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?

Some rules seemed so petty (e.g. the one a day walk)

How would anyone ever know though? How did people think this would be monitored? I think a lot of the gov guidance was wild but the interpretation and actions of some people was equally so if not worse.

They shouldn't have pretended cloth or surgical masks did anything much and should have focused on getting proper masks out to the public as soon as possible. Whether that was practical, I don't know, but the "white lie" they apparently told in order to preserve N95s for front line workers really took hold and gave people a false sense of security.

They shouldn't have had some of the nonsensical rules at all. People aren't stupid and won't take any of it seriously if they feel like it's s load of nonsense. Pubs etc should've either been closed or open on maybe a reduced basis with windows open etc. Having people mask while walking about in a pub but not while seated was obviously nonsensensical. Similarly one way systems in supermarkets and not being able to meet up outside when outside spread was very unlikely (although tbf, they didn't necessarily know that last part initially). They should've focused on masks and ventilation from the off, basically, and probably should've only enforced strict stay at home for the vulnerable.

But it is easy to say in hindsight. In the early days it looked extremely dangerous for everyone, and that was the message from Spanish flu. Also it's possible services couldn't have kept running if too many people got it at once. So it's complicated and I don't blame the government for most of it, even as a firm opponent of theirs in general.

Sadly this isn’t true. There’s no herd immunity, the only thing that de-risked Covid was vaccination. People in hospital were not only elderly or CEV and the modelling showed the NHS would be overwhelmed if we hadn’t locked down. I’m not a fan of the govt or lockdown however. If we had properly stood up contact tracing from the beginning then lockdown should not have been necessary.

Yes, this was the issue with 'lock up the old and vulnerable'. Those old and vulnerable are living in households with other people who would then have been at school/work/circulating as normal. That's why we had to have lockdowns until the vaccine had been rolled out.

I'd have loved my DC to be able to continue to go to school, but people of all ages and in all professions were vulnerable and some of them were young or middle-aged and didn't even know they were vulnerable.

If there's another pandemic that kills mainly children (rather than disproportionately older, overweight people from ethnic minorities like covid) then I expect the whole country would shut up, comply and not complain about it.

You said shut the borders more tightly like they did in NZ. That was the comparison. I don't think that was realistic.

Additionally, part of the working vs not working calculation involves whether the population are actually going to stick to it. If it works on paper but not in practice because people aren't having it, then it doesn't actually work.

Absolutely. Both DH and I would be classed as elderly, he has been very ill although now stabilised and living an independent and productive life. We both thought the Great Barrington declaration was the most sensible way forward, although we did not want to ‘shield’ in our home. We just adjusted our shopping etc to minimise inconvenience. If we had been given the option, we would have continued to attend outside events which were not very busy.

We said at the time that the excuse of ‘protecting the elderly’ ( who in many cases did not want to be protected by being forced into isolation) would lead to an increased resentment towards them. And so it has proved.

Plenty of people did comply- either willingly or because stuff was shut. We will be paying lockdown off financially and socially for decades to come with young people arguably having taken a big brunt of the lockdowns via disruption to their education which affects their future.

You make an important point here. The people who we were told we were protecting didn't necessarily want that, or experience it as protection. I can imagine it must be particularly galling to feel oneself the target of resentment when you actually didn't want any of it to happen.

What Sweden did.

Agree with the poster who said if the people
most vulnerable to the virus were children it would change the response - and people’s attitudes and behaviours - entirely.

God forbid this happens, but the fact that the coronavirus pandemic mainly affected the elderly is the biggest factor in how it was dealt with and how people feel about it in retrospect. Horrible when you start to dig into it.

My school (small alternative provision school) did stay open, including during lockdown. Students came in for half days (half in the am, half in the pm). We had to do that for a fairly lengthy time when schools were open with "bubbles" as well, because the number of staff off at any one time would have made it unsafe to have the whole school in. What made me cross was not staying open, because I knew that was necessary for our children, but the complete absence of any support for our families apart from us. Social workers, family workers, education officials etc on Team calls from home telling us to have the children in full time when we just couldn't staff it. Awful time. Very stressful.

What else do you propose to call people who were behaving like actual herds of cattle? Cows perhaps?

I very much doubt it. This tends to come up on MN a lot, and I think a lot of posters forget how many of the population don't have minor children or grandchildren.

