For those who were/are against lockdown

[CarlaH]

I have just sounded off a bit in another thread when I should have started one of my own really.

I would like to ask the vocal critics of lockdown, the ones that state that vulnerable people should just stay at home how they would have handled the complete overload of the NHS.

Even with the lockdowns and restrictions we have had the hospitals have been overwhelmed. The staff must be on their knees with it all.

With no lockdown at all I have to assume that there would have been even greater numbers of very sick people needing hospitalisation.

Would any of the people who are so opposed to the lockdowns been prepared to personally stand at the hospital doors and turn the sick away to possibly/probably die at home?

I’m not ‘anti lockdown’ but I think too many things are unnecessarily closed.

I would just have the rule ‘no household mixing’ and have shops/hairdressers/cafes open. I really don’t think it would make much difference to the rate of spread.

I do think that while a rise in cases during the autumn was fairly inevitable, because of the reality of British winters/ respiritory illness, it was aggravated by excessively prolonging lockdown from May onwards.
Suddenly young people are mixing again fir the first time in nearly 6 months with minimal immunity from September onwards. If people had mixed more and all young people resumed education, there would have been a lot more natural immunity in the community.

Maybe by not locking down and by allowing the virus to circulate then whatever variant is transmitting in France at the moment meant that the Kent variant couldn’t take hold? This is complete speculation! But you would think they are so close to us that this strain would have made it over there...

Much like the S.A variant can’t really gather much pace here because the Kent variant is dominant.

I don’t think France do as much genome sequencing as us so they may not know until case rise. If they do.

But good for them for allowing families to mix. Though having lived in France for a year I’m sure they wouldn’t have accepted such restrictions on family gatherings as we have so blindly....

I agree @BogRollBOGOF

Of all the many stupid things this government have done keeping kids off school in the warmer months then sending everyone back to school and work at once just when we were going in to virus season takes the biscuit.

@Delatron

Maybe by not locking down and by allowing the virus to circulate then whatever variant is transmitting in France at the moment meant that the Kent variant couldn’t take hold? This is complete speculation! But you would think they are so close to us that this strain would have made it over there...

Much like the S.A variant can’t really gather much pace here because the Kent variant is dominant.

I don’t think France do as much genome sequencing as us so they may not know until case rise. If they do.

But good for them for allowing families to mix. Though having lived in France for a year I’m sure they wouldn’t have accepted such restrictions on family gatherings as we have so blindly....

It just doesn't work like that. This is the issue with anti lockdown supporters. The argument is based on a flimsy understanding of how viruses and our immune systems behave, which is fair enough, it's complicated. But that's why we have experts!

@Kazzyhoward

"Shielding" doesn't work because it seems most people who've died of covid actually caught it in supposedly safe/shielding places like care homes and hospitals. The "shielded" can't live in a vacuum. Even if not in hospitals/care homes, they need deliveries (potentially made by infectious people), they have workers in their homes for various reasons (repairs, meter readers, carers etc) who again are potentially infectious.

The "shield the vulnerable" brigade havn't a clue about the reality of a "shielded" life.

It's not that they don't have a clue about it, it's that they don't care because that aspect is not the important one. The important one is 'everyone else get back to normal'. Whether the shielded people being protected or not works is not really relevant to their plan. I'm sure they think it would be nice if it did, but it's not the main point.

I was against lockdown as a long term strategy ie if they hadn’t have come up with vaccines or effective treatment, there was only so long we could have kept this up.

Test & trace, with an ill disciplined population such as ours, was a pipedream.

If any new variants cause issues, as long as the IFR doesn’t increase, I think it’s a case of enough is enough now, we really need to get on with it. The world didn’t end after Spanish Flu.

@SonnetForSpring
I said it was a theory and even the scientists can’t agree. There’s so much we don’t know about this virus. But what we can do is look at what is happening in other countries.

Why has Florida (no lockdown since July) got the same death rate as California (constant lockdowns)?

I’m not anti- lockdown I supported the first one and I think we should have acted quicker.

I think the balance has shifted now.

There’s an article in the Telegraph today on immunity and lockdowns. By someone who knows more than me and most on Mumsnet I would guess. It’s very interesting. Of course I’m
not an expert. This is a discussion thread.

