Case numbers dropping due to lockdown

[womanity]

Not vaccine.

Why has Boris said this? I don’t understand.

I get he wants people to still follow rules, but he also wants them to get vaccinated, right?

@Puppylucky

I think his statement is partly based in truth, as explained above, but it's also clearly Johnson getting his defence in first. This last lockdown will, over the next few months be seen to have killed many people through postponed treatments and mental health issues as well as increased poverty. If he doesn't start to seed the story that it was the key to saving lives and downplay the impact of the vaccine, then the blame is all laid at his door.

How does a lockdown kill people again? I never follow the logic.

@PrincessNutNuts I also agree with Boris Johnson - I see vaccines as working as a fire extinguisher they can stop spread when there are small clusters of cases but they are not able to stop a wildfire. We had a wildfire - so we needed lockdown to properly put out the fire and now we have to hope that the vaccines will stop it becoming a wildfire again

The analogy isnt by any means perfect but I think works for how I see it

Ever felt manipulated?

For the last 12 months

@Princessnutnuts - you seem like a really clever person, so I'm genuinely surprised that your modus operandi is to keep asking faux naive questions - surely even Louis Theroux has recognised the limitations of that approach. Anyway, I digress. It's surely not news to an informed person like yourself, that waiting times to be seen in the NHS have quadrupled, whilst 68% of people with serious illness have been denied ongoing treatment. Add to this, the elderly and vulnerable, who have been denied the social contact that can help aliviate mental and physical health issues, plus the health issues caused by lockdown itself ( obesity and loss of stamina if you need it spelled out) and we are facing a serious health crisis that might well end up dwarfing Covid in it's impact. No snark - I am genuinely amazed you can't see that!

@PrincessNutNuts

The ONS study suggests that the effects of social distancing in lockdown will lead to 970,000 quality adjusted lost years in the next five years or so.

www.ons.gov.uk/news/statementsandletters/estimatingtheimpactsofcoronavirusonenglandsmortalityandmorbidity

Restrictions have got us where we are... vaccinations will hope us keep it that way.

Help*

[quote Fridget]@PrincessNutNuts

The ONS study suggests that the effects of social distancing in lockdown will lead to 970,000 quality adjusted lost years in the next five years or so.

www.ons.gov.uk/news/statementsandletters/estimatingtheimpactsofcoronavirusonenglandsmortalityandmorbidity[/quote]
the same report also ends with:

“While these negative health impacts of lockdown exceed the impacts of COVID-19 directly, they are much smaller than the negative impacts estimated for a scenario in which these measures are not in place; without these mitigations, the impact of direct COVID-19 deaths alone on both mortality and morbidity would be much higher – an estimated 439,000 excess deaths resulting from COVID-19, and 3,000,000 QALYs lost.”

Not ‘may have been’, ‘would’.

I’m not looking to minimise the consequences if SD and lockdown, it’s bloody awful, but I wholeheartedly believe the same consequences would be greater without SD and lockdown in the UK.

@PrincessNutNuts I really hope we dont have to find out.

Jane Fleming
@fleming77
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2h
Channel 4 News out with a rat catcher in South London fighting a rodent resurgence as rats who previously fed on fast food and restaurant leftovers move into the suburbs.

@Cornettoninja

I’m not anti-lockdown! I was responding to the question asked by PrincessNutNuts. A lot of people think lockdown is about going to the pub, etc. It isn’t. Lockdown is the lesser of two evils at this stage, but it’s an absolute tragedy.

Bloody hell i keep doing this - I need to stop trying to parent and MN at the same time - sorry @Fridget

Thank you @Fidget.

@Cornettoninja has covered my view on that.

I'm against letting covid get so out of control that you need lockdowns.

But once you have let things get out of control, there are fewer deaths from having a lockdown than there would be from not having one

@Cornettoninja

Bloody hell i keep doing this - I need to stop trying to parent and MN at the same time - sorry *@Fridget*

Ha no apology needed, I usually write my posts one handed because of the semi-sleeping baby on my other arm

princess I do agree lockdown was the least bad option, and we should have done it sooner, I just think it’s awful in its own right, and was just trying to respond to you saying you don’t follow the logic of lockdown costing lives. Because of lockdown people will die who would not otherwise have died. It may be a smaller number than those who would die if we hadn’t locked down, but those people are still dead.

It's surely not news to an informed person like yourself, that waiting times to be seen in the NHS have quadrupled, whilst 68% of people with serious illness have been denied ongoing treatment.

But this isn't because of lock down! It's because the NHS has been busy treating covid patients and because they also have a reduced capacity for surgