Has UK Lockdown been a waste of time and money?

[pontypridd]

Other countries have started locking down earlier and been far more strict. Their lockdown has had more effect and now they're beginning to come out of it.

UK locked down was late and has been soft - so not much change to infection rates etc are happening.

Might we have been better off not bothering? As it stands it looks as though we're going to have to continue this for much longer. I wonder whether a shorter and more severe lock down would have ended sooner.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/25/boris-johnson-lockdown-dilemma-grim-virus-data

And to add to my comment above @pontypridd, I agree govt made a wrong decision to not lock down sooner and stronger, but I don’t think it means the lock down we have had has definitely been a complete waste of time. The death rates could have been even worse. I know there is the argument of Sweden who have had an even looser lockdown with mainly social distancing and work still happening. I don’t have an answer to that. Probably factors I am unaware of.

At the risk of repeating something that I've said on many, many threads:

In Wuhan, they did not just do lockdown.

They started off with the lockdown but quickly added centralized quarantine measures.

People who were infected were traced and compelled to go to a centralized quarantine facility, to protect their families.

The UK has not done this.

If you wait until there are many people infected, and then hold a lockdown WITHOUT removing those infected people from their families, then what will happen is that those infected people will infect other people in their households.

Close household contact produces the highest risk of infection, because the healthy people are breathing in huge amounts of virus for long periods of time. It also appears to greatly increase the risk of severe disease, due to people's immune system's being overwhelmed before they have worked out how to tackle the infection.

So if you hold a lockdown without bothering to organize tracing and centralized quarantine, it is going to be a really long time before you actually see any sort of significant fall in the number of deaths and hospitalizations. The virus has got to burn its way right through each affected household first. Eventually the death figures will fall because the virus will have worked its way round these households and have nowhere to go. But you have got to wait quite a long time before that happens.

Predictably, this then produces the calls for a "stricter!!!" lockdown. I think some people on here seriously believe that the deaths have been slow to fall because of someone sitting on a park bench to eat a sausage roll, or someone exercising twice a day instead of once.

Well, no----it's slow to fall because when you carry out lockdown without centralized quarantine what you are literally doing is confining healthy people into small buildings with sick people and forcing the healthy people to breathe in a thick haze of virus all day every day until they get sick too .

Yes, the reason why there might not seem to be much effect from the lockdown might be that as a country we are more deficient in Vitamin d as it is needed to fight respiratory infections www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52371688

I have wondered whether that is why we're allowed to go out so much and whether being outside is in fact the best place for people to be to fight this virus
The risks of transmission outside are considerably lower than in an enclosed space, as long as social distancing is observed, espcially in direct sunlight. There's really no reason to make people stay indoors, in fact it can be counter productive. Extremely restrictive lockdown can also lead to social problems - domestic violence, divorce, depression leading to potential suicides.
There's evidence that new infections actually started to peak the week before lockdown, certainly in London, when we were asked to start socially distancing, and self isolate with symptoms of coughs and/or fevers. Which indicates that extreme measures may not be neccesary to bring transmission rates under control.

@Kokeshi123, thank you for your v informative post.

so not much change to infection rates etc are happening.

Source?
Hate this type of shit, sorry.
If you're going to come out with stuff as facts, can we have links please

No country has been able to reduce covid-19 transmission enough that it dies out. Not even South Korea, they came closest but they still had over 10,000 cases.

With transmission of the virus reduced but not to the point it dies out, a "stricter lockdown" doesn't mean it will be shorter. Indeed the mathematical models show that the more effective lockdown and social distancing are, the longer the epidemic will last! But crucially, suppressing transmission means fewer people get sick at the same time, which was always our government's motivation in order to prevent healthcare being overwhelmed. "Flatten the peak."

It's counter-intuitive. We want to think that if we all "behave" we'll be rewarded by the virus going away sooner. But it just isn't working that way. As long as Covid-19 is still present and most of the population are not immune to it, a return to "business as usual" will lead to the rapid spread of the virus again.

Oh, and Italy are in no way a good example to follow. Their healthcare system got significantly overwhelmed by the peak in cases.

The strict NZ lockdown does mean that NZ will be left with a population with no immunity to the virus ( but remember that exposure does not guarantee immunity). We are aware our borders will be closed for a very long time. I also think that a vaccine may be not as easy (or as successful ) as we think. Time will tell us.

Yep too little too late.

Total shambles but what else would you expert Boris is only focused on Brexit. This gives him the excuse he was after to flog the NHS to the us insurance industry as part of the trade deal.

They cut all the pandemic planning, and ppe stocks, didn’t learn any lessons form the operation cygnuss.

Now he’s been hiding at Chequers he can through those in his cabinet under the bus.

But at least Shop lifting is down.

@LunaTheCat

You only need to look at the mutations from mers and sars and seasonal flu to show the herd immunity is bollocks.

So many countries have less fucked this up then we have.

I think that the spread I within countries that are as densely populated as ours are closely linked to our transport systems - in London as in New York most people travel in London by crowded tubes, trains & buses - crossing & re-crossing others elbow to elbow - look at our major cities as well - full of densely packed housing & open plan offices.The biggest source of international infection also seems to be our own tourists especially those on things like cruise ships.

One thing I don't understand is why the guidance here is so bloody vague. Don't go outside unless you want to get some exercise. Don't go to work unless you need to go to work. Don't go to the shops unless you need to buy something. I wonder whether we would have been better off just trying to keep more businesses running, with social distancing one-in-one-out rules, rather than the half-hearted lockdown we've done here.

