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

Yes I do.

However I don’t know anyone who has died from Covid. I know plenty of people who have tested positive with very few symptoms though.

I wonder this. When we look back on say, the plague, we see low life expectancy and poor quality of life, one would wonder what the point would be of adding on extra suffering by locking people up t ft it months on end when they were all going to die young anyway and have miserable lives. Obviously we don’t view ourselves that way but I could easily imagine the perception changing. The vast majority of the people dying for this are towards the ends of their lives anyway with unpleasant medical problems. They face years of medical treatments only to eventually be shoved in a care home by their relatives and largely ignored. One could ask what the point is when we will be unleashing decades of suffering on young healthy people who would have otherwise (hopefully) had a few prosperous happy decades. This isn’t my view of things obviously, I have relatives in the old and sick category who have good quality of life and I would be devastated to loose them but such small personal tragedies are usually forgotten over time.

Of course we haven't over reacted. Over 28000 people have died just in the UK alone because of this disease. In just a few months. That's fucking horrific, if it was one of your loved ones who sadly succumbed to it, would you still think it was an over reaction? Selfish attitudes like this really baffle and annoy me.

"However I don’t know anyone who has died from Covid. I know plenty of people who have tested positive with very few symptoms though."

Well it's lucky that the government doesn't base their policy on your immediate social circle then, isn't it?

This comes up again and again and the answer is always that, it would have been worse.

The question is justified though as, had we acted sooner, then we would not have taken such a hit.

No, imagine what the death toll would be if we hadn’t of locked down

This is post is incredibly insensitive to those who have lost loved ones. Has no one got empathy anymore?

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.

Look at the statistics MrsNettle showed. It is a real spike above the baseline due to corona - including people in 15-64 age group. Anecdotes don’t make statistics, but if it is helpful, look at the relatively healthy nhs workers who died.

There is also the puzzle of vastly different covid death rates in different countries. Why is it 28000 in UK, 6000 in Germany, 500 in japan and 250 in S Korea? It would be interesting to see total deaths in these places over time - compare Total deaths in the next 5 years or so and see whether those with early strict lockdowns had worse overall increases in baseline mortalities than those with slower, more relaxed lockdowns.

@Namenic The Korea figures are no mystery, they actually dealt with the crisis which is why they are so low.

As for Japan, you can't trust any figures that they come out with regarding deaths, they rarely do autopsies so will just count the deaths as something else to fudge the figures.

"The question is justified though as, had we acted sooner, then we would not have taken such a hit."

Of course that's true, but the point is, the government didn't act sooner. If they had, of course a strict lockdown wouldn't have been necessary.

When we weren't in lockdown the growth number was around 7 for each person infected. Whilst in lockdown the growth number has been under 1. So roughly if we hadn't taken measures the deaths would be 7 times as high so potentially about 210,000 deaths already. Deaths outside of hospital at the moment haven't been taken into account so the true number would actually be higher.

It is valid to question whether in the long term lockdown and other covid measures make a difference - ie whether those that controlled the epidemic well will in future have worse spikes than those hit hard the first time (the herd immunity theory) - though personally I don’t think this is likely.

Corona has been a terrible tragedy, but I hope that perhaps we can make positive changes because of it - eg increase in air quality during lockdown (air pollution causes a number of deaths each year), more flexible work policies, more focus on mental health?

past absolutely excellent point.
op yes yabu. Disagreements about this do go wrong quite a bit because we are talking about death fear loss and social behaviour being policed.
If you stop seeing it as us being restricted but rather the virus being controlled it makes more sense. Restrictions will be lifted when its time for the virus to spread a little more. All to avoid spikes.
Anyway really sorry for anyone touched by this with loss and grief.

We dont have the highest death rate in Europe and no one knows who will yet , you have to base it on per million capita and we aren't the worse we also include the care homes and other deaths in our figures other countries don't some sort but some don't
It's been clearly explained that comparing figures cannot be done as yet but people on my still spout we will have the highest death rate in Europe all the time , maybe we Wil maybe we won't but it is not a fact as yet

"It is valid to question whether in the long term lockdown and other covid measures make a difference"

I don't see what choice the government had after they had dithered for so long and let it spread.

