@TheDailyCarbuncle
No, of course not, for the very good reason that national lockdowns are the opposite of effective - they create more problems than they solve. Here we are after months of lockdown (such as it was - I take the point that people weren't confined to their homes, but businesses were closed and social activity was restricted), still with cases in the community, still with ongoing deaths. So what was the point? You could argue that it was necessary to bring infections down to a lower level to 'protect the NHS' and so on, and I think that's valid if you're looking at a one-month or even two-month lockdown. But months and months of it? Children out of school from March to September?
People will still get covid and some will die. So they'll have the joy and fun of all the effects of lockdown (which are massive and likely to last for years and years) plus covid. A great result.
Besides that, lockdown has definitely killed people. For some reason in the minds of many, those deaths don't count. As long as they didn't die of covid, it doesn't matter. To my mind it is beyond idiotic to say that there is a threat from a virus so let's add to the threat by also destroying the economy. So people can now have the threat of illness combined with poverty, joblessness, mental heath issues and everything else that goes with a recession. Fantastic.
It is blatantly obvious how ridiculous it is to engage in months of lockdown and to have a crazy focus on one single risk from a virus to the extent that hundreds of other risks are increased unnecessarily. Being 'kept safe' from covid only to die by suicide because all your support structures have been taken away is not a positive result. A death is a death. Many people with dementia died because they couldn't cope with the stress and anxiety of being locked in their rooms without family contact. Many just stopped drinking and died from dehydration. That is a horrific outcome and totally unacceptable and anyone who argues that was in any way necessary is, frankly, nuts.
There will be a lot of questions asked in the coming years about what went wrong to make politicians think that destroying their economies was a sane or sensible measure. No politician is going to have the balls right now to admit they fucked people over. But plenty will point it out in future. And behind closed doors politicians will be recognising that doing it once can be considered a mistake but doing it twice is unforgivable.
To be fair, the scenario of living in a country with 250, 000 people dying of covid, that wouldn't be a bundle of fun either.
There would be a huge economic impact from that, to be borne by future generations.
Businesses would have closed, with the owners/ workers/ main customers dead.
Society would have been forced to shut down anyhow. Just with a higher corpse count. And maybe worse and for longer.
People would have killed themselves anyhow, in this dystopian nightmare and more people with dementia would have died, of covid and of lack of care because their carers were ill or dying or isolating and so was their family.
We are population dense, we can't wing it like Sweden.
The politicians were forced into lockdown,against their ignorant wishes, by necessity and world opprobrium, and, yes, it could happen again.
Forcing kids back into crowded schools with adequate safety measures, and workers into offices, this is very unwise, if we want to avoid a further lockdown.