I think they've got it right and we are just going to go in circles of restrictions and lockdown for a long time.
A hard strict lockdown at first yes would of stopped infections and deaths but you paint yourself into a corner.
You can't lock down forever so when you come out of hard lockdown the cycle of infections start again it has not eradicated the virus. But also everyone is vulnerable as hardly anyone had CV.
I think people need to accept the harsh reality of the situation.

One thing I don't understand is why the guidance here is so bloody vague
Really? I think we're just supposed to act like adults who can use our judgement instead of children who need to be told what to do all the time.

In my opinion, yes a waste of time and money. We bottled it. I wasn't in favour of our strategy but there was no point changing our minds halfway. And now we throw round words like contact testing. Just not possible any more.

Really? I think we're just supposed to act like adults who can use our judgement instead of children who need to be told what to do all the time

I don't think we're being treated like adults at all. We're not being told anything apart from "stay home, protect the NHS, save lives". Local businesses have been forced to close indefinitely and yet people are somehow allowed to go and buy compost from B&Q. I think in this situation "everyone just use your judgement" is not a great idea.

You may have a point op, in that could we have done what Sweden did and had softer restrictions and stayed within the nhs capacity, possibly but hind sight is a wonderful thing and at the time they didn’t know, it would have been a gamble and people were screaming for it.

If there was going to be some breakthrough, a treatment say, in a month, people would be happy to stay locked down for longer. But with no timeline for this, and the same situation continuing, it just seems we are properly fucking the economy to stay within capacity for the nhs. And we could do that with less tight lock down. A better balance.

That’s what needs to be carefully managed, that’s what needs to happen, how to keep the economy moving and stay within nhs capacity.

That’s all we were doing with this lock down, protecting the nhs. We have over achieved, as sage predicted it was never breached. So lightening the restrictions slightly and seeing how it moves, is what needs to occur.

It’s got to be one of the most difficult things to do, so for me, I don’t blame the government for the action they took at the time.

I would however blame them if they continued like this past the 11 may.

Totally agree with bluntness I agree with response so far but things need to be cautiously lifted. There may never be a vaccine and we need to find a way to move forward. As do the nhs to start up some routine treatment like cancer therapy etc.

I wish we had a Chrystal ball and could see who who had the right approach from the vantage point of 2 years down the line.

With no vaccine in sight, these strict lockdowns can't continue indefinitely.
This virus doesn't seem to be going away!

I think I'm resigned to most of us will get it, most will survive without intervention, some will die with or without intervention ....

but the whole point of our 'softer' lockdown is to ensure that the NHS has the capacity to treat the people who are capable of surviving with either 02 or mechanical intervention .

Yep @Bluntness100 speaks the truth. If anything we locked down too hard and went under NHS capacity. But who knows - if we hadn’t locked down that hard maybe we would have exceeded it. Anyway point is that we didn’t lock down too late or too soft. I don’t understand how anyone can think that still given our NHS has coped admirably. Now we need to loosen some restrictions and get moving again - which we will do at the beginning of May. The virus needs to spread slowly through the population. We won’t get rid of it. I actually feel worried for countries like New Zealand who have tried to suppress it. Surely they must feel highly vulnerable when they choose to open their borders again.

The WHO keep saying there is no evidence that having had Covid means you have immunity. But I am just not sure anyone intuitively thinks that will be the case. Hence why we still believe a vaccine will work and that antibody tests are so important.

I was amazed to read that they are only just now considering quarantining people flying into the UK. Surely this should have been in place since the lockdown started or at least something basic like temperature checks on arrival?

I suspect only reason this isn't in place already is lack of capacity to successfully implement rather than govt / scientific advisors not wanting to do so.

Look at Italy, Spain and France - they were stricter, their numbers are coming down significantly, they're coming out of lock down.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that these countries are not decreasing significantly? I look at the figures daily and god bless them but I think they're all only slightly decreasing and them coming out of lockdown is shocking, their new cases daily are still huge and with them having older populations I think they've a very long way to go

@milkjetmum actually the chief science officer explained early on why they didn’t do this. It was because it has very little effect. Many many people are asymptomatic. Many more have symptoms but no fever (I was one back in early March and flying in and out with no idea). Many fly in with no symptoms and then develop a fever later (my DH was one). So to check everybody entering not only is one monumental pain in the bum and super expensive but also was shown to have a minimal effect. They have to pick and choose the measures they are taking - the ones with the maximum effect and to some extent then balance that with disruption. They found that hand washing has the biggest effect. That is a well known. But because it seems both far to easy and also takes a high degree of personal responsibility, people don’t like it. Shit I have got to actually do something myself that seems so damn easy and obvious. It’s much easier to rant at somebody else that they aren’t doing something seemingly more obvious.

@stayathomer agree. They reason the lockdowns in Italy and Spain were harder is because they crashed their health systems in both countries. The UK didn’t. And yet still people think that both countries did better. I am not sure what they are basing that on. I base how well countries do on whether their health systems crashed. Germany nope. UK not yet and fingers crossed. Spain yep. Italy yep. So of course Spain and Italy needed a tighter lockdown. But even then as you say the numbers are still going up. Which they WILL! They will keep trundling up until we have a vaccine. Again lockdown is not to stop the spread it is to SLOW IT DOWN. But it seems some cannot get their heads around this because it means people will die. That’s why this whole pandemic situation is so horrific. We have to manage it as best we can. Now let’s see what happens to those countries that have seemingly stopped the spread. I don’t think we can be talking at the moment about that being a success yet.