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

I think there has been some extent of overreaction

To me it is shocking that cancer treatment was stopped for so long

Fewer people will have died of the virus than without lockdown, which is good. But more people will be dying from cancer, also stroke and heart disease

And mental health concern is real too

And people will lose jobs, a whole cihorr did not get to sit GCSE and A level and Uni?!

Lots of people are losing their jobs and their homes (not yet apparent due to furlough measures)

Lots of businesses, esp small ones will go bust

It’s not an overreaction as such, but yes there is a heavy heavy price to pay for corona measures

And only time will tell if the “medicine” was worse than the disease

One person has died in our small town, when I saw that I was a bit 🤔.

If we had reacted earlier, heeded the warnings from the WHO and Italy we would have been in a better place now. Over 100 NHS and healthcare workers have died, we have the worst death rate in Europe, over 40,000 people are likely to have died despite lockdown so how many would have died without it?

It's a weird one because if we under- react (is that a word?) it will be plainly obvious. Whereas we'll never be sure if we overreacted or not. We'll only be able to speculate.

I think it is impossible to know if it was an over-reaction because we can't know what would have happened if we hadn't locked down.

But I do find it interesting that schools haven't been closed on a widespread level since the Great Plague.
I don't know whether 'the science', to the extent that it exists, really shows that this virus is so much worse than the others we survived without shutting the whole country down, or not. But it's interesting that it's the only time in nearly 400 years it's been deemed necessary.
I live in a very low risk area so to me it feels like an over-reaction but naturally if I knew a lot of people who were ill or had died I would feel different. I do wonder if in an age that was less 24 hr news, the government would view the deaths of 1% of the population as warranting total shutdown though.

We don’t have the worst death rate in Europe? Surely you need to calculate proportionally, not just the total number of deaths. Belgium Spain and Italy have a higher proportion than we do.

Anyway OP I agree with you. YANBU.

@JUSTJUDY10101 are you struggling ? Is that why you’ve asked the question

If you haven't been personally affected by illness and death, then I can see how you might think this. And even more so if you are impacted by loss of earnings/employment.
My view is that it isn't.

@Reginabambina

“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.”

Why don’t you, say, READ about any of the plagues first? The word quarantine itself comes from 14th century practice of making ships sailing from plague-infected cities/ports sit at anchor for 40 days before they were allowed to land in Venice.

I would also have preferred to keep the relative I lost to Covid.

You are being a dick. Be thankful you haven’t lost anyone

It's so hard to say isn't it? If we had followed the Sweden model ( basically doing very little) and it had gone badly wrong people would be saying we should have had lockdown. This is a fairly relaxed lockdown compared to Spain or France.
I feel for people whose lost loved ones before their time but many will say that wrecking the economy wasn't worth it. You cannot win here.
Dealing with pandemics, everyone has an opinion and it turns into the economy v lives.
It's a balancing act and not easy.

Comparisons to other countries are so much more complex than death rate, deaths per millions, population density etc. We already know certain people are at more risk like those with obesity. Therefore countries with higher rates of obesity will likely see higher death rates and so on with older populations etc etc.

I don't feel like it's been an over reaction, I think it's bought us time to get infrastructure in place to help us deal with this until we get a vaccine/herd immunity/ whatever will happen.

I'm very sorry for all those who've lost someone. Having lost my DM way before her time I know how heartbreaking it is.

The death rate in this country has doubled. It very nearly killed the prime minister. And even if you survive the serious type it could well leave you with long term medical problems. I work for the NHS altho I don’t I don’t treat Covid patients but my two daughters do and they say they’ve never seen so much death and suffering. They both describe it as a war zone. Also half their patients are under forty with no medical history. It’s only just starting to ease so they are hoping this is the end of the beginning. If we exceed 100,000 deaths then it will be worse than the 1918-19 flu epidemic. Personally I don’t think we are over reacting. But if you are stuck indoors apart from shopping and chatting to the neighbours then you’re not gonna see refrigerated articulated lorry trailers full of corpses taped off in a car park.