It's pretty clear by now that countries that introduced early tracking and testing are the only ones that have it under control as well as not having tanked the economy.

@CrimeAndMumishment - which is why total deaths (compared to baseline) would be useful. You can miss covid deaths due to lack of testing, but it would be harder to hide total deaths (But agreed - the numbers on worldometer for covid don’t show this). Comparing it to baseline for that country may also help mitigate against factors such as age structure (ie places with more older people have a higher baseline death rate per capita).

We’ve been observing the lockdown since the beginning. In fact because of my health I’ve not been out of the house since before the lockdown. I’m also shielding. The only people who have been out of the house are my husband to get the shopping once a week and my eldest who walks the five minutes it takes to get to the supermarket and meets my husband and helps bring it home. None of us have left the house apart from this.

My eldest (18) has just been diagnosed and my youngest (12) and myself are showing symptoms. So no I don’t think we’re over reacting. If anything we’ve under reacted.

"which is why total deaths (compared to baseline) would be useful."

It could be one useful measure but then there are likely to be fewer deaths due to other factors.

At any rate, the current system of reporting bald statistics is useless.

OP, you open your thread by saying you're prepared to be flamed for this, so surely you must have realised how emotive your strawman question is.

Just look at the evidence, the number of people who have already died, how infectious this disease is and ask yourself if at any point, now or in the future it would be considered an "over reaction".

Imagine if our government had not taken the action it has, not looked to scientists and medics to make its decisions, the NHS would have been swamped, even more people would have died from exposure, and everyone would now be on a witch hunt. How could we have done things differently. We should actually have reacted even earlier to get PPE in and distributed quicker.

We probably haven't overreacted as nobody knows what the future holds and whether Sweden's way of doing it was the right way etc.

People need to stop being misled by "apples with oranges" comparisons.

How can you think of comparing Sweden with UK. You only have to look at the size of Sweden and its total population and compare that to U.K. as a tiny island with 65M+ people crammed into its cities, to realise that Sweden would out of this far better than us. This is a highly infectious disease which thrives on person to person transmission!

I’ve known two people, unrelated to each other, that died from it, within two weeks of each other, my very fit older next door neighbour was seriously ill in hospital, survived it and has come home as an old man. The private nursing home behind me has so many cases, including deaths, that NHS workers have been sent in to help. I have two adult children that would be unlikely to survive it, so I think, if anything were under reacting. I worked in the health service (left 5 years ago) and I have friends still working in it. They’re terrified, but if you think they’re over reacting OP, then feel free to volunteer your services or work in a nursing home. Naturally you’ll not bother with the protective gear.

We will look back and wish the government had taken this seriously in January.
We will wonder why they didn't implement testing and contact tracing promptly.
We will wonder why they are still not providing PPE for front line workers when manufacturers and suppliers can't even get anyone to place orders.
We will wonder why they didn't do anything about testing and quarantining people entering the country from known hotspots.

"How can you think of comparing Sweden with UK. You only have to look at the size of Sweden and its total population and compare that to U.K. as a tiny island with 65M+ people crammed into its cities, to realise that Sweden would out of this far better than us. This is a highly infectious disease which thrives on person to person transmission!"

You can compare it with Korea which has only a slightly smaller population, far higher population density, is essentially an island, but is also far closer to and has more links with China, then see that Korea has had fewer than 300 deaths with no lockdown and deduce that the UK and most of Europe monumentally fucked up.

"We will look back and wish the government had taken this seriously in January."

Exactly. Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, NZ...all took it seriously early on, all have tiny numbers of infections and deaths compared to Europe.

UK had lots of flights frOm China daily also , London is one of the big travel hubs
Some countries faring better (not all )have apps that they trace etc there is another thread on Mumsnet where people in this country are saying they would refuse to have such an app
So comparing counties can't be looked at just like that as there are cultural differences and other factors to take into account
figures can only be compared on years to come when we look back and see how it fared if some countries have bigger 2 nd waves than others etc