If the virus had started anywhere but China, would the work ‘lockdown’ even be a thing?

[guitarstringseadgbe]

I can’t help thinking that lockdowns are only a thing because it was how China dealt with it initially. Would they even be a thing I’d say the virus started elsewhere?

The term lockdown makes me shake inside. My husband is self employed. His income is our main income. I never would have believed we would live in a society where people aren’t allowed to work and earn a living.

The term's been used for years in America when a school has a "shooter", hasn't it? Not sure where it originated though.

We will need to look into history to check how humanity has coped with previous pandemics
There is a link here www.colorado.edu/today/2020/04/08/6-lessons-we-can-learn-past-pandemics
If you are interested.
This is not the first time that there are SD, local lockdowns, border closures, and so on.... while they waited for a cure or vaccine. Other pandemics have been much worst in the total number of deaths, killing large number of popullations that had no immunity whatsoever to the pathogen.
This is possibly the first time there have been so many lockdowns at the same time across the globe though.
I think the SD and lockdowns are neccessary to slow the spread, spare as many lives as possible, and avoid a total collapse in the Health system. It gave us some time to study the virus, test some treatments, start with the vaccine... I do hope that the goverment has done something to oncrease Healthcare capacity, PPE, and resources (for all, not only covid patients), and I wish they could get a grip on the test and trace.

I do not think it would have been different if it had started elsewhere.
Each country have their own outbreak protocols. WHO would be their main influencer.

Italy was the first country to respond, I think. They locked down- and severely- not because China did but because their hospitals were overrun.

@TrustTheGeneGenie

We haven't just quarantined the Ill though, I would have found that much more acceptable!

In past centuries, whole families or even villages were locked up together and the sick ones infected those who were well to start with.

Ships would have to wait 40 days to dock, even if everyone on board seemed well (40 days giving rise to the word "quarantine")

So yes, well people could get caught up in this.

Not on this kind of scale though...

unfortunately, it is the nature of this virus that has determined it.
France and German has started their second lockdown. I believe they do it because it is the only effective way at the moment, not because they follow other country's influence.

Our NHS is still ok to cope at the moment, thanks for the first lockdown, this has bought us the time, now we have more knowledge to deal with the disease. I read on BBC the other day, about the difference in ICU unit in hospital between spring and now. There is a massive improvement in how we treat patients, and the death rate is much lower on this second wave due to this improvement.

This is from a GCSE History textbook
Funny how little has changed

@TrustTheGeneGenie

Nope. I think if it had started somewhere else, that lockdown wouldn't have happened. If it had started in Britain we wouldn't have locked down, the only reason we did is because everyone else did and then the public wanted it because it seemed to be the right thing to do. It wasn't, I don't personally think, and I don't think it's right to do it again either but here we are.

Not all of us public wanted it though. I was critical of lockdown from the beginning. It was obvious to me that lockdown was going to cause more pain than the virus. Watching the catastrophic effects on the economy and on mental health, is even harder when you have doubted the wisdom and the efficacy of lockdowns from day 1.

I assume many of those wanting further restrictions do not have a livelihood depending on being able to trade.

@Thanx4theMmories

I didn't want it either I agree that it's hard to watch when you never wanted it at all.

I sort of understood why they did it to protect the NHS but that wore very thin very quickly, but I never actively wanted it.

I think you're right, many people who want further restrictions are prob comfortable, working from home, no MH issues etc.

I am lucky in that I can now work from home (couldn't in round 1 I left and found a new job and was v lucky!) But I don't want it, I don't want to homeschool and work at the same time and I miss my loved ones. I have never ever felt so hopeless in my life.

I was just saying yesterday that if this had happened 25 years ago - before the internet and social media. Would we even know there was a pandemic
Would we shut society down ?
No probably not

@Heatherjayne1972

I was just saying yesterday that if this had happened 25 years ago - before the internet and social media. Would we even know there was a pandemic Would we shut society down ? No probably not

But also we weren't such a global society decades ago, international travel wasn't such a thing, people moved away from their home town a lot less.

Maybe not 25 years ago though admittedly.

@Heatherjayne1972

I was just saying yesterday that if this had happened 25 years ago - before the internet and social media. Would we even know there was a pandemic Would we shut society down ? No probably not

And I've worked out that we had the internet about 25 years ago, so I think that's too recent for the outcome to be different.

I can remember watching news reports from the first gulf war so we would have known if there was a pandemic.

Maybe 50 years ago though

Fully agree with the OP that China set the tone for this whole appalling response. They deployed a social nuclear weapon (lockdown) and the rest of the world followed.

I don’t know how to link, but the excellent Jonathan Sumption delivered a lecture yesterday in Cambridge questioning the legality of lockdown. He sounds a clear warning about where giving up civil liberties will take us as a society.

Some US states used lockdown in the early 1920's ( they recovered better than the ones that didn't )

As did villages during the plague,like Eyam.

It's a type of response that has been used for centuries

But midgebabe, we no longer do things we did centuries ago. Amputating limbs when a bone has been broken, for example. Surely we have moved on.

Today we at the very least have access to statistics about infection and can judge the severity of a threat. It is baffling to me that we are ignoring reason on this subject.

I wish we could leave animals alone. Too many viruse have stemmed from this awful industry. Meat costs more to make than it's worth.

The original premise that lockdown was a new thing
It isn't
Should something better have been done? Yes, test trace trace isolate would have been better.

Wasn’t Isaac Newton famously sent home from Cambridge during the plague outbreak?
Universities closed. Borders closed and while towns/regions were “locked down”.

Exactly museumum, in 1665. It defies belief that we haven’t moved on. To say nothing of the fact that plague had a death-rate of about 50%, not sub-1%.

The excellent Jonathan Sumption lecture to the Cambridge Law Society, about the violation of our civil liberties and referenced above by @Flyonawalk, can be found here:

Really worth watching

Also, we cannot compare with previous epidemics. The death rate is under 0.5% and the average age of death for Covid19 in the UK is 82 years - above the life expectancy at birth. Spanish flu had a death rate of 20% and bubonic plague, 50%. Also, outcomes of lockdowns in the US during the Spanish flu are biased by centres which had many travellers, versus those who did not. I think there was a study of St Louis and Philadelphia, whereby Philly is critacised for not locking down, but Philly was a hub for servicemen returned from WWI. Likewise, London and New York are worse hit by CV19 then, say NZ for exactly the same reasons.

PS, Apparently Italy's health service is under strain every Feb/march owing to seasonal viruses and an old population.

Thank you Taciturn - that is indeed the Cambridge lecture. There is a transcript too.

You explain very well why the 2020 virus does not compare to previous outbreaks of illness - thank you.

So we’ve got people arguing it’s a new thing and we only locked down because China did. But also that it happened for the plague hundreds of years ago so we should have something better.
Both of those things can’t be true.

@Heatherjayne1972

I was just saying yesterday that if this had happened 25 years ago - before the internet and social media. Would we even know there was a pandemic Would we shut society down ? No probably not

We probably would know, yes, what with all the people getting ill everywhere. Look into the 1510 flu pandemic - it’s the first flu pandemic we really know much about (maybe the first one?) and a lot of people wrote about it at the time because it caused such disruption. It had a mortality rate of about 1%, (best we can reckon from what they recorded at the time), that didn’t stop it being a very big event.

Here’s a Wikipedia entry on it: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1510_influenza_pandemic

The so-called 'lockdown' here is nothing like they did in China.

Hence why China are cracking on with their lives and we are all either ill or under lame and increasingly stricter restrictions.