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?

1)I think there should have been UK wide rules. It was crazy that Scotland/England /wales/ni were all trying to be the 'best' at responding. Whilst health is devolved, I think there needs to be a clause for crisis moments.
2) Boris clearly never wanted all the restrictions, as heard in his comments about the elderly and his manner by partying. He should have stuck to his guns and led by what he truly believed.
3) overall I think saving a minority of the population has not been worth the long term impact on kids and the economy. Although I realise this comes across as heartless.
4) we had the opportunity to behave like new Zealand as an island and shut borders from Feb 2020. Just before the lockdown a family member was hanging out with delegates from china.

So, I think there should have been provision for the vulnerable but essentially the rest of us should have got on with it. My friend was living in Sweden at the time and the difference was huge!

Our Govs (possibly not this one) are at the mercy of any screaming tabloid headlin. Eg care homes not being protected - but residents not being allowed visitors, the same thing in hospitals, was a shocking thing but it came about when headlines claiming that residents were being put at risk by hospital admissions and the gov didn’t care about the elderly.
the same with threats about businesses going to the wall which resulted in money being thrown at them and crazy rules for eating out.
In the end schoolchildren suffered. They don’t have a voice when it comes to headlines.

Everyone I know secretly agrees with me on this.

Rate the sacrifices of the young as much as the rights of the aged and dying.

Schools stay open, children not sacrificed on the altar of the old.

Why? We don’t have the right to ruin children’s health and education to - possibly - prolong the existence of invalids who’ve already had a find old life.

The amount of children who died as a result of abuse from parents, stepparetnts, care givers was despicable and many of those children were known to social services.
Abusers would use covid as an excuse to not allow social workers in the home to check on the children.
Domestic violence cases went through the roof and more women died at the hands of their abusers.
I'm not sure what the rise in child sexual abuse was but I imagine significant.
Ultimately we locked victims in with their abusers and that to me should never ever happen again.

I think covid was very tough to navigate because it was unknown and people, healthy young people died due to covid so I do think there needed to be a shield of protection for the elderly and vulnerable. But it was catastrophic in the way it was handled. Instead of politicians trying to help their pals profit, money should have been used wisely and advice from people who had some answers taken.

I think any child known to social services, even prehistoric cases should have had to have attended school as a bare minimum but I'd have had the schools opened and only vulnerable students or those with vulnerable parents battling illness or themselves really vulnerable should have had been allowed to home school.

😂 This is so true. Any mentions of “sheep”, “snowflakes” or “woke brigade” and I’m switching off

That sums it up perfectly…and would have saved at least £250 billion. Compared to the hyperbole about stricter controls and more lockdowns at the time, which would have cost another £250 billion….

It’s the next few generations that will be paying the price of the inept advice we were all given, with no consequences for the politicians, the civil servants and public health organisations for being woefully unprepared in terms of even having a plan.

T1D is an autoimmune condition that and be triggered by any illness, quite often in people with genetic markers that put them at risk. So yes covid can trigger T1D but so could chickenpox.

There has been an increase in cases, but its not know if:

• these are in people that would have developed T1D at another time regardless of Covid. So over a 10year period the number of cases will level out.
• the increase was triggered by Covid infections or the massive wave of other illness that came after lock-down.

I live in Western Australia so we had a massive advantage to most places we are geographically remote from the rest of the world. Our state border was completely locked down very early, so while the rest of the world was getting COVID, we had zero cases. We had about two weeks of stay at home lockdown, apart from that life was pretty nornal, apart from the fact that no one could enter or leave the state. They didn’t open the state border until we were all vaccinated.It caused some hardship as people couldn’t travel, but compared to everywhere else we were able to lead a fairly normal life while the rest of the world were suffering a lot. We didn’t even have to wear masks for most of it, as we had zero cases.IMO it was well worth it, and the UK should have closed borders completely much earlier. But it was an unprecedented situation, and we were lucky, it’s easy to see mistakes in hindsight. We didn’t really know what we were up against. We had just bought a house in Feb 2020 and genuinely thought for five minutes that there was a real possibility we had massively fucked up as we were possibly all going to die. Thankfully that didn’t happen.

Add to that list, the use of ‘grown ups’ as an attempt to make “their” gang seem more credible. While the rest of us, either side of the centre, chuckle at their naivety ☺️

I think we did ok. I'm not sure I would've changed that much. A few little bits here and there uk could've certainly done better. But that's easy for me to say because Dh and I were still working and ds's were fine at home doing school work.

We should have locked down much sooner and much harder. And why did we ever stop? Covid is still out there. It’s just not safe.