So basically, everyone who is anti lockdown would go back in time and do everything differently. Super.

Here is a list of multiple studies showing lockdowns don't work. mobile.twitter.com/the_brumby/status/1349478829002133506

It was supposed to be locking down to flatten the curve. For three weeks. Nearly a year ago. Places like Manchester have been in a form of lockdown all year. It has become a new religion.

Looking forward we can learn from this. Come out of this lockdown and never entertain the thought of one again. Well in our lifetimes hopefully.

As of Thursday, the health minister stated that variant strains currently make up 41% of daily cases recorded in France - 36% uk variant and 6% South African and Brazilian. They might not have been great at detecting variant strains before but they certainly screen for them now and there are even different isolation periods recommended for the SA and Brazilian strains.
Anecdotally, last October it became hard to find anyone who hadn’t had or didn’t have covid around that time period, including me and my family. And on November 8th, the daily case figure was recorded at 86,000. Personally I think either the uk variant was responsible for that spike in November or the local strain went round so many people that many people now have some form of immunity.

I am against lockdown, I am against criminalising what were once seen as basic human rights. I am firmly of the belief that the NHS is not my responsibility, it is not a charity it is paid for by taxpayers and the government who have underfunded it and basically screwed it up. That is not my issue to fix. I understood the first lockdown was necessary to prevent it from being overwhelmed although I still didn’t support being told what I can and can’t do in my own home with my own family it is illegal in other countries to force restrictions on what people do at home, it should be the same here. The NHS then had a fairly normal summer which they could have used to prepare for what they knew was going to happen in winter. They didn’t and now somehow it is my responsibility to protect it again.

I would happily give up my right to NHS care and have private healthcare if i could reduce my national insurance payments but this is not an option. I received shambolic maternity care last year because of their obsession with covid.

We do not need a lockdown for an illness with a 99% survival rate we need a functioning, properly funded healthcare service. There is no reasoning with those who support lockdown because a lot of the time they have lost nothing. I have a family of business owners who have lost everything they have ever worked for because of a continued over reaction. We aren’t all in it together, it’s not a collective responsibility to “save the NHS” as there is no collective responsibility to save my in laws businesses or save our mental health.

I do think you will all change your tune when suddenly we have to pay all this money back and you finally realise furlough isn’t free money and that idilic work from home situation is replaced with mass unemployment and tax rises.

I was 100% for the long down in March last year. It was a new virus, no one knew what to expect, absolutely supported it. It was hard as there was no take aways or online shopping that time but I felt we were doing the right thing at that time. It should have went on longer.

Now a year later, we are in our third lockdown. Somethings not working. We've seen what this virus can do. It has an overall 0.5% death rate. 99% deaths have been over 50. The 100,00 deaths are with Covid not because of Covid.

We now have vaccines with over 95% efficiency rates. Studies have shown certain ones slower transmission. Further studies have shown they give you protection against the variants.
Hospital admissions are lowering, deaths are lowering.

So my stance is, once the over 50s are vaccinated, we should not be living this.

Why does everyone have to be either strongly pro or anti lockdown? I haven't noticed this polarisation outside the media and Mumsnet

@bathsh3ba

Why does everyone have to be either strongly pro or anti lockdown? I haven't noticed this polarisation outside the media and Mumsnet

Because you have those who are comfortable, dont have to worry about money, have kids that are at school or on their xbox...or...believe the media scare mongering and are scared shitless.

.....and then theres those who have businesses ruined, plunged into poverty, homeschooling while working, stuck in with a toddler and its affecting their mental health and had enough of this corrupt bull shit government.

^Here is a list of multiple studies showing lockdowns don't work. mobile.twitter.com/the_brumby/status/1349478829002133506^

I'm coauthor on one of the cited studies...
and it wasn't 'published' as the twitter thread claimed -- it's a flipping preprint (like most of them)

I am in the mildly Lockdown skeptic camp but I also think that was a very specific set of data -- very pre-new-variants, actually. And we had no idea about Long Covid at the time.

the problem I find with that specific Twitter thread is that it's broadly anti-all NPIs. Which is not a position we took or saw in the data at all. Plus... it's flipping models. In epidemiology we value real outcomes on real people over models. Models are just indications, not the final word.

