To be depressed that lockdown would happen again tomorrow if there was another new disease

[Pavementworrier]

We talk about all the things that are worse "since the pandemic"but government prep is based on all the same mad nonsense that caused the worsening

Grim

I know

And we complied as we wanted to survive as we will want to survive and protect our loved ones again

During the pandemic A&E was operating as normal but kept separate from other areas of hospitals - more and more of which were being converted into Covid wards and additional ICU’s. DH worked on a Covid ward - they were desperately running out of beds, ventilators and staff.

Surely most intelligent people didn't trust Boris in the first place. They were listening to the scientists.

While I wouldn't be going to visit lots of friends and family, I absolutely would be visiting my boyfriend of 9 years. I live alone, and will not be spending weeks on end alone at home, not seeing anyone in person. I would hope that any future lockdown would have the bubble concept right from the start, but if it didn't I'd be seeing my boyfriend. Last time the isolation on my own almost broke me.

Lockdown was always really only about keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed. It doesn't take much for a hospital to become overwhelmed with more patients than it can treat, especially if those patients are infectious - exponential growth anyone?

Just as Nightingale hospitals weren't to add extra treatment capacity, they were intended (and thank goodness never used much) as warehouses for the dying and the dead to free up hospitals for those that could be treated. It might not feel like it but we dodged a massive bullet with Covid.

Fuss over nothing - one hundred thousand people died. What, in the most literal, non rhetorical sense, is wrong with you.

Boris, no. But he's irrelevant anyway. The bigger problem would be the damage to credibility of organisations that remain important, like the WHO for example.

One reason we're still talking about lockdown so much is because our government handled it so badly. Not because of whether they locked down too too late or too long, but because just about everything they did was steeped in scandal. Most other countries have been able to move on, their inquiries are done and dusted, their lockdowns might be mostly forgotten by now. But as well as lockdown itself, and the collateral damage, we can boast the following, all of which were preventable:

• A growing scandal about PPE contracts.
• A pandemic plan torn up and ignored.
• Partygate, leading to an extremely angry population.
• A public who were extremely frightened, and some of them still are, because of a co-ordinated and brutal campaign of fear. So many millions were poured into frightening the public, instead of treating people.
• A government who tried very hard to cover things up, until they were literally forced to tell the truth, such as the Whatsapp messages.
• A public who no longer trusts government, because of the above.

They were trying to get people out of hospital.

DS had to go into A&E - medical emergency - taxi down and operation - DH said it was empty in A& E and they told him they were sending even the kids home if at all possible as soon as possible in wards after operation. Hospitals here were hit early and hard - and I think they were doing best they possibly could.

In later lock down I know Dsis couldn't just turn up at A&E in her area - it was ambulance and there were long waits or you had to ring and get an appointment time - it delayed newphew getting looked at and triaged in person.

My Dad got though covid fine but his health declined months and years afterwards and the NHS treatement was at times was callous to harmful. I think there was a lot of staff burn out - completely understanable - but hurtful to actual have to deal with as a patient and family.

I agree they should have had bubbles from the start.

Agree about the scandals but the incompetence - locking down too late, sporadically - was also absolutely critical.

The key to seeing off a pandemic is to keep the lockdown prompt, short and strict. Other countries did it and it worked. Our lockdowns dragged on - and cost us billions - precisely because we didn't do that.

It's an utter tragedy that people have not learned this lesson in advance of the next pandemic. I greatly fear what may happen next time, when we may face higher mortality rates in combination with a less compliant population. Boris's legacy may prove to be far worse than we yet know.

Then we'd have a new problem and we'd deal with it. Who knows, with a disease somewhere between covid and ebola and with no vaccine, maybe jobs like that would end up being like jury service, so everyone would need to take a turn.

In a scenario closer to covid, one thing that might drive people like that to stay home and not work, of course, would be lots of people who could perfectly easily stay home not doing so, and the resulting higher amounts of virus in circulation. A big one would be their workplaces not having adequate ventilation or PPE.

It's hard to see how any of that would be improved by not even attempting to have something like a lockdown, to massively but temporarily reduce contacts between people.

'I didn't die and didn't suffer and therefore it was a fuss over nothing'.

Hopefully at some point the likes of you will be victims of your own stupidity and selfishness and will remove yourselves from the gene pool.

I find it more depressing the number of people saying that they would deliberately go against advice and risk the health of themselves and loved ones if it happened again.

Covid was handled dreadfully which was what resulted in the process being so long and drawn out. Next time, the govt need to sort out it's strategy quicker and there's more than one option. Immediate, short-term lockdown to stop the spread before it starts is one method. Closing all the borders in and out with quarantine centres for British residents caught abroad before the closure is another, although that poses problems now we have left the EU and can't return migrants.

Nice drop and not come back OP.

If the next pandemic was most lethal to children and middle-aged adults then every single person declaring they wouldn't comply on this thread would be CALLING for lockdown and then going full doomsday isolationist, barricading themselves in their houses. Absolutely guaranteed.

If it happens again, it will play out exactly as it did in 2020, with governments scrambling to react and making mistake after mistake as it goes.

The fact is, nothing has been learnt, really. Nobody has a better plan for what to do if it happens again. People can sit on here and say that populations wouldn't comply if lockdown happened again, but they would, because what choice do we all have?

I lost several friends during Covid. Lockdown may be horrible, but it DOES save lives. I'm guessing you're young so don't care that you're putting older/sick people at risk. Would you even wear a mask?

There is, of course, another option which is that we would not in fact deal with it. Quite who you think would enforce everyone taking a turn at such roles in the event of a really serious pandemic is not immediately obvious.

And this is the point that was being made. Even if it were better to try and have a lockdown in a particular set of circumstances, that doesn't mean enough people will play along for it to happen. There's no guarantee the structural factors necessary for a lockdown would exist, even if people had a really well thought out argument that they should.

Which is one of the reasons our absent OPs premise was wrong!

How many of those died FROM Covid? They changed the recording metric to massively inflate the numbers.

Are you aware of how many people die in the UK per year? No one mentions those numbers.

Perhaps, but that wouldn't in itself create the conditions necessary for a lockdown to be viable. We all have to hope there's never anything most seriously affecting those groups, because the lights would be at real risk of going off.

I certainly would but then I'm not stupid.

Then we’d have a different problem. Getting food to people in their homes and keeping the lights on.

What would happen is selfish idiots would revolt, the lockdown would be delayed until the hospitals could no longer take people and the dead were piling up in the street and then the government would be forced to act anyway. As happened here with the idiot Johnson in charge , only worse.

Some morons would need to see bodies piled up in the streets before their selfish denialism could be overridden and common sense prevail.