What Would Happen Without Lockdowns

[Flaxmeadow]

Just that really. What would have happened if we hadn't locked down in March or if we don't have lockdowns now

@SarahMused so how does my vulnerable fil get treatment for his bowel cancer if the hospitals are rife w COVID? Or by "isolating " do you mean "die quietly at home"?

A huge percentage of Swedish households only have one member
I think this is a very significant factor!

@Yohoheaveho

Maybe, maybe not.

New York City has a similar % of single households. Didn’t stop the spread there. Ok, you can point to higher population density but a single household is a single household.

Prague has a significant % of single households but less population density than Gothenburg. But it has still spread there also.

So @Strawberrypancakes how do you propose that the 60 something ecv Teacher giving your kids normality can protect themselves in their non COVID secure classroom if the virus is out of control in the community?

[quote MummyPop00]@Yohoheaveho

Maybe, maybe not.

New York City has a similar % of single households. Didn’t stop the spread there. Ok, you can point to higher population density but a single household is a single household.

Prague has a significant % of single households but less population density than Gothenburg. But it has still spread there also.[/quote]
I wonder if it is is also function of the percentage of multi occupancy households?

@nicky7654

And the death statistics are a lie. My friends family member died in a car crash and it was put on death certificate as Covid!!!! Most deaths are from cancer and heart issues and old age. Thousands die of flu a year and no panicking with this!

This lie again! Please see excess death rates below in the yellow shaded area - these are deaths beyond what is usually expected from cancer, heart issues and accidents in a normal year. How do you explain that? Denial won't save you or someone you know from getting it and becoming very ill.

@nicky7654 it won't be counted as a COVID death unless on death certificate as a csuse of death which clearly it won't be. . It may be on the 28 day daily figures but anyone who dies of COVID after 28 days isn't.
Actual ONS COVID figures are higher than daily tally

@Flaxmeadow

Just that really. What would have happened if we hadn't locked down in March or if we don't have lockdowns now

April every month for quite a while is what would happen.

Only with bigger numbers.

Loads of people would have died and those who had survived would have continued living. M
That’s my guess anyway.

@nicky7654

And the death statistics are a lie. My friends family member died in a car crash and it was put on death certificate as Covid!!!! Most deaths are from cancer and heart issues and old age. Thousands die of flu a year and no panicking with this!

Well my friend said you’re full of shit.

Oh the dilemma of which mythical friend to believe!

No one likes lock down. It is hard, miserable and lonely but the alternative is even worse. People dying because there are no beds left in hospitals. Mortuaries overflowing, bulldozers digging mass graves like we saw on TV and the NHS would be decimated so unable to cope with even things like childbirth. I can't imagine how much stress doctors, nurses, porters, hospital cleaners were all under in March and April but I fear the worst is still to come. Already we hear in Liverpool they have more in ICU now than in April. I know money does not help with stress but all NHS workers should have been given a decent bonus that might have made their life easier in a small way. We can't as a society.keep taking the NHS for granted.

@TheEmojiFormerlyKnownAsPrince

Brazil didn’t lock down did it?

It looked pretty grim there. Those mass cemeteries

Peru locked down earliest and hard. Generally 'top of the table' for Covid deaths.

Perhaps there are other factors than just lockdown affecting how Covid goes in a country.

In March and April it was very hard to get taken to hospital with Covid because the hospitals were so full. People were told to stay at home and monitor their breathing. Lots of people were admitted too late with terrible oxygen levels. Do you want that to be you or your mother, daughter, friend? Because that's what will happen everywhere.

The first nationwide lockdown did work. The watered down regional ones are not working because they hardly consist of anything until you get to Tier 3 and many people are flouting them.

The NHS cannot carry on business as usual with Covid at high levels

1. Because staff have to be diverted to care for COVID patients
2. Because Covid patients have to be segregated from others so we need a parallel system which requires much more space and staff.

How do people honestly think the NHS could have just carried on as normal under those circumstances? As soon as Covid came it was inevitable that more people would die of other illnesses. It is not possible to do business as usual and COVID

Peru locked down hard and early in theiry @amicissimma but in reality people there are too poor to be able to stay workless in doors. Many could only afford to buy food for a day or two at a time and it's well established now that local markets became hubs of transmission - and then people carried the virus back to crowded homes - and the rest is history. So not really so much a failure of lockdown to work as a situation in which lockdown was not possible.

@Flaxmeadow

Just that really. What would have happened if we hadn't locked down in March or if we don't have lockdowns now

We all know what would have happened because we all lived through the mitigated version in April.

Any suggestion that we can somehow "go back to normal" and the same thing won't happen again is magical thinking bordering on delusional.

@HalfPastThree

Hard to know, but it's interesting that nowhere in the world has seen Neil Ferguson level deaths, in spite of vastly different responses and levels of compliance. The virus has been with us for nearly a year now, so if it was going to happen, it surely would have happened by now

90% of us haven't had it yet.

This year's carnage has been on the virus getting to just 10% of us.

And we've been in varying levels of restrictions since March.

Ferguson's numbers were for "Let it rip"

What really gets me is that nobody is questioning HOW this thing happened. Ok we get some sob story about a wet market in China or a facility which experimented in viruses but nothing probing. That would be the starter for me - to find out how it really happened.

When that happens - when you are seeing and hearing it for yourself - people lockdown anyway. Who the hell is going to walk past a morgue lorry and carry on with life as normal???

People need to reflect on this bit here. Acting blissfully ignorant to life during a deadly pandemic is... scary tbh. Normality won't be around until case rates are signficantly down. Handle it as best you can but don't act like it won't affect you eitherway.

People will die, people have always died it is part of life.

Whatever we choose it won't be nice, it won't be pleasant, quite probably the world as we know it now will change for a good while.

But human beings survived the Black Death of 1347- 1351 estimated to have killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population (75 - 200 million). It is what we do, survive.

Yes but to add, Emeeno, I don't disagree with your sentiment, but during the black death, people still did whatever they could to survive. Without modern medicine. The pope was kept alive because his people made him sit alone, next to the fire. Many were also quarantined away and took preventative measures and "medicine".

If science was as advanced back then as it was now, it'd be medically and scientifically unethical to adopt a 'everyone dies anyway' approach. If we want to talk about human rights being trespassed against, we also have to consider how unethical it is to not try to preserve large masses of life.

..as it is now*

@MagicSummer

What really gets me is that nobody is questioning HOW this thing happened. Ok we get some sob story about a wet market in China or a facility which experimented in viruses but nothing probing. That would be the starter for me - to find out how it really happened.

Zoonotic viruses are an inevitable consequence of animal abuse.

Look up all the other pandemics and how they started. Pigs and chickens feature as heavily as bats.

And this has been predicted for decades.

Devi Sridhar got it pretty spot on years ago.

@MagicSummer you’re looking in the wrong places then because plenty of people are asking exactly that.

Australia got burned by China with their supply chain for pushing the point and as far as I know only the WHO have been granted any kind of access at all to investigate. The WHO (imho) have lost all credibility in their early handling of covid but even so I appreciate they’re treading a fine line keeping lines of communication open with China.

I did read China has been putting new laws in place forbidding the farming for consumption of something like 60 different wild animals but it's not immediate as they will give farmers a transition period. They will also allow farming of certain wild animals for research but it is a worry if these animals will still get into the food chain via the black market.

I agree @Tier2Minus. There will be more pandemics as long as these animal abuses continue and humans encroach and live ever closer with wild animals.

There is currently a new strain of swine flu that has been found within China when farm workers were tested 10% were infected.