AIBU to think in the future we will look back on this and think this was such a big overreaction?

[JUSTJUDY10101]

Preparing myself to get flamed for this.
Isn't it true that the majority of us will get mild symptoms and not even notice we really had it?
Yes hundreds of people are dying a day from it and yes they are not just numbers, but are they dying 'of' it or 'with' it?

People.die everyday, why have we locked down for this but we never did for the swine flu?

Is it worth ruining the economy for?

I just want other thoughts incase i'm just being stupid

The vast majority of the people dying for this are towards the ends of their lives anyway with unpleasant medical problems.

@Reginabambina, A person went through the Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre (ICNARC) update for the week beginning 30/3 for those who were in intensive care with corona. 93% with corona were able to live without assistance in daily living activities before getting ill indicating reasonable health. 7% had severe co morbidities and most them were in the age range 50-80. So many would have expected to have had many more years ahead of them.

I agree OP. If this was a disease already in the community I don’t think it would get any attention and no one would be very worried about it - it’s not like Ebola which kills indiscriminately in 2-4 days and is incredibly infectious and has no asymptomatic carriers. It’s only because it’s a new disease we’re acting like it’s the end of the world.

I think the health and personal tragedies that will come from practically shutting down the NHS and destroying the economy cannot be justified any more - the NHS is not overloaded, the Nightingale hospitals are empty and so the country needs to open up. Yes, some will die and that will be devastating, but some die every year of all kinds of diseases and yet life goes on.

Well, it's because it is new and no one has immunity that we would have been looking at exponential growth without lockdown. Write out some dates, insert some death counts starting with the day before we went into lockdown, double them every three days. Keep going. Keep going. Think it would have got any attention yet? Think the economy and NHS would have been trugging along ok?

I mean, I agree we should open up gradually under the guidance of the experts and with measures in place to help suppress it. But you get that lockdown was partly about enabling that to happen right? It wasn't just some crazy overreaction the world dreamt up just to inconvenience you, and eventually will back down from. Without lockdown any thought of returning to even the remotest kind of normal would be a fever dream right now.

The only way to know for sure is to have two identical countries and run an experiment where one locked down and the other doesn't, this is not possible or ethical.
The best that we can hope for is that countries collaborate to use all the data gathered from this episode to formulate a detailed and comprehensive map to guide us next time.

The fat lady🎶 has been existing on one slice of sourdough bread per day whilst following online workouts, she now looks like a gym rat 🤭

'The vast majority of the people dying for this are towards the ends of their lives anyway with unpleasant medical problems'

I don't think this is true at all. This idea that underlying conditions = close to death/no quality of life is dangerous. For some yes but certainly not all.

My daughter has cerebral palsy and if the unthinkable happened she would absolutely be discussed on forums like this as '14 year old but DONT WORRY SHE HAD UNDERLYING CONDITIONS' as if that somehow means her life was less. I know the image you all immediately have in your head of who my daughter is as soon as I mentioned cerebral palsy. You are so, so wrong. If believing that all the people who have died with covid were at deaths door makes you feel safer than fair enough but it doesn't make it true

No, I don't. I now want lockdown to end asap but if we had locked down harder, faster and more intelligently in the first place we could be opening this week. No government has hot it completely right but I do think this lot made several notably wrong calls due to their own interpretation of life.

I've seen a lot of Covid patients over the past few weeks and believe me, huge numbers of them were living completely normal independent lives including some who were sporty and fit. Even the frail ones weren't necessarily about to conk out.

I think a lot of people misunderstand mild symptoms. From the people I've spoken to that have had it it's been absolutely horrendous and mild just means aren't hospitalised or dead. I doubt the thousands and thousands who have lost loved ones of all ages would agree it's an overreaction.

Definitely not! You are not paying attention.

If we had lockeddown harder faster and more intelligently
Or to put it another way if only we knew then what we know now
In other words if only we had hindsight/a crystal ball🔮

Of course. But our lockdown like everyone else's is very individual and there were alot if models to choose from. They picked one particular model for a reason. And there were alot of calls for a lockdown at least one week earlier here.

@B1rdbra1n well not really as other countries managed it with the same info at the time than we had.

Remember other countries barely affected were locking down while Boris was still mixing with covid patients and insisting washing our hands was enough

other countries managed it
countries who had experience of SARS so people were prepared and the society was set up in such a way that it was possible to do the right thing without too much scrambling.
Enforcing lockdown in a country where the police are already routinely armed is a different from trying to enforce lock down in a country where we have policing by consent.
The UK government had to be very careful to avoid civil unrest, this is an extremely complex experiment playing out in real time, it's not possible to get it right the first time.

