An alternative perspective

[havefunpeleton]

If at the last election. A political party had said they'd save 60 k deaths. However this would cost us 100 billion. And our kids and grandkids would have to repay this debt. And the majority of people 'saved' would die within a year. And btw we'd have to lockdown for months... and there would be huge unemployment. Schools would close too. I'm guessing this wouldn't have been a vote winner!!

If however a party promised to cut taxes (and therefore cut nhs spending) they'd have been pretty popular

We have been utterly brainwashed haven't we?

Do you think the majority of people saved by measures taken would have died within a year?

It’s a global pandemic. Normal rules can’t possibly apply.

@lousleftkneelies I have read 30 k deaths from care homes. Majority is the wrong word. A significant proportion maybe?

@PurpleDaisies that's my point though. Let's apply our 'normal rules'. We have never as a society strived hard to reduce our death rate. Quite the opposite in fact...

Do you think it would have only been 60k deaths in that scenario? We have these deaths with the restrictions and steps the Government took?! If we had done nothing and just let the virus run just how many deaths do you imagine we would have faced?

Presumably you don't think black lives matter? What with the large number of deaths coming from BAME communities.

Btw it's not only elderly housed in care homes. Many residents are young disabled.

I think the projections were saying 500 000 deaths if there was no action.

The consequences of lockdown are horrible but we had no choice.

I understand they took the measures they did becuase their models showed the alternative without lockdown would have been 500,000 deaths (80% of population infected, 1% death rate) a good proportion of whom would have been young.

I still think they made complete mess of it, but lockdown was necessary.

Your argument is completely hypothetical nobody predicted a pandemic.

60,000 people have died with those measures... It’s reasonable to think that 500,000 people would have died without them, and that’s not just taking Neil Fergusson’s modelling on face value, it’s looking at places where Covid got a hold of the population before any mitigation took place - Bergamo where 6,000 died out of a 1.1m population and that’s even with a lockdown, albeit far too late.

Also, say the Government has done nothing, it’s ridiculous to think we’d have sailed through without a gigantic economic impact, with everything carrying on as normal as 100,000s die.

Also, imagine the impact on healthcare had we done nothing... Doctors and nurses having to deal with a tsunami of cases with no PPE... significant numbers of them would likely have succumbed as a result leaving healthcare in tatters for many years, and our ability to provide non-Covid provision decimated, leading the 100,000s of additional deaths in the years to come.

Always easy to judge and be critical. That's why Keir Starmer has one of the easiest jobs right now.

I guess it all comes down to how much you value the lives of others. It's obvious there would have been 1000s more deaths without lockdown. What's not so clear is how many that would have been and for some that number would be acceptable loses for their lives not to be inconvenienced.

Also many areas were failing anyway. Schools before the close were in pieces round here and had to close due to low staffing levels and lack of safety (couldnt find a cover teacher for miles!). So again, to assume things could or would have just been able to continue is wrong.

As with everything its personal circumstances that drives us. Unemployed now? Struggling with isolation? Then yea, lockdown was crap and an overreaction.....Financially/socially stable, then lockdown didn't come soon/hard enough.

Brainwashed? Not really. Just people in different circumstances and therefore different options which some people are upset about.

The majority of people saved would nit have died within a year, the estimated average life expectancy at death is around 10 years

They have saved around 450,000 lives as best we can tell, not 60,000

National debt does not work like household debt. who felt better off when we stopped paying off the national debt from the Second World War...anyone even notice? No. I think it was within the last 5 years if you are interested.

The government believes, and I have to agree, that the economic impact of an uncontrolled virus pandemic would be far worse than what we have now.

Simple example, most of the countries that we get tourists from have gone for a suppression approach, and are restricting travel to countries that have not. We therefore have a better chance of reviving our tourist industry before the end of the year, if we keep the virus down and stay in that group.

The government also believes that we, as a nation expect the NHS will treat all poorly people, and that the NHS would have spectacularly failed if we had an uncontrolled pandemic

And I have never voted for reducing taxes as I have all my life felt that we make too many people suffer through our reluctance to share our wealth, however meagre

What would you have done?

You could have followed the America/Brazil approach, I suppose, that looks nice.

How is this an ‘alternative’ perspective? Many forum members are strongly opposed to lockdown.

Op, you are ignoring the fact that had we not locked down, we might be facing 500,000 deaths. That is less than 1% of our population so perfectly feasible.
Lockdown has given the NHS time to learn about cv19, it has given time for the general population to learn about social distancing & hand hygiene and come to terms with face masks. Some of us at least.