@freedohm Sweden didn’t do so well as its neighbours. Obviously did better than us but very different demographic and lifestyles

Yes one a day was never a rule! Or the hour thing. Michael Gove said that on breakfast TV when was asked what was reasonable.

I definitely think the teacher unions messed up their comms strategy. They should have been saying - we want to keep schools as open as possible and everyone as well as possible, we need x,y,z to do that.

Instead, every time Mary Bousted was on TV she was saying you couldn't possibly expect teachers to have any kids in school and they should all be closed. For key workers, who were in hospitals, care homes, busses (massively disproportionate number of deaths in bus drivers) that sounded like exceptionalism and not really in line with public service principles. And also like they weren't that keen on children. Teacher deaths, in the end, were in line with the rest of the population.

I know, also, that that wasn't what it was like for teachers in schools who were in general trying really hard, and were actually open anyway. But it felt like pitting one part of the public sector against each other to get one over on an admittedly terrible government.

My gran died towards the end of the pandemic in a care home, not with covid, and said she would have preferred to take her chances. Her last couple of years were dull; and then the home got covid just as she was dying and only 2 family members were allowed in once to see her. She repeatedly said that she'd had her life and didn't think she should be protected at the expense of the young.

My husband was the ECV one. I was meant to return to work the week after the first lockdown. I handed my notice in and became a SAHM whilst we shielded as a household. My husband for over a year saw no further than our tiny back garden and house whilst working from home FT. I would take DD to the park when it was chucking it down with rain to ensure we had the place to ourselves. Had we financially needed me back at work DH would have moved in with his elderly parents 5 hours away and shielded there. I would have just had to struggle on as a single parent with no local family support with DD either working at home when nurseries were shut or battling long days because I work in logistics which never stopped during the pandemic. Had I gone back to work DD would have forgotten who her dad was without a doubt.

A lot of people think it was easy for the vulnerable to just shield. Forgetting that not every one of those was old, retired or disabled. A lot like my husband who was 37 at the time and a fully functional member of society had to hide away.

If the pandemic were to happen again yes vulnerable people need to shield. However it was the public perception in a lot of cases of "just let the vulnerable die or be locked up whilst the rest of us get on with our lives". It was the messing around for weeks at the beginning that led to things being worse than they needed to be. We had months of seeing what was happening in China and then Italy. We had months to source correct PPE, months to prepare businesses for shut down and months to tighten up our supply chains. Instead the powers that be sat on it all unfolding and then absolutely scared the living daylights out of the public.

There was never a rule about one walk a day, was there?

As I thought - no such rule!

Outdoor exercise was unlimited 😊

There are people whose life's work is to plan for such contingencies. However when put to the test everything went out of the window. No one planned for a lockdown for instance. Lasting damage has been done to some younger people which is unforgivable. We have to learn from this experience.

This wasn't a government thing but there was so much performative nonsense that places did because they wanted to look like they were doing something, but actually made no difference or were actively worse.

As an example, after things started to reopen we went to a national trust place for the day. In the toilets, for "covid reasons" they'd closed every other cubicle so that if you were in a cubicle, no one would be in the cubicle next to you. Not sure how much difference that makes but fine. Except this meant that a) the queue of women stood inside the toilets and down corridor was much longer, so people were in those indoor busy places longer, and b) each individual cubicle was being used by double the number of people, so in terms of germs they must have been dirtier. I'm not sure it was the great infection control scheme they thought it was.

Introduced certain measures much sooner. Stuff like banning large gatherings, closing airports to non essential travel. That would have bought time to work things out.

If full lockdown was still necessary, again just to buy time, then no longer than a month.

As above, but people living alone should have been allowed to see another person/family without distancing. (As New Zealand did from the start of their lockdown.)

Using the time to get a workable plan in place to shield people vulnerable to covid, whilst a somewhat restricted life goes on for everyone else (still no large gatherings, WFH if possible, that type of thing).

Did the teachers want the schools to stay open?

Surely it would have ended up with more teachers catching covid from super-spreading but thankfully less susceptible children, being off work, seriously ill or even dying?

Especially when many teachers are parents themselves.

Well the only good thing to come out of is the ability to work from home and flexible working.

Haven’t read full thread so may have been mentioned already but women should not have been made to go through labour and birth alone and partners should not have been turfed out not long after a baby born where they were lucky enough to be able to attend.

We didn’t know who was in the highest risk categories initially. And I admitted LOTS of previously-fit men in their 40-50s to ICU in the first wave (of which more than half died), it wasn’t only frail old ladies.