need to get out of it. The details are incidental.
I imagine any collateral deaths would be just one of those things. Shrug.

But collateral deaths are inevitable. In any system or society we collectively make decisions that will be better for some people than for others. To pretend otherwise and to express outrage that decisions were made that lead to some people’s deaths is naive.

For example we as a society collectively accept that the benefits cars offer outweigh the fact that some people will be killed by cars.

Yes it would have been lovely if there were clear ‘right’ answers during the pandemic that would have pleased everyone and had no trade offs or resulted in collateral deaths. But this simply wasn’t the case.

I think the best thing is to create an environment where there can be a grown up rational conversation where politicians and others can be honest about the choices they (and us) have to make.

Exactly.

I think the idea that we could've just isolated 'the vulnerable' is stupid. But the posters who advocate that aren't showing any less concern about the collateral deaths than the ones who argue that lockdown was right.

Exh was one of the vulnerable
MIL was one of the vulnerable

Yet when we all got Covid it was, dd DS and myself who suffered the most with the the illness

For exh and mil Covid was an annoying 24 hour sniffles

Reading comprehension not your strong point then. I said give them whatever support they needed, including supporting families to shield with them if necessary.

Do you really think that the food delivery people, carers, medical staff etc were any safer from Covid during lockdown down than they would have been without only the vulnerable shielding? As a key worker who did all the shopping for three different vulnerable households and went to work everyday in a high risk environment you can take it from me, they weren’t.

Exactly, so much was an “experiment”, and not in a good way. I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but I can’t help wondering if that’s why the campaign of fear and absurd rules was so extreme: somebody said “let’s seize the opportunity, and find out exactly how much we can frighten and manipulate the public”. Also dragging out lockdown for as long as they could, especially the third lockdown: “let’s see how long the public will tolerate it”. It felt as if they were really testing the limits. That’s why I felt it was vital to resist, so that the government would see that not all of the public would be so easily fooled.

An idea I did have was that partygate was a conspiracy to “anger” the public back to normality, after frightening them worked too well, but I don’t believe that any more, as Boris took
so many people down with him.

Also, back in the 90s, I remember Tony Blair saying “I want every household to have the internet”. Did he know something? My skin creeps to think how smug he would have been, had it been his duty to order the public about. (I’m not sure I actually believe his comment was linked to lockdown, but I do think it very much suits the government for everyone to have the internet at home.)

@taxguru @scalt

The reality is that had covid happened, say, a decade earlier, we couldn't have had lockdowns etc. It was only because of the development of the internet, fibre broadband, almost everyone having laptops/smartphones, and that we were already well on the way to an online World, i.e. working from home,

Of course what some of the extreme lockdown fans failed to realise, perhaps still do, was that to enable many to stay isolated and work from home an awful lot of people still had to travel to and from work.

If you want power to run the internet, keep the lights on, water in your taps, loos to flush, fuel for delivery vehicles, drivers for delivery vehicles etc etc etc many people still actually have to physically go to work.

@scalt

"An idea I did have was that partygate was a conspiracy to “anger” the public back to normality, after frightening them worked too well, but I don’t believe that any more, as Boris took
so many people down with him"

The main lesson I took from Partygate and other breaking of restrictions by Government members is that either:

a) Covid was indeed as deadly and contagious as the Government was actively saying and that the restrictions were indeed as rational and required as the the government stated. But Boris and other politicians had a death wish and didn't care if they or family members died or everyone of them thought they were special and safe from infection
Or:
b) it wasn't as deadly or contagious as they were saying to the public, that the restrictions were largely ineffective at preventing transmission and that therefore they could ignore the rules, that ordinary people were told to follow, with little risk to their or their family's health.

There's definitely a very common underlying assumption that pandemics still involve all those things happening, without questioning how. Wouldn't say it was limited to extreme lockdown fans though, I think there's an internalisation that goes further than that. I've heard it from people who didn't take a strong view either way. There's some of it in this thread.

It's like some people have an idea of lockdown as an automatic pandemic thing, rather than a policy that arose out of a specific set of circumstances that requires a lot of non-guaranteed things to be in place in order to work. Not all the people who've absorbed that assumption think it's a good thing.

Personally I think it was all overblown nonsense. They were "together" anyway during the day as they were working together, so the only difference was eating and drinking in the same room rather than working in the same room. Obviously looking back didn't look good, but I can easily see why they didn't think it was a problem at the time.

It was akin to stupid University security staff not letting 8 students walk around campus together nor sit in the campus cafe to have a drink or meal together because of the "rule of six" when those same 8 students were living together in the same campus flat. Doesn't look good, but scratch under the surface and apply a bit of logic and it was obviously not a problem as they were no more of a risk re covid sitting together in a cafe than they'd be sitting together in their flat kitchen which was allowed as it was their "household".