So your question should be Would you have voted for a govt who did not lockdown and allowed the virus to run through the whole population, or one who did.
We are not at the end of this pandemic yet. Watch the spread in the Americas. And the U.K. hasn’t had the second wave yet. Try asking the question in June 2021.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

We can look to the US to see what would happen without a proper lockdown. Doesn't look great so far.

@Gingerkittykat

I think the projections were saying 500 000 deaths if there was no action.

The consequences of lockdown are horrible but we had no choice.

That model was incredibly flawed. It's unlikely we would have seen anything like that amount of deaths.

Of course the majority wouldn't have died within a year, and that is without even taking into account those left with long term health issues who survive.

Yes, brainwashing is a possibility.

www.theactuary.com/features/2020/05/07/co-morbidity-question

It's easy to criticise the government (I do, and I dodnt vote conservative) BUT we dont know how things would have been with an alternative government.. There are varying ways different governments around the world have approached it, some with more success than others. There a lots of things that could have done differently, although not every country is the same and what works in one country might not have been possible in another. NZ had a very strict lockdown and has largely contained, or even eradicated the virus, Sweden had no lockdown but no where near the fatalities suffered in the uk.
I think the government have made a lot of mistakes but no one knows for sure we would have been in safer hands had Labour been in power which they probably would have been if JC had stepped down earlier
It's probably pie in the sky but for a crisis of this magnitude I feel a cross party allegiance working together could be more powerful but not sure how that would work or whether the parties even could work together.

Also OP, you seem confused about whether you think it is the majority who have died or the majority who have been saved that would have died within a year. Wrong either way of course, but perhaps you are assuming those who have died are typical of those who would have died on a wider scale during a natural peak. Not necessarily so at all, but you are also possibly underestimating the extent to which controlling covid is not just about avoiding death and disability from covid but also the effects of that occurring in a natural peak....on the economy, health provision of all kinds, utility supply, security, education.

Of course the govt have made massive mistakes, not being properly prepared, locking down too late and the rest. That's the real scandal, but it is more incompetence than conspiracy.

I don't know what you think the true agenda of govts worldwide is!

Regarding the economy and the burden of debt for future generations, do you believe that trade and travel with other countries would have continued uninterrupted if we had allowed Covid-19 to run completely rampant through the population? Would industry/services output have continued at near normal rates with workers dropping like flies and being allowed to infect each other?
I wonder about the reasoning of OPs like this. The lack of capacity to imagine the chaos of a pandemic left to run unchecked.

“And the majority of people 'saved' would die within a year.”

You can fuck right off with this. Not everyone vulnerable would die anyway. Just stop it. Just fucking stop it.

@iffymiffy

“And the majority of people 'saved' would die within a year.”

You can fuck right off with this. Not everyone vulnerable would die anyway. Just stop it. Just fucking stop it.

There will have certainly been deaths that have been bought forward earlier than would have been, however time will tell when we have further data of excess deaths over a much longer term than the last couple of months as to the true figures

medium.com/@vernunftundrichtigkeit/coronavirus-why-everyone-was-wrong-fce6db5ba809

Not saying I agree with all of this (I certainly don't think Covid is a cold!) but this immunologist makes some interesting points about natural immunity and asymptomatic cases.

@TrustTheGeneGenie

Yes, there were flaws in the model, but events have shown what happens when Covid is allowed to rip through without any mitigations and everyone takes it “on the chin”, and the 510,000
estimate has stood the test of time.

In Bergamo, Italy, the epicentre of the pandemic outside China, 6,000 out of a population of 1.1m died in a month... That scales up to 350,000 deaths in the U.K. if a similar situation had been allowed to unfold. Even Bergamo locked down though, albeit too late to prevent many deaths, so the 6,000 would almost certainly have been worse still had nothing been done. Also, Bergamo, and other parts of northern Italy were supported more widely by the Italian state, 80-90% was too badly effected as national lockdown occurred before spread was too widespread.

If an entire country was engulfed, there’d be no means of mitigation... Had that happened in the U.K., it’s reasonable to assume a catastrophe would have occurred that would have torn the heart out of our healthcare system. It wouldn’t have been some cancer treatment that stopped, but all of it... It wouldn’t have been some doctors/nurses who died, but thousands swamped, with literally millions of cases and no PPE.

In reality, nowhere on earth, when faced with the pandemic, has chosen to carry on regardless and treat it as “a little flu”... Even where the state‘s response has been slow or poor, people have taken matters into their own hands - note the significant reduction in social interactions in London prior to lockdown.