DH was also a doctor during the pandemic. I went weeks with hardly seeing him and when I did he was having nightmares about the sheer number of seriously ill and dying patients- young and old.
The way the government (and some members of the public) treated the medical community during Covid was appalling.

After working as a GP and in hospital medicine for 30 years, DH has now taken early retirement. Treating so many Covid patients with insufficient staff and equipment has changed him forever.

I think we should've closed our boarders earlier.

I definitely think schools should have opened earlier, it was ridiculous that you could go to the pub , but my children couldn’t go to school .

In our school we had 8 members of staff who were classed as CEV and we are a small school. We wouldn't have had any Maths teachers.
Also, several students were CEV too.
I still tutor 2 students who have Long Covid.
One small school!

The government didn’t know what we were facing.

Some people hold onto the comforting belief that the government didn't know. The reality is what was happening in Italy was all over the news plus the Italian state talked to other states. It came a little earlier than modelled, but what happened was expected.

Who would have taught your children, teachers and support staff were also getting Covid in large numbers.

New Zealand seemed to get it right, didn’t they? Long, strict lockdown initially and then living normally afterwards - with the big exception of a closed border. They have much lower death count. I’m not sure what effect it had on their economy but repeated lockdowns and furlough can’t have been good for ours.

we seemed to react too late and too slowly and then the measures when coming out of lockdowns were really daft.

@Gingerbee I understand that the schools would not have run as normal but they should have remained open.

Well that wouldn’t have helped the burden on the NHS. The main issue was that if you were seriously ill or injured (unrelated to Covid) you didn’t have much hope of being treated due to the lines of people on ventilators and the beds / staff being taken up.

I think people forget that the govt after a while KNEW that younger and healthy people weren’t much of a risk but had to desperately try and reduce the numbers in hospitals which were swamped. I worked in healthcare at the time and many of my colleagues were all deeply affected by this time.

Close borders
Keep schools open

Invested properly in the NHS in the decade before Covid happened. I presume that if all the money they spent on Covid had been spent on the NHS instead there would have been no worries about overwhelming it.

@Hemiola is spot on about each of the UK nations having different “approaches”/rules/whatever one wants to call it. It really did become a dick waving contest or as Hemiola put it, “trying to be the best” with their response. It failed as far as I’m concerned.
it led to instances of cases where people were charged with breaching the rules having to be dropped because police had wrongly applied Welsh rules in England for example. This was actually reported at the time.

England relaxed lockdowns earlier - the right call - and what happened? Wales still hadn’t opened “non-essential retail” after lockdown 1 and the traffic from Wales over to England was obvious.

I met up with a friend yesterday and we started talking about Covid restrictions funnily enough. I can’t even remember what got us on to the topic.
We both lived in Wales at the time and as many will know Wales had some absolutely stupid restrictions. I think the best well known was the “ban” on non-defined “non-essential” goods. Sounds like Ireland had an even stricter approach on this from a few posts earlier in the thread. Here’s the funniest thing though, which a lot of people didn’t know: in Wales there was no legal force behind this because none of the Covid regulations at the time prescribed for it. It was so inconsistently applied too. The one branch of Tesco cordoned off the gift cards and stationery aisles but the other branch 10 minutes up the road didn’t.

For me possibly the silliest of the restrictions in Wales was during December 2020 when they imposed a 6pm curfew on restaurants, bars and pubs and they couldn’t sell alcohol during the times they were open either. At this time you had to book tables, could only stay for 2 hours and they were limiting how many people could come in. Oh and you had to put your masks on when stood up or when going to the loo but could take them off when sat down at the table.
The same friend and I met up twice during those weeks, went to a Toby carvery the one time and another pub/restaurant another. To say they were both well attended despite the fact they were limiting numbers inside and had to close at 6pm would be an understatement. If the thinking behind the no alcohol and 6pm curfew was, “well, people won’t bother going if they can’t have a drink,” they got that wrong!

The old and vulnerable staying home sounds sensible in theory, but not so much when you consider that they live with young people. Parents and grandparents can be vulnerable, and if schools were kept open then it would spread like wildfire.

I think it was a difficult lose/lose situation no matter what they chose to do, but the ‘’rule of six’’ while out in the garden in open air I thought was illogical. As was having to wear masks in pubs and restaurants when the person was going to be eating and drinking anyway and would have to remove it.

Being 2m away from a potentially infected person in an enclosed space isn’t going to do much to prevent spread either! So there were definitely things that didn’t seem to make much sense. Boris was a total fucking idiot though, they all were and had such contempt for the public.

Been much stricter on furlough and other payments. So much money wasted and people profited from it