Or to put it another way if only we knew then what we know now
In other words if only we had hindsight/a crystal ball

So what did Greece and France and Norway or South Korea or Singapore know that we didn't? How come UK was almost unique among countries affected in not either imposing lockdown or starting an aggressive testing and tracing policy or quarantining at border or even banning large meetings? Did the others have a crystal ball denied to us?

countries who had experience of SARS

Norway? Other European countries? Are you actually saying that UK is unique in Europe in rule by consent?

From what I can see, the government's decision-making process has been a good deal more open in other European countries: finding out afterwards that the supposedly independent scientific body responsible for our medical strategy included an unelected government advisor who not only had the power to join (and consequently to influence) the discussion but also the power to invite other non-medics with a financial interest in government contracts to meetings has not strengthened my confidence in the decision process one little bit.

@B1rdbra1n absolutely not, plenty EU countries took quicker, stricter and more decisive action.

So many questions and angles it's all fascinating!

Not on MN you cant. Actually I do think you are very ill informed. Whether you jump on the "we over reacted" " we underreacted" " Its all the fault of the Tories" " I never voted for them anyway" bandwagons, the fact is the inevitability of tis virus is absolutely enormous, both in health and economic terms. Swine flu was nothing like this, you have to go back to 1918 for the Spanish Flu to see anything like. No it is not true that most people get a mild illness, some, but not most. Now is not the time for analysis, that will come later. But you are minimising it. Maybe you live in an area as yet mildly affected, and have no family in a nursing hoem

Re hospital numbers. Surely common sense tells people that we've never had care homes and medical staff killed off like this.

Here in Liverpool, we've never had to send patients to the Women's and children's (Alderhey) hospitals, because our Royal hasn't been able to cope. Even during the main football and race/festival seasons, sometimes happening all at once.

As for hindsight, Madrid was a hotspot, the death rate was climbing, the hospitals were overrun and we let a football match go ahead. Which we know think is why Liverpool's rate has been so high.

@cantory at the risk of being flamed I absolutely agree. So so many people bleating about ‘mental health‘ when they mean they aren’t as able to do things they’d prefer, things they enjoy, things that aren’t a pain in the arse.
Absolute different ball game to mental health difficulties. (Disclaimer- fully FULLY aware that some people’s actual mental health will genuinely suffer. )

@Inkpaperstars @SabrinaTheTeenageBitch (great name by the way)

That was slightly exaggerated to reflect the way we view the lives of people from several hundred years ago. Of course I’m assuming a significant improvement in health and living standards but given that there is room for it I don’t think that’s an unfair assumption to make. To me 13 years (that’s the average time someone losses with this disease if they die apparently) seems like a long time but if people are routinely living to over a hundred then it isn’t as big. Likewise a lot of people spend that time at the end of their life in and out of hospital, in pain etc. Of medicine vastly improves I can see people of the future looking back and thinking how terrible it must be to live through a decade of arthritis or dementia.

I’m really not espousing my personal view, merely wondering what people will think when they look back.

@Blackforesthotchoc and yet when the government suggested people did their own risk assessment, the masses rushed to pubs and parks, Had BBQ’s in the sun, rampaged round packed supermarkets stockpiling big roll and pasta, piled up snowdon and insisted on booking cheap flights to Tenerife

I’m not entirely sure we can argue that they should just let the public risk assess on their own. People did a shit job of that in my opinion.

eaglejulesk Until you've been through weeks of isolation, yearning to hug someone you love but having no physical or face to face contact with others, I don't think you can understand how awful it is

You do realise that this is the case for many people all the time? Some people live oceans away from those they love but manage. There are worse things to contend with in life.

Wow, ok. This really surprises me. I'm not taking the piss, genuinely surprised. I mean, I know that psychologically we're hardwired for human interaction and extended solitude isn't "natural", which I thought explained my own experience. I've experienced extended periods of deep loneliness in life before now, and traumatic experiences made significantly worse by going through them alone. For me the worst thing in life is being alone (not for a few hours or days but really alone). It's weird because some of the really sad things I've experienced haven't been the worst precisely because I've not been alone with them, and they're widely understood as sad things so people are generally sympathetic, increasing the sense that you're not on your own. For me, everything I've been through has showed me how important social relationships are. Everything else just seems like window dressing, and now it's all gone the social relationships seem more important than ever.

I do live miles away from many of those I love, including my entire family. I don't know when I'll see them again. But the soul-crushing thing that is bringing back past trauma and making me feel totally hopeless about the future, is the day-to-day loneliness and craving for a hug, from the friends I love.

Watch what comes out of Sir David King's alternative SAGE group. It will tell you what us scientists have been saying since January. No crystal ball, just an attention span and the ability to do joined up thinking.

@Reginabambina - I hadn't actually heard the 13 years thing before, that's very interesting