I know no one who’s had coronavirus and neither do my friends or family

[mywayhighway]

Or any of their friends or families.
But I have 3 friends who’s businesses probably won’t survive, another who’s husband has just been made redundant, possibly more to follow, a friend who’s teen has sunk into depression. All the dc have missed out educationally and no prospect of getting back to school anytime soon. That’s just my selfish perspective. There’s loads worse off as a consequence of the impact of lockdown and the slow easing out.
Feeling so frustrated with this now. We’re all suffering and I’m not quite sure if the benefits are going to outweigh the losses long term.

I'm not sure what this thread is hoping to achieve. Anecdotal data from an anonymous source... Lucky you.

The alternative (without lockdown) would have been something like '20 of my friends have died, and so their businesses have had to shut down too'.

I know 2 people who have died in their 40s. We have had it 99% and my sister's family have tested positive.

I’ll start by saying I support (and like many am looking forward to) coming out of lockdown but with caveats. We don’t know diddly about this virus and it would be reckless to just reinstate normal life.

I know three people so far who have tested positive for covid, one died (56 so hardly expected to die in the next year), one hospitalised near the beginning of lockdown and still recovering (ultra fit marathon runner) and one recently diagnosed and poorly but not needing intervention as yet. I’ve not counted the people who have had symptoms but no positive test. It’s very real.

The lockdown is a red herring, the economy would have been battered without it. People who get sick get really sick and for weeks. There would have been mass sick leave and consumers would have naturally avoided going out impacting spending through the supply chain but there would have been no furloughing or business rescue packages to throw people a rope.

To counter the ‘it’s mainly old people who would’ve died in the next year anyway’ I’d like to point out that a lot of businesses who won’t survive this were also unviable. A lot of very big companies folded remarkably quickly and to me that implies that they were carrying a lot of debt and were foolhardy with their financial situation. It’s sad when people’s businesses fail but a lot of them were running on a knife edge.

If we’re going to be callous about people’s lives then we should apply the same rules to businesses.

I forgot to mention a friend who is a GP who was a gym bunny, but is now under the care of a cardiologist because of what Covid did to him.

I controversially think that the majority of people who have died we’re already past their life expectancy and had lived a full life. The younger people who have died were tragic but so are deaths from cancer etc.
I think we have had a major overreaction to coronavirus the impact of which scares me much more than the virus

I controversially think that if a business is really useful and needed it will survive the recession. That those who lose their business will have to downsize or look for alternative work. Council housing and benefits will help them while they retrain to be more useful or come up with innovative new business that society wants. (I don't really think this just trying to help OP see how horrible and insensitive argument their opinion is on people dying!)

I live with and work with many healthcare workers and also know plenty of people who have had it and unfortunately some people who have had family deaths. Estimated 20% of infections were hospital acquired and that included staff. Staff who worked in areas with no PPE at the start or lower levels (surgical masks as opposed to full face guards) have been very exposed.

That said the high death rate is probably largely due to the late lockdown and stoppage of non essential air travel, and nursing home ppe situation.
I’m not convinced there will be a wideSpread second wave but am concerned about the economic situation and Schools

Irioness I'm very sorry about your parents!

I have lost one of my oldest friends, BAME and in his fifties, a work colleague, 2 friends of friends and 2 elderly relatives to COVID . It's shit!

OP you seem to think it was one of the other, shut down or carry on as normal and let a few people die, that's not what would have happened! As more people got sick business would have struggled anyway as their workforce were sick or isolating. As people's friends and relatives got sick they would have locked themselves down & stopped socialising or going out for fear of catching it themselves. The average length of time people are in hospital would have overwhelmed the NHS.

If you're angry at the Govt, be angry that they didn't take this seriously in January & February, didn't close the border, ramp up test and trace, increase stocks of PPE. They left it too late, until the number of cases were so high that a lock down was the only alternative!

Well the population is around 67,000,000 and around 40,000 people died so there will be lots of people that don't know anyone that died with it.

Lots of people have no symptoms at all (BBC news today said of the cruise ship that was off Japan all passengers tested and of the positive cases 75% had no symptoms!). Although no one really knows in the community how many people have had it with no symptoms.

Council housing

(Hollow laugh) Council house is a dream from the past in many parts of the country.

It can’t be said that lockdown was pointless because no one you know got it.

Saying that is about as logical as saying “My nan died of old age, so clearly she didn’t need to bother giving up smoking earlier in life, because she died of lung cancer!”

she didn’t die of lung cancer.

