What’s the purpose of lockdown?

[SpongeCake23]

I keep seeing posts on here, on Facebook and some people I speak to in real life. They seem to think that lockdown is to completely stop the spread, to 0 cases and to then eliminate the virus or lockdown until a vaccine.
I thought it was to save the NHS from being crippled under the strain, but as it seems to be coping, surely lockdown has been successful? And we can start looking to exiting.

You are right Restrictions were put in place to give the NHS some breathing space and buy valuable time to get resources etc in place.

As far as I'm concerned, it's to save lives. It's unrealistic to think lockdown will eradicate it, but the focus should not be letting it spread at the rate the NHS can cope with - that's 1000+ deaths per day!

Reduce R
Reduce the total number of active cases

Thus protecting the NHS and economy from the kind of problems we would have had without lockdown

Thus Buying time so we can get our act together to get test and trace up and running

And time for work to sort out social distancing etc at work

R to zero...if we all lived in separate houses and everyone has PPE for work and shopping, not practical
Cases to zero,,,not if we want to get out of lockdown before vaccine , not practical

Lockdown reduces it to manageable. Lifting lockdown totally will just start the process off again leading to further exponential growth a month or so down the line. We will move in and out of various lockdown measures over the next 18months until a) we achieve herd immunity or b) large scale vaccination becomes available.
We will not be be going back to normal any time soon.
There will be many more deaths due to Covid-19 over the next few months but lockdown has allowed the country to prepare for the high rates of infection giving a lot more people the chance of successful treatment. But they won’t be able to save everyone unless a miracle drug or treatment protocol emerges.
It is difficult for many people to understand that no amount of ventilators or ICU staff can stop a totally new disease from killing people. Until recently nearly all cancers were fatal. We have to think of Covid-19 as a new cancer that kills some people very quickly and medicine has no way of treating it. The medical world is working blind and doing an amazing job under the circumstances.

Protect the nhs. If everyone caught the virus at once the nhs wouldn't be able to deal will it there would be shortage of beds ventilators medical equipment etc

protect the nhs, slow deaths in the hope of finding out more about the virus (vaccine, how it spreads, etc), and give companies time to work out the logistics of a socially distancing workforce.

also, cynically, we'll be more compliant with controls in day to day life when it's a step out of lockdown than we would be if we'd never been in it.

If you want to protect the NHS, you need to make sure cases are not growing exponentially. If R is above 1, cases will grow, and at some point the NHS will be overwhelmed (red line R = 1.1). If R is below 1, then cases will fall down to zero at some point (green line R = 0.9). It is very hard to make R exactly 1 (blue line). If R is above 1, this is very dangerous, as the delay on discovering cases means it can have got out of hand before you realise. The government have stated that they want to keep R below 1. Whilst this may be to protect the NHS, the side effect of this is that it will reduce cases close to zero, aside from imported cases.

The graph here is just to show the maths of it, not to say these are the numbers of cases we currently have.

It's to make the govt look like they did something to stop a year's worth of deaths in a 2 month period, either now or in near future.

Make us quite miserable and undo all the good things we'd worked been working towards, because Boris Johnson has a massive country mansion anyway.

Just how I feel about it. Obviously not true.

How is the R calculated accurately though? Because we don't have mass testing yet? Do they look at how many people are badly infected in hospitals and then from that figure calculate the 80% with mild to moderate symptoms?
How is the R then monitored? I know it is currently happe ing in Germany but they seem to have had more efficient community testing from the start.

It seems only to be on Mumsnet that ‘protect the NHS’ is interpreted as being the sole objective and the ‘save lives’ bit excluded

Depends who you listen to.

According to WHO it's to take the heat out of widespread community transmission and buy some time to enable you to put in place measures to find, isolate and treat cases, trace and quarantine contacts. The aim is to move back from community transmission towards a steady, very low level of transmission or no transmission.

According to our government it's to slow the spread enough for the NHS to cope and that's basically it.

IMO our government are criminally negligent.

It was sold as being necessary to flatten the curve so that the NHS could cope with the influx. It has morphed over the weeks partly because the fear that had to be instilled into people to persuade them to accept lockdown has become an issue in itself and there is now so much health anxiety that the government is now running in fear about how to keep popularity whilst getting people back to work to pay the taxes that are needed to pay for all this.

There is no point. It's a response to fear and anxiety that will kill far more people than it saves. It'll be looked back on as an absolutely shocking waste of human life and potential. Our children will be paying for this ridiculous and unwarranted overreaction for decades and politicians will use it as an excuse to let more and more people die.

It’s to stagger the cases so that everyone who needs treatment can get treatment

It’s not to stop people dying from virus completely

It’s to stop people dying who might have been saved by nhs

People will die as it’s new illness and vaccine is two years away realistically - even if found earlier it’ll take months and months to dish out

So lockdown is to prevent unnecessary deaths from local or insufficient resources only

Lockdown cannot continue forever so we will all be exposed at some point way before vaccine and that’s what people don’t get

They want a result that just isn’t possible

People will die and it’s unavoidable

Asking for lockdown continually when nhs is capable of treating patients is pointless - if there’s capacity then we need to unlock

If we unlock do people think virus will just go because it’ll only go when we have immunity through vaccine or herd immunity

So unless we are going to lockdown for the two years it’ll take 66 million to be vaccinated then there’s little point in locking down at all if nhs is below capacity

save the NHS from becoming overwhelmed and thereby save lives...

(and prevent social unrest and keep people at home getting used to obeying rules "for their own good")

TheDailyCarbuncle “ There is no point. It's a response to fear and anxiety that will kill far more people than it saves. It'll be looked back on as an absolutely shocking waste of human life and potential. Our children will be paying for this ridiculous and unwarranted overreaction for decades and politicians will use it as an excuse to let more and more people die.”

This.