@Mumoftwo52 Respectfully, I think you need some perspective here. I was clear that some consequences (inevitable) were far from ideal. However, this does not negate the fact that lockdown also brought about some positives. Regardless, it was a necessary response, which helped keep the virus from spreading, this has all been clearly evidenced.
I feel that for many, families got opportunities spend time together they would never have been afforded prior to the pandemic. Even these days, I see a far higher percentage of father's participating in school drop offs, attending activities, which was not typical before. I think this is a great positive. WFH for some meant that professional opportunities that did not exist before for many women have been opened up, offering them vital independence and income, around home/family responsibilities. Schools prior to the pandemic were not the safe haven for a great number of SEND child. My DC thrived at home, learning way more than they had at school and were calmer than they had ever been. This says far more about the state of mainstream education, but nevertheless, was I cannot begin to tell you a most welcome change.
As a society, lockdown really shone a light on the public services we rely upon, not just those who had the luxury of working from home, able to get most things delivered. Our health workers, education support services, medical teams, retail staff, rubbish teams etc were all suddenly afforded the credit they deserve. This I think was a very positive change.
Was all perfect? Absolutely not. My own mother went through lengthy cancer treatment from the very early days of lockdown, it was stressful and the limitations of how we were able to "bubble" and support her through this was stressful. But we understood why.
In the first few weeks, we lost a local headteacher to Covid which was very sobering, then followed a great number of relatives, friends and acquaintances. This was of course horrific.
When it comes to mental health, I think we could and should have responded, had better volumes of support available as we came out of lockdown. The word "unprecedented" still haunts and irritates me, but like all services for the vulnerable, there just is not funding where it needs to be. The same applies to DV and the increase we saw there. Piece and social services are again still woefully oovrsubscribed and underfunded, what's your solution here? IIt's not as if these issues did not exist before the pandemic, if we were to learn any lessons on this, you would hope and pray that specialist teams not only better predicted the increases, but also prepared for them. These are areas I do think we could have delivered better, but again, none of us knew the extent or duration lockdown was going to take. Remember when they talked about it being three weeks only?
My experience informed me clearly that Covid was as lethal as we were told, the fearmongering was I believe a wholly wrong method applied to make people comply when it mattered. But only the benefit of hindsight informs us of this now. At the time, the information coming through all led to this being the only way to protect as many as possible. I am not saying it was easy for indeed that consequences were insignificant, not at all. We had a number of deeply stressful challenges, losses and the daily grind of having a SEND child to navigate through this unknown was a hellish 24/7 job.
Therefore for your to cite, with no knowledge of me, the circumstances and challenges I faced with: It was mass hysteria, and it sounds like you bought into every word of it. is as offensive as it is inaccurate. We did the same as anybody did. Read the info and guidance, did the very best we could and muddled through, trying to help all we could along the way. You clearly resent lockdown, this is your right, though I disliked much of it, I disagree it was not needed. What you do not have the right to do here though is abuse me or jump to assumptions you have zero ability to judge properly. What I "brought into" was the best option available for all at the time, with an unknown, growing problem looming across the globe.