There are a lot of privileged people like the OP who probably wont know many people that have suffered with the virus. There is a reason why you are twice as likely to die if you live in a poorer area of the UK. It's a very different experience if you were able to work from home early on, if your waitrose and farm shop deliveries continued to your door. If you didnt have neighbours living in the same block as you, if you had the luxury of a big garden to exercise in. Then a redundancy or two creeps into the social circle and panic ensues and all of a sudden there cries of 'it's only old people who die anyway' and let's go straight back to normal when other peoples realities are very very different.

No I don’t
Dd knows someone at school who’s Grandad might have died from it and one of DHs friends have lost a few people from his community
Like other people I do know people who have lost jobs and businesses though so I do wonder whether the lockdown has been worth it
However, if there hadn’t been a lockdown maybe people I do know would have died so I’m a bit torn

I don’t understand the point of threads like this - is it that because you don’t know anyone, you think it’s a hoax? How do you explain the 60k+ excess deaths then?
Someone upthread asked another poster, who knew people who had died, ‘would you feel like that if it was any other infectious disease?’ Thereby minimising their Lived experience as some Kind of hysterical overreaction.
But the whole point is that we are lucky enough to live in a country that has no other infectious disease like this. And don’t come at me with your flu, your polio, your chicken pox - I have posted the comparable Numbers so many times. This has killed a lot of people in three months - and thousands more now facing possibly long term chronic health problems. I have friends who are seriously unwell 8 weeks on, and they were supposedly mild cases.
Count yourself very fortunate, OP. And by the way, I agree the Prolonged lockdown is awful & the looming recession/depression will claim a terrible toll as well. But that’s because we took action far too late. It’s not an argument for doing nothing at all.

Pretty much my whole team have had Covid. A few asymptomatic, some with mild symptoms and a few who were very poorly, for a number of weeks.

I and a number of staff have post viral fatigue which is completely debilitating.

Where do you live OP? Some areas have had very few cases, but perhaps would have had many by now if it were not for lockdown. You may also not know which of your friends have had it - I think that I have, but was not tested so I’m not sure. It’s not like I posted about it on Facebook or anything, I think I’ve only mentioned it to one or two people outside my immediate family.

Dhs colleague died. He was in his 50s and good health. My ds and I have most likely had it, but we both got off lightly. Took over a month for me to be able to walk without getting breathless though.

My neighbour works on the Covid ward and has seen many people die of it. She got it herself and had to be rushed to hospital by ambulance and admitted to her own ward to save her life because she couldn't breathe. All her family (3 kids and DH) had it next. Luckily everyone survived but they might not have.
Count yourself lucky you don't know anyone that's had it - it's horrible.

As more people got sick business would have struggled anyway as their workforce were sick or isolating.

It would have been worse than that... If we had repeated what happened in Bergamo (which even then was mitigated by a lockdown that was too late) which had 6,000 excess deaths out of 1.1m, and scales that up nationally we’d have had 360,000 deaths scaled up and literally millions needing hospital care, it would have been truly apocalyptic. In fact it would almost certainly have been worse as at least Bergamo was one smallish region in a much larger country. To think that businesses and education would have carried on regardless in those circumstances is crazy. Having a number of your workforce off sick would be the least of a business’s woes.

@WowLucky - probably because they are being tested constantly and nobody on the community without symptoms is.

I work in a hospital. I know at least 20 colleagues who have had it. Several tested positive, several tested negative and then had positive antibody tests. A handful of healthcare workers, including one of the very first consultants, have died in my hospital trust. They have probably passed it on along the way. We saw a lot of patients with it in April/May, but it has become much less often now. My husbands grandfather passed away with it, in his 90's. I'm convinced that several members of our family, including myself, had it in December ( I was laughed out of the GP's when I said it was the worst/longest cough & sore throat I have ever experienced)

I do agree however it's time to get some things up and running, albeit with serious changes and social distancing measures. Chances are a lot of us have already had it and have been completely asymptomatic.

in the community

Several of my friends have lost parents to it, and several have tested positive to it. I do agree that lockdown was too much, but just because you have been fortunate enough not to experience it doesn't mean it hasn't impacted a lot of people.

Count yourself lucky. I know several people who've had it. All caught it in the community. All were very ill, although most not hospitalized. 2 had strokes. Two friends have lost parents. This is very. very real.