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 was on these threads when people were saying they were going to carry on as normal and still go on their holiday at Easter.

They were wrong.

I was on these threads when people were accusing everyone of fear mongering and saying we wouldn't be like Italy because of A B and C.

They were wrong.

I was on these threads when people were saying that we could never have a lockdown in the UK.

They were wrong.

I was on these threads when those same people were saying that 100,000 was the absolute worst possible scenario if we had no lockdown at all.

I'm pretty certain they were wrong. I'm pretty certain you are wrong now.

The heavy price that people keep saying is paid for lockdown or for the measures taken....are you imagining that nhs treatment for cancer, or school exams, a bustling high street etc would have been continuing through the unmitigated peak of an epidemic in which hundreds of thousands would be expected to die?

Looking at many of your posts, I can only conclude that you are. How odd.

Cancer treatment is still going ahead for the most part.

I think comparisons with other countries are fairly meaningless as so many variables and so much unknown currently about Covid.eg Does it affect people worse in winter?( some countries are in summer)
Also , few countries have an international hub as busy as London. The London transport system must have facilitated thousands and thousands of infections which would have been carried far and wide in the UK within days. To compare is with NZ and Aus is meaningless. NZ has less than 5 million living in same land mass area as UK. That is half the population of just London in the whole country!
The figures are also meaningless at the moment as we will need to really look at the next year or 2 off deaths and compare that with average annual deaths to see what the extra deaths look like numberwise. One study I looked at stated that over half of care home residents die within 450 days of entering the care home, I also know that a very high percentage of the over 80's in hospital at a given time will be unlikely to survive the year so for people in those categories, had it not been Covid, it would have been something else. This is why looking at longer term figures is more helpful when studying the impact of Covid. I personally think that when all that is taken into account, the numbers may not look so devastating and I do think we need to find a sensible balance that does not allow the economy to be totally screwed. Personally I hope lockdown is relaxed fairly soon alongside testing testing and more testing and contact tracing. But then I am an NHS employee and life is pretty much norm ball for me. I too and fro from a busy job and the staff panic has died down now as Covid has become business as usual and being at work allows you to see the reality and not the hyped up national press version of what is going on.

Yes we must not compare with other countries as it will then become clear how crap our response was to this crisis.
And there are plenty of other cities with lots of international travellers.

Mikki2019 , do you work for the NHS then ?.

OP, I think this is a good question. Last night i was doing some digging to understand the bigger picture since there are so many comments on the intetnet about COVID19 deaths being under reported AND over reported... depending on where you read.

Https:www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest
gives some very interesting charts that compare the number of deaths to the average deaths. If these figures are to be believed, then the number of excess deaths since COVID 19 outbreak are as follows:

• in UK +52% or 27,0000 excess deaths.
• in Italy +90% or 21,500 excess deaths
• in USA +15% or 20,800 excess deaths
• in New York +387% or 12,400 excess deaths
• in London +124% or 6,100 excess deaths
• in Bergamo, Italy +463% or 4,100 excess deaths.

Without lockdown, it would suggest to me that, the excess deaths could have been much higher in many more cities in our countries.

How we are impacted economically is something we will probably be assessing for many years to come.

Has anyone thought about the fact that there are over 1200 hospitals in the UK so even at the peak of high death numbers, there would be many hospitals who had not one person due of Covid19 that day. I know UK has a few visits and the experience for staff in those areas must have been extremely traumatic, I am not belittling that, but we did not have the Italian scenarios of lines and lines of trucks taking away bodies and patients not getting access to oxygen and ventilation when needed. I am very proud of how the NHS copied with the crisis.

hot spots not visits!

I haven’t RTFT, but I just wanted to make a similar point to Inkpaperstars upthread. If a pandemic is left unchecked, it could get to a stage where society breaks down completely, because so many people become ill at the same time. They wouldn’t all have died, but a large proportion would have been unable to work until they had recovered. So the central government, health service, police service, fire service, food supply system, local council services etc could have been devastated.

Pandemic planners estimate that up to 50% of adults can be removed from the workforce at the peak of an unmitigated pandemic, with both people who are ill plus those adults who are caring for the sick. This is covered in Chris Whitty’s 2018 Gresham lecture on pandemics. So we really had no choice.

Now it’s a case of working out the best way to manage until we have a vaccine or effective treatments. We can’t afford to let it get out of control. This is not like swine flu.

I don't think we know yet. It will take a few years to be objective and to have the science to say what effect a compulsory lockdown had over a voluntary one. 600,000 die a year in the UK and we have about 27k covid 19 deaths so far and we would need to strip out from those any who might have died next year from something different anyway as they were already sick to work it out properly and also look at "excess deaths" compared with the 12 months without covid although even that is interesting as some of the excess are because of lock down (husbands killing wives) rather than because of CV as without the lockdown those mentally damaged and killing themselves might not have done so - so we have things caused by CV 19 (both cv 19 deaths and deaths because people did not have over NHS care during it - ambulances not turning up or taking them in etc), things caused by the state's reaction to CV 19 and a normal year to compare.