@Katie517 I am totally with you and I couldn't have said it better myself. Numerous credible scientific studies stating that lockdown doesn't work in the way the government and sage would have us believe. Businesses across the country are in tatters. Personally my business is limping on but will fold by the end of April. I am only lucky that my DH is in a stable (for now) job.

We are all in for a horrid shock when this all is to be paid back and we have been trying to save the people most likely to die from covid who were already over the average age of normal mortality in the country.

I have close family members who are on the brink or already in mental health meltdown with no help from the nhs because they no longer care about anything except covid.

My 6year old old daughter is so depressed and confused thinking that school life is mostly done at home, never seeing friends that she has started wetting herself in distress.

Enough. This country is a mess and I lay the blame wholeheartedly at the government and sage's feet.

@MedSchoolRat

^Here is a list of multiple studies showing lockdowns don't work. mobile.twitter.com/the_brumby/status/1349478829002133506^

I'm coauthor on one of the cited studies...
and it wasn't 'published' as the twitter thread claimed -- it's a flipping preprint (like most of them)

I am in the mildly Lockdown skeptic camp but I also think that was a very specific set of data -- very pre-new-variants, actually. And we had no idea about Long Covid at the time.

the problem I find with that specific Twitter thread is that it's broadly anti-all NPIs. Which is not a position we took or saw in the data at all. Plus... it's flipping models. In epidemiology we value real outcomes on real people over models. Models are just indications, not the final word.

Yes

And to actually try and assess the impact of lockdown on CV you need to do some kind of systematic review (i.e, formally searching for all published studies, and rating their quality) and potentially attempting some kind of meta-analysis (aggregating results from comparable studies)

Posting a list of studies that have shown lockdown is detrimental, without any attempt of assessment of study quality etc is not a unbiased way to approach the question.

It's exactly the same for mask skeptics who throw a couple of google scholar links to small, poorly conducted studies which shown harm, completely ignoring the robust body of literature that show they do not cause adverse side effects

@Hollyhead

I’m not ‘anti lockdown’ but I think too many things are unnecessarily closed.

I would just have the rule ‘no household mixing’ and have shops/hairdressers/cafes open. I really don’t think it would make much difference to the rate of spread.

I agree. Forcing small shops to close is stupid - if they enforce restricted numbers in the shop, have screens, etc., they are very low risk. Same with hairdressers, etc. All the lockdowns are doing is damaging the smallest of businesses, many of whom will never re-open.

Enough. This country is a mess and I lay the blame wholeheartedly at the government and sage's feet.

I'd put a large amount of blame at Rishi's feet. He's the idiot who wanted businesses to open last Summer too quickly. He's the man behind "eat out to spread covid". He reduced VAT to help the hospitality/tourist industry. All things that encouraged people to go out in "risky" environments, which almost certainly caused the infection rates to start rising in August. We'd have been better opening up a lot more slowly and not having to return to restrictions/lockdowns etc in the Autumn. The later lockdowns have done far more damage to business and the economy than keeping things closed a bit longer last Summer.

I’m not anti-some restrictions but I don’t see the sense in some of the lockdown rules.

Take the high street in my village. There’s a craft beer shop and a gift shop next to each other. There’s rarely more than a couple of customers in each at any one time, plus the person working there.

The craft beer shop is open because it sells “food”. I’m glad about this (and agree it should be) because I do shop there.

The gift shop is closed as it’s non-essential.

I just don’t agree that either pose any significant risk to public health. However, one is arbitrarily allowed to open, the other is having their business wrecked.

I am firmly of the belief that the NHS is not my responsibility, it is not a charity it is paid for by taxpayers and the government who have underfunded it and basically screwed it up. That is not my issue to fix.

If you want healthcare, it’s your issue.

We sgould have acted like new Zealand and closed all boarders. We a small island and self containment was always the better option.

Add to which, all the money spent on furlough and school catch up programmes could have been thrown at supporting the NHS our economy wouldn't have shrunk by the largest amount in recorded history and the mental health crisis waiting in the wings would have been half the size.

No one was needed to stand at hospital doors turning sick people away. Money just needed to be allocated better.

@loopyapp when you say the UK is an island so we should have closed our borders, what exactly do you think should have happened with Ireland/NI? Do you just forget it exists or do you have a solution?