Why are we in lockdown when no one is dying?

[SplunkPostGres]

I don’t understand why we’ve got local lockdown again. Cases are high but deaths are still low. Seems like a lot of cases are asymptomatic? So why are the lockdowns and restrictions needed?

charities are warning about the victims of domestic abuse
What, that they might catch Covid and die or suffer long-term Long Covid disability?
Or do you mean the need - long before Covid came along - for more funding and better resources? You know, because two women a week were dying before the pandemic.

Students in Australia and New Zealand will be able to go home for Christmas. Without the risk of becoming long-term disabled.

Want this over with as soon as possible?
Yes? Then you want short-term measures to contain Covid.

Short-term pain, long-term gain.

We all know countries that took action to effectively contain Covid now have healthier economies.

It's not as simple as 'not being able to have friends over' though. If you're in a nice, cosy, family unit congratulations on your domestic bliss. But there's plenty of people isolated and alone, with MH issues, domestic violence. I wish people wouldn't apply such black-and-white thinking to this because it's so far from that.

@SaltyAndFresh

OP: people aren't dying. Mumsnet: that's because restrictions are in place to prevent people from dying. OP: but people aren't dying.

sad but true.

Even when hundreds of people were dying each day many people were saying the response was an over reaction. A few weeks ago in Spain they were saying the cases were rising but deaths were not. now look where they are with 80+ deaths per day.

Please don't quote New Zealand......it's not a huge travel hub with millions upon millions of people living in close proximity

Yes, millions of people living in close proximity. A virus's wet dream. Fast and easy spread. All the more reason to take effective containment action.

Nowhere is helplessly a 'travel hub'. It's entirely within our control to change that. As an island we have an advantage that makes restricting borders very easy (with proper quarantine for essential travel like food imports).

New York City is normally a major travel hub. They temporarily changed that.

I heard an interview over the weekend about a theory re the situation pre March - the science dude (I think from Harvard?) explained that they think the situation in Jan/Feb here was similar to how it is now ie fast rising cases, lots of a symptomatic transmission, esp in the young. Obviously we didn’t know that then - hence the huge death toll in the subsequent months.

It was on Radio 4 - can’t remember the program...

@Flowersinthewindowstill

It's not as simple as 'not being able to have friends over' though. If you're in a nice, cosy, family unit congratulations on your domestic bliss. But there's plenty of people isolated and alone, with MH issues, domestic violence. I wish people wouldn't apply such black-and-white thinking to this because it's so far from that.

This. Lone parent. WFH since March. Saving grace is that I’m not having to home school (ignore child all day while I work on back-to-back Teams meetings all day).

I think Boris is shitting his pants.
The NHS barely copes any Winter.
Every Winter we have picturew of people laying in corridors and on the floor of A and E. Stories of grannies and grandads who had to wait hours before being given a bed for admission.
Wards are full and ambulances are queuing out the door.
That is a normal Winter for the NHS.
We have got this to look forward to with Covid on top.

unless you're trying to get zero deaths then there has to be an 'acceptable' numbers of deaths.

I consider that we already below the number of acceptable deaths and there is no justification for the continuing restrictions being imposed upon millions of people

@Pootle40

And why are we ok that our police force are spending their time breaking up 'gatherings'

What about the murderers, rapists, drug dealers, paedophiles.....who's tracking them if the police are stopping people from meeting up?!

Why do we think we can do the impossible - controlling an infection?

Please dont quote New Zealand.......it's not a huge travel hub with millions upon millions of people living in close proximity

The impossible? As if! New Zealand and Australia aren't the only countries that have taken effective containment measures. Much of Asia has. Germany too. And Italy has learned a lot since their bad first wave. Unlike us.

I was just reading earlier today about police officers testing positive at several stations.

Who's going to track the drug dealers, murders, rapists, and paedophiles when the police are off sick - potentially for many months with Long Covid?

Totally agree with you. The original lockdown was because there was concern that the nhs would be overwhelmed based on the situation in other countries (eg. Italy) Now, we know much more about the virus. We know it isn’t as deadly as originally feared. We know that a large proportion of cases are asymptomatic (some studies show up to 80%) and there are nowhere near the same number of hospitalisations and deaths (even allowing for the lag). People seem to have lost sight of what the original intention of lockdown was and are his focussing only the increase in (usually mild) community cases that we are now able to test for. Madness 🙄

This. Lone parent. WFH since March. Saving grace is that I’m not having to home school (ignore child all day while I work on back-to-back Teams meetings all day).

Lone Parent. Have to leave my two children at home to do their school work while I am out looking after other people's children for 9 hours a day. We all have it difficult.

Agree op

And reading through comments from doctors on BMJ papers, they tend to agree

The government were criticised for not invoking lockdown measures soon enough earlier this year.
Now they're in the wrong for introducing restrictions when no-one is dying. They can't win.