I am extremely concerned about the mental health aspect of lockdown and do feel that SOME hardcore lockdowners are underestimating the impact that an extension would. I have two examples:

My Nan died last Thursday in a Care Home "with Covid" although on her death cert it also states "frontal lobe dementia" she had been living with it for 3+ years. She didn't want to be here any more. Constantly saying she had had enough, that she was just existing not living. For her, Covid provided the peace she has wanted. In her circumstances, yes, I did not want her to die like she did and yes, I miss her like crazy but I know she's happy now.

On the other hand a dear friend of mine lost her 21 year old son later that day. He suffered from depression and his friends and close family were part of his medication. He jumped in front of a train. His mum is under no illusion that lockdown contributed to his thought process.

Lockdown was never meant to be a solution until the virus was eliminated. It was to slow the spread and enable the NHS to deal with the peak. It does need to be lifted slowly, and gradually. Who knows, if there had been a little light at the end of the tunnel, a bit of Hope, then my friends Son might still be here ❤️

I've rambled a bit! Not even sure if I've made my point... Which is whilst the number of deaths from/with Covid is atrocious, mental health matters too and people are killing themselves because they can't cope with the isolation lockdown brings.

Just under a fifth of our population are elderly. A third of our population are overweight and a third of us are obese. 95% of those who died of CV had serious underlying health issues.

We are not a healthy nation at all. If we hadn't locked down it would have spread rapidly to everyone and since we are not collectively a healthy bunch, the fatalities would have been catastrophic. Our NHS wouldn't have coped at all, not just because of the numbers of sick, but because all the staff would have been off sick or tested positive.

"You cannot win here."

Some countries have shown you can.

@PrimeroseHillAnnie ‘truckloads of corpses ‘- give us a break

I believe the Government failed by not having a pandemic plan and not acting early enough to try to put a brake on the spread, so subsequent consequences are having to be more severe now than might have been.

I'm not sure a sooner lockdown would have made much difference. Care homes deaths wouldn't have been affected much either way.

I think lack of PPE has been an issue but I don't blame the government for that. The NHS procurement is absolutely shit and they need to carry some of the blame. There is a world wide shortage.

I think in many mnay years to come we will realise that our NHS isn't fit for purpose and the German model is far better (social insurance, pay for your first gp visit annually, a mix of public and private).

Frangipanini I agree we are an unhealthy nation. More like America than Europe.

500,000 would have died without a lockdown/ social distancing. You decide if you think it was worth saving those people or if society would have just carried on as normal as half a million people died around them.

Personally I think we haven't locked down hard enough.

@whattodowhattodooo sorry to hear about your nan. I must admit I too also think this has been a 'blessing' for some of those people who have wanted to pass on for some time. Not a nice thought but like your nan said she was existing not living.

I am worried about mental health and staggered by the ignorance of someone on here saying it's because people feel sad about going to the shops. A family member has depression and is not coping at all with having her family home. She needs to be on her own in the day to manage it.

I'm also worried about my friend whose cancer treatment has stopped. I'm pregnant and the care has been stripped right back, I really worry about the effect it will have there. We need to find a way to protect vulnerable but let the low rush groups return to life.

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

The figure that matters is the number of deaths on top of what might be expected at this time of year. This comes out with some delay from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). It is calculated from death certificates. And what it suggests at the moment is that some 40 000 plus have died in the UK during this pandemic on top of the ones you would normally expect to die. That is quite a lot of people.

Another point is the very high death rate of NHS and care home staff. So usually fairly young, quite fit people who might have expected to live for many years but who are dying because they are not safe at work. How long can we expect them to carry on risking their lives if we are not doing everything in our power to protect them?

Swine flu blew over really quickly and it was less contagious with a lower fatality rate. We needed lockdown in this situation.

But stockpiling, acting like the end of the world is literally on it's way, refusing to leave the house until 2025 and refusing to let kids go back to school for the ten years is an overreaction.

As already said, 500,000 would probably have died if we had just carried on without lockdown. This is why before lockdown I was getting "neurotic" as my colleagues told me.

Without lockdown and the nightingale hospitals things could have got very messy. Luckily the hospitals haven't been needed. But can you imagine if they had and went there?

We went into lockdown a week later than would have been cautious. There have been more deaths because of that, but also more herd immunity.

I don't think lockdown was an over reaction at all.