No point in lockdown anymore

[LifeMatters]

All my neighbours seem to think that we are in a paid staycation by the government and social distancing are out the door.
Everyone around where I live has friends and family over, are having picnics together on the grass in front of their flats, the roads are busier than ever.
It's crazy! There's no point in making this country suffer any more so better all let's just go to work and what happens happens.

People are taking advantage of the paid time off and not staying indoors. What is the point of this lockdown if people are not following it anymore?

My next door neighbors had friends and family over all this week...it's crazy.

@mintymabel the tone of your posts are so utterly obnoxious I refuse to engage with you anymore. Do you honestly speak to people in your RL like this for expressing a view or describing an experience you do not agree with? Perhaps you do and they take it it but personally I have learned long ago here on MN that tantrumming posters like you are best ignored entirely. One thing though, there's a series of threads running about MN Covid Dementors at present, take a look, it's quite funny and I think you might recognise some descriptions on there

YANBU OP. No point locking down, people don't go to work, but they don't socially isolate either - lose/lose. With the weather being nice, many are treating this as paid holiday and having social gatherings around BBQs and garden parties. If people don't socially isolate in lock down, they might as well go to work and keeping to distancing guidelines.

We have been observing the lockdown. We are both in the vulnerable 'work from home etc' group. I was sent home from work on 19th March and am working from home whilst most of my colleagues are on a rota to go in (school is still open for kw and vulnerable children). I haven't left my home sine the daybi was sent home. We are fortunate enough to get online deliveries which we share with DC. When shopping arrives, we bag up dcs share and they collect it from our driveway. I am petrified of catching and for that reason will not put myself at risk. Dh is the same. I do get cross with the neighbours who are still having playdates and having family and friends visit. They seem to think lockdown is a government funded holiday. They are not only putting themselves and their children at risk, but if they catch it, they could potentially be putting nhs staff at risk. Which is why I find their insistence on pot bashing and clapping on Thursday's extremely hypocritical.
If I have to return to work, I will, but at the moment my employer is allowing me to work at home - and I am working. I am thanks will have a job to go back to and I wish others would adhere to the lockdown so that we can all get back to work asap.

As soon as they started hinting at relaxing it is was effectively over. It’s been flouted more and more where I live for the last week or so. I think people have just had enough now.

I'm beginning to feel deeply resentful that my kids' lives are on hold to protect a small minority. Yes, anyone can get it but the stats show there's only a 0.01% mortality rate for the under 70s. We are more at risk of being killed by a car but we haven't banned cars!

Why can't the most vulnerable stay at home and the rest of us get our lives back? I'm not being goady - both my parents are very vulnerable - over 70 and both on chemo - and they agree. They would be happy to stay home and let the children have their education, friends and old lives back.

Research across 30 european countries shows that closing schools, staying away from work (so not using public transport) and banning mass gatherings are the most effective at controlling CV spread.

Staying inside and banning outside contacts has little effect.. this was on R4 this morning.

i doubt there will be too much relaxation, 530 died yesterday, we are not in control of this pandemic yet, the R number is increasing, gone from 0.6 to 0.9.

The reason for not letting everybody else just get on with their lives is the same reason it's always been...

If you let everybody else just carry on, and the virus runs rife, you end up with hundreds of thousands of less vulnerable people catching it, and of those, SOME will need hospital treatment, which puts strain on the NHS.

Then some unfortunate older person gets the virus, goes to hospital, and they're too busy treating the folks who just wanted to 'get on with it'

No one notice why European countries don't have furlough schemes? its because they already pay decent unemployment benefits and there is more cooperation between state and business.
Several EU Govt's have said "if you want help, then pay your taxes here and future profits will come back to the state too"

UK govt says "Have what you what, no strings attached"

@VerticalHorizon I was totally behind that logic when lockdown first happened. But then we saw the nightingale hospital standing almost empty, 20 patients in a hospital for 400 odd - and many many threads on here with doctors in large city hospitals saying they were not overrun...

Have you got a link to those stats @NinetyNineRedBalloonsGoBy?

It's not just about deaths btw. Many young healthy people are off sick very ill for weeks and weeks. We also don't yet know potential long-term effects.

The increased age risk starts at 40 or 50. A very large proportion of the workforce and many with young children who won't want to lose their mum or dad.

The risk also includes many common underlying conditions.

What about the BAME community. Do you see them as expendable? They are being disproportionately affected.

And of course our doctors and nurses and other HCP. Being on the frontline exposed to higher viral lists, they are bearing the brunt of this.

What about the economy? How do we have a healthy and recovering economy when large numbers of staff are off sick for weeks?

The lockdown is to save lives AND the economy. We need to reduce the infection rate. Get accurate tests, get enough PPW for our frontline workers, get masks for the public, drugs and equipment to treat patients (earlier instead of waiting until chances of survival are lower).

We can use the next three weeks to start sorting all that out. That we might we ready to safely ease lockdown. Avoiding the many avoidable deaths and economic chaos a bad second wave would bring.

you are best ignored entirely

And yet, it took you 6 lines of text to tell me you are ignoring me entirely.

Presumably you're going to such pains to explain you are ignoring me, because you can't answer why figures are going down if nobody is staying home.