Give it 2-3 weeks and the deaths will come.
The admissions are super high... they will be treated for a while, until the deaths come.

@AlecTrevelyan006

unless you're trying to get zero deaths then there has to be an 'acceptable' numbers of deaths.

I consider that we already below the number of acceptable deaths and there is no justification for the continuing restrictions being imposed upon millions of people

acceptable number of deaths Which of course will be Other People.

What's the acceptable number (in your view) of young people left long-term disabled - unable to work for months and months (perhaps ongoing)?

What's the acceptable amount of damage to the long-term economy because of unchecked Covid? (You'll have noticed, presumably, that the countries who've tackled Covid are doing better economically).

@Rebelwithallthecause

Agree op

And reading through comments from doctors on BMJ papers, they tend to agree

These doctors you speak of must be outliers (a bit like Harold Shipman perhaps).

The BMA certainly doesn't agree with OP.

I understand it seems disproportionate and agree that the effects are awful. Broadly speaking the reason for the restrictions is this:

There are a lot of cases and a lot of hospitalisations. They are both increasing rapidly.

We can't be sure how many cases there were before the last lockdown but we do know how many serious cases there were in different age groups and can use this to estimate how big the spread will be.

The reason few of these are dying is because because it's mostly the less vulnerable catching it and our treatments have got a lot better.

We are pretty sure that no matter what we do the number of cases will rise enormously over winter, from late October onwards. If the current situation continues that rise will utterly swamp the NHS capacity (including nightingale hospitals, army drafted in and anything else we can marshal).

At that point most of the people who get serious cases will die because we can't treat them intensively, early enough. Probably at least 500k.

This is obviously a worst case scenario but we are trying to avoid it without having to shutter the economy for two months over Christmas.

So the interventions to slow the rate of rise start now, like turning a supertanker the transmission rate doesn't respond quickly to interventions.

Slowing the increase by one month over the next five months could save tens of thousands of lives and mean the difference between a recession versus a depression.

@AlecTrevelyan006

unless you're trying to get zero deaths then there has to be an 'acceptable' numbers of deaths.

I consider that we already below the number of acceptable deaths and there is no justification for the continuing restrictions being imposed upon millions of people

The cases and in turn deaths are still going to rise even with the restrictions we have in place. You just need to wait a month or 2.

@Concerned7777

Those 13 people would have tested positive 6-8 weeks ago

Well no, they would have had to of tested positive within the last 28 days and since passed away to be included in the daily death total

Admittedly I don't know exactly which figure the 13 is but all covid deaths within 60 days are counted by the ONS and I was making a general point to the OP who seems to think that a positive test and death occur at the same time.

there is always an acceptable number of deaths, illnesses, injuries etc

otherwise we would spend all our GDP on the NHS and ban all the things that cause death, illness, injury...

as a society we tacitly agree that in order to have a certain quality of life we have to accept a certain level of risk

Very simply, containing Covid saves the economy. I mean, long-term economy (as opposed to the middle of next week).

Ventilated ITU patients in England have apparently gone from 88 last week to 245 this week. Sadly the deaths will follow. All the doctors I know are feeling very anxious right now.

Are you still allowed to support bubble as a single parent household in Wales?

We're on almost lockdown, high rate area in England. Support bubbles for single adults are still allowed

The reason is essentially mathematical. Imagine 1000 get covid and 5 days later test positive. At that point no one has died at all and in fact maybe nobody dies for two weeks.

After a few weeks some of them start dying and eventually 10, say, die and a number of others are still horribly ill.

That is bad but maybe acceptable.

Now imagine that every week the number infected doubles.

In week one no one dies. At the end of the week there are 2000 cases. At the end of week 2 still no one dies but there are now 4000. At the end of week three a few people die from the start of week one and there are 8000 cases. At the end of week four maybe 10 die who caught it in week one and there are 16000 cases. At the end of week five 20 people have died and there are 32000 cases. At the end of week 6 40 have died and there are 64000 cases. At the end of week 7 80 have died and there are 128000 cases.

Now at this point the number who have died is not that great. But even if no one else ever got infected we can expect 1280 to die in the next month or so. However much worse than that, if we don't lock down then in another 3 weeks 1 million will be infected and we are guaranteed approximately 10000 deaths in the subsequent months.

So when was the right time to lock down? Was it at week 7 when only 80 people had died but 1280 were going to die? Or should we have locked down much earlier?

In essence, in this scenario with doubling infection rates, whenever you lockdown is too late.

The right time for lockdown in the UK the first time was probably March 1. But who would have accepted it?

Some people are also failing to consider that increased hospitalisations doesn’t necessarily mean increased deaths. Doctors now understand much more about Covid and can treat it much more effectively with existing cheap drugs and no need for hundreds of ventilators.