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

All those saying ‘no one would comply’…what would you be doing then, if some truly horrific, new and deadly ‘plague’ type virus was whizzing around the world unchecked?

If it were that bad, plenty of us would be occupying ourselves looting, getting looted, scapegoating and getting scapegoated. During the Black Death, there were some awful incidents of pogroms against Jewish populations and attacks on people with visible diseases like lepers. Good job we've grown out of that sort of thing now, eh?!

Compliance was high, better than expected.

There is no way they’d shut schools like they did last time and if they didn’t and kept them open to all pupils next time I think staff working there would have something to say as they’d be in the biggest line of fire of all whilst everybody else got to snuggle up at home.

@P1nkElephant a couple of local schools were recently closed for a few days round here due to flu

Lots of areas did shut schools before Christmas because of illness.

@P1nkElephant ,

There is a famous 2006 paper coauthored by a then 14 year old girl called Laura Glass which came up with the idea of social distancing.

When Laura’s father was looking at contact numbers, Laura realised that schools just beat every other environment in terms of daily close contact numbers per person.

And, of course, school children live with adults, including vulnerable ones, and school staff are of all ages up to 68 these days.

Schools would have to close, or at least partially close, in any meaningful pandemic.

Haven’t RTFT.

I’d like to think most people wouldn’t comply, but I reckon most people would again. Especially in the UK. It’s just not a country where personal liberty is taken seriously at all.

I'm afraid you're probably correct, although I wouldn't again (and didn't fully last time round either)

I wouldn’t want a lockdown, but then again I wouldn’t want a new pandemic either. Whatever the legal / social requirements, as a patient with a serious chronic disease I would do all that I could to avoid infection, as would my family.

eta - whoops no I’ve not RTFT either

I often think it'd be interesting to know how many of those who are saying they'd never lock down again under any circumstances are also of the belief that people should go to work/school even when they are ill... 🤔

This
I think the vulnerable would
But everyone else isn’t giving their lives up again.

Self-reported compliance was high. Everyone I know broke the rules. I was going to house parties by May 2020 and went abroad on holiday in June 2020 (first lockdown officially ended in July 2020). The illegal rave scene was huge, I wish I had had the balls to go to a couple, but they were high risk in terms of getting caught and potentially fined.

If my company hadn’t been strict about everyone needing to work in the UK for tax/business reasons, I would definitely have fucked off to a country with no lockdowns like Sweden or Dubai, as many people did.

I did get to play lockdown arbitrage in the UK though, by escaping London in December 2020 when it went into “tier 4” and spending time in Bath and Brighton which were both in “tier 2”. I absolutely LOVED this, for reasons I can’t even explain, and still talk about it to this day 😅. Maybe something to do sticking it to the man when I’m normally so strait-laced?!

Deforestation increases the number of encounters between wildlife, such as bats for instance, and humans. That increases the risk of zoonotic diseases being passed on to humans. There's a useful article here https://www.bbcearth.com/news/could-deforestation-trigger-the-next-pandemic on BBC Earth. Or if you'd prefer more a technical insight there's a research paper here https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8580505/

i enjoyed aspects of it too - but this is such a taboo thing to say, so I don’t mention it to anyone.
Family around all the time, zoom meet ups with friends, shopping on line instead of in person - there were so many positives!
(Yes there were multiple, downsides, loneliness, educational challenges and so on, but we survived those thank God.)

A couple of days for all children AND staff before a holiday is a world away to what happened in Covid.

The consensus from various reports and inquiries is that extended
school closures had significant negative impacts on children's education, mental health, and social development, and many argue the harms outweighed the benefits. Evidence suggests the closures may not have been effective at controlling the pandemic when implemented over extended periods, particularly when other social mixing continued.

And if it happened again I think many staff would refuse to go in anyway for key worker children. If it’s not good enough for the majority of children it shouldn’t be deemed good enough for staff.

Surely the point there is that journalists and camera men were allowed in to film while relatives wernt allowed in at all.

Lockdowns are a perfectly sensible measure to control a highly contagious and dangerous disease. I think if the next pandemic disproportionately affected children, or young healthy adults, then even the people saying they wouldn’t comply would have to think again.

I completely agree with you about the high chance of societal collapse with a worse disease and that lockdown would be irrelevant, and in fact unnecessary given that people would be voluntarily avoiding each other except for looting. However, I think the people who say they would comply are not wrong to say they would, even if the government wouldn't need to declare a lockdown as such, because I see compliance as going along with the purpose of a lockdown (drastically minimising contacts), regardless of whether it's imposed by a government or circumstances.

What is usually discussed as the opposite of compliance on these threads is the mixing as if there was no virus that some people did (sometimes proudly) during covid, and I think very few people would do that with a worse virus.

I look back at it very fondly but only because I broke the rules (as I explain upthread). It is the only time in my life I haven’t followed the rules, ‘done the right thing’, and been a square, basically. I’ve blocked out the bad bits (poor mental, drinking too much wine and eating unhealthily) and just remember the joy of going to ‘secret’ house parties and being one of only a handful of people at Heathrow airport when I decided to fly to Portugal mid-lockdown (as their lockdown had ended).

People did as they were told last time because they were naive and ignorant. We now know many didn’t (including the PM)and more importantly the damage done to children and young people who were hung out to dry. No way on earth people would blindly follow lockdown rules now.

No, it isn't, but it is to assert that there is no doubt that no lockdown in the same circumstances would mean the death of vulnerable people; this is by no means definitely the case.

I also think that it is lacking in maturity and/or an ability to reflect not to realise that there is something selfish about vulnerable people wanting to be protected by the annihilation of the social and economic lives of others - particularly where there may well be other options for their protection - it is a case of competing and mutually exclusive wants and needs, not a mere selfishness of the healthy making them willing to wipe out the ailing.

So yes, I think your post was at least silly, and certainly verging on the hysterical, even if it did not make it all the way to full-blown hysteria.

I think if people saw large numbers of healthy children and young people dying from a contagious virus, they would do whatever they were told was necessary to protect their own. You disagree. This is fine 🤷🏻‍♀️

No movement data showed compliance was high. Who you knew doesn’t really count, it’s just anecdotal for a few people.

Yeah many disagree we heard it all last time and not children suffered. Won’t be sucked into the hysteria next time. What are we going to do -lockdown over every single flu bug- just no!

It makes me laugh when people say they wouldn’t comply. If a terrifying virus with hideous symptoms and a high enough death rate suddenly started, 99.99999% of the population would comply. I’d love to see how many people would be in Tesco when you run the risk of a disease which melts your insides, for example. Covid really wasn’t/isn’t the harmless disease some people are trying to suggest it is now, but there are some truly horrific scenarios which might happen in future pandemics.