@ToffeeYoghurt
This graph on the BBC is what got me thinking (hope picture attaches)

"My DP's work have just taken on a load of furloughed workers who are now being paid twice! "

My understanding is that you can't take any work on at all as long as you're furloughed. If it's been found that you had, the payments would be stopped (and perhaps reclaimed), just as with any other state benefit.

Totally agree. Where I live it's the busiest it's been since the end of March. The police can't do shit to enforce anything. And the cost of this 'lockdown' means we're entering the worst recession in living memory that will badly affect every single one of us in some way or another.

Lockdown only works for 3-4 weeks tops, it has to be done at the right time and quite strictly. This government failed to do that. It's a farce now and needs to end.

Blimey some of the comments on here. Wow. Well where I live everyone is doing the lockdown right. Traffic is light, people go out once a day. no visitors, no parties. No deaths in this area at all. Im very lucky to live with such good people.

Why can't the most vulnerable stay at home and the rest of us get our lives back? I'm not being goady

Has all the information about R and exponential growth passed you by? Just curb your selfishness a little bit longer and it will be safer for everyone; your way will overwhelm the health service as younger people do get sick in large enough numbers to need hospital care and increased spread in the community puts the vulnerable at greater risk as well.

the cost of this lockdown
No. The cost of this pandemic.
Which would be far worse without lockdown.

People aren't just dying. Many are very ill for weeks on end. Including young healthy people. See the threads here from those sick with it.

How do we have a functioning economy when lots and lots and lots of the workforce are off sick for weeks on end?

The transport workers, teachers and other school staff, doctors and nurses and HCP, care staff, clients and customers and managers of businesses. All off sick. Or dead.

That's why, as well as to prevent avoidable deaths, we need to get the infection rates down, we need accurate testing, we need enough PPE, etc before easing lockdown. Because we can't return to any kind of normal otherwise.

It's the lockdown that is slowing down the spread of the virus.
In all likelihood, most of us will get it. That was always a given. The issue was when we got it, and how well the NHS would be able to cope.

The fact that we've not needed the the full capacity is testament to the lockdown reducing the rate of the spread or 'flattening the curve'.

If we'd done nothing, the models predicted deaths in the hundreds of thousands, many of which would be down to our inability to treat them at that moment.

In addition to that 'flattening the curve' also buys us precious time to:

1. Prepare for extra capacity
2. Better understand the virus itself and the best treatments for it
3. Obtain more PPE
4. Buy thinking / planning time

We mustn't think any relaxation of the lockdown is an indication that the virus is going away, more that we are managing it at a level we can cope with.
That's going to mean any reduction will need a period of time to measure the effects. So if we open up schools, we'll need at least 3-4 weeks of measuring the effects of that before deciding if we can relax a bit more, or need to tighten again.

Testing is still a bit of a problem, because you can test someone today, and they're clear, but tomorrow they get infected. So we'd have to continually test people for negative results.

Testing for positive or formerly positive (had it in the past) should be more effective, as long as we have some level of certainty that a second infection will not do more harm. If you don't have that certainty, it's not much use (other than an indicator of how prevalent it really is, which we still do not know).

There is another issue of course - regarding the economy...

A failing economy will reduce the investment into the NHS or schools (or any other sector) in the future, which also has an impact. For instance, a dire economy now might mean less hospitals, or less scanners, less nurses etc - which results in more deaths down the line (for a variety of medical issues).

I genuinely don't envy any government having to make some of these decisions, and make no mistake, some of it is a gamble. Informed gambling, but still a gamble.

Tories didn't want lockdown in the first place. They're libertarians, the last thing they want is nanny state stuff. They had to go for lockdown as people were beginning to do it themselves.

The loosening is partly because they have terrible comms and people are beginning to break the rules. Maybe partly to have a second wave in summer rather than autumn, when other respiratory illnesses full up hospitals.

They're still going for herd immunity, just slowly.

because you can't answer why figures are going down if nobody is staying home.

People are staying home where I am, and according to govt records. In the daily briefings, they show graphs and the use of public transport, the consumption of petrol, is right down. The majority are staying home, working from home, only doing essential journeys. There may have been a slight upward trend of travel just recently, but the lockdown has been happening for the past 6 weeks, and it will have affected the transmission rates. Didn't you spot the photos & video of empty London streets, deserted city centres, sheep and deer going into towns because every was home? It was like 28 days later without the zombies.

We actually do not know the IFR (Infection Mortality Rate) as we simply do not know how many people have been infected.
CFR's (Case Fatality Rates) are problematic because of how 'cases' are detected, and also of how subsequent deaths are judged to be Covid-19 or not. However. CFR rates for those under 70 appear to be much higher than 0.01% quoted above.

They range from about 1.9% down to about 0.15% the younger you are.

The HUGE danger of resenting the efforts being made to protect the elderly is that once we start to say 'they're over 70, let them die', then soon it will be over 65, or overweight, or smokers, or disabled...
It's a very dangerous path to go down.

It was like Christmas in Tesco today.

Vertical
I agree. Add in the BAME community, who are being disproportionately affected. Will people say 'it's only black and Asian people'? The Othering is definitely a very dangerous (and unpleasant) path.