@vdbfamily Did you not know that largely over 80 year olds are being sent home to die? They are usually not included in the hospital deaths. The hospital deaths are people in their 50's and 60's.
And carers on TV are saying amongst the older people who died it has often not been the ones they would have thought would have died from this.
But I know the message is these people would have died anyway.

I think people also fail to consider what the psychological impact of what Boris had originally described - that everyone in the UK would be saying goodbye to loved ones - would have actually been. Do you think everyone would be just chugging along as economically productive as normal if their family, neighbourhood, workplace etc. all were touched with several deaths?

There is a balance and probably no country has gotten it perfect, but certainly locking down temporarily must be preferable to the alternative which was "herd immunity" or whatever nonsense.

@Xenia So far 14 women have been killed by partners. Tragic and awful but it really has nil impact on the 45,000 excess deaths so far.

Someone's probably already said but swine flu spreads completely differently to corona, just like ebola is completely different, ebola only spread while you were sick with it where as corona can spread in the upto two week period before you're showing symptoms and sick,

so you could only catch ebola while caring for someone sick, where as corona you can catch off of someone who looks and feels perfectly healthy.

Ask the families of the nearky 30k (and still climbing) who have died already whether we have over reacted? 🤷🏼‍♀️

Maybe some people who are selfish, a bit of an 'I'm alright Jack' type will do.

The rest of us mere mortals will likely look back and think we didn't react hard/quick enough at the right point (if we had done it earlier maybe we would have a much lower death rate - oh and if hospitals had actually taken people who needed help instead of leaving them to die at home so as not to skew figures (this is not a dig at paramedics, drs, nurses, I know these rules have come from much higher up) and now are paying the price in lost loved ones.

I seem to remember a very senior health professional (sadly cannot remember who as this was a while ago and before we locked down, the day the pandemic status was wheeled out) saying "Anything before the declaration of a pandemic is probably an over-reaction, anything after a pandemic has been declared is an under-reaction."

I think it remains to be seen whether the measures are an under-reaction. This is the very beginning and the plans at a national level are, I believe, working on three peak points.

The alternative is that we have a bubonic plague situation where 25 million people die worldwide. But hey, it’ll keep the economy going.... Which now thinking about it, would probably tank the economy as well.

I hear where you’re coming from OP but I deffo think a lockdown was imperative.

@missyoumuch Yes someone said on MN she was a teacher and in her area there have been lots of deaths that affect many of the children. She was anticipating that being a big deal for the school to deal with when schools do go back.
Bereavement is shit. And unsurprisingly with this virus the deaths occur in clusters. So I notice amongst people I know across the country in real life that they either do not know anyone who has died from this, or they know quite a few people who have died from covid 19. That will have an impact.

Swine flu wasn’t as contagious and we had a vaccine pretty quickly.

But on overreacting if you look to NZ they reacted quickly and if they get to the point where they are through it in their own travel bubble it may look quite nice from here.

Yes NZ is a different proposition, then again so is Switzerland. We are in the middle of it as are US and other countries. Hard balance to strike.

The lockdown was necessary:

. to stop exponential infection growth which would probably have caused hundreds of thousands more deaths
. to give time to build up health services and mass testing
. to learn more about how to treat patients

I think we need to get back to work and school this summer,
but imo it ruins the case for it when people keep denying the seriousness of this crisis and the number of victims of it

• that just puts people right off

Cantory, there have been plenty care home residents come through our hospital, some died in hospital and many recovered and returned( or are waiting to do so) The ones who did not come in are generally the ones unlikely to have benefited from admission and who were in an environment that could meet their end of life needs.

We can see how the number of deaths from all causes in the UK - ONS figures - has spiked with COVID,
despite fewer deaths from RTAs, work accidents etc

Many of these deaths are of those who died before they could be tested for COVID

Pp should say Sweden obvs

Anyway yes lock down was necessary here. I am pro ending furlough as it stands however.

I have just recovered from an unpleasant illness where I ran a low-grade fever for weeks on end, I was utterly exhausted and my breathing was affected. DH & DS also had symptoms and a couple of dozen people in our workplaces that we know of have been similarly affected. We live in a hotspot, so we are calling it as Covid-19. It was very unpleasant, but none of us and has died or been hospitalised. One of my colleagues lost his grandfather. I am very sad for everyone who has lost someone.

I am also getting to the stage where I think certain posters on here may almost find it disappointing that there isn't more carnage, they seem to be enjoying it, clacking their knitting needles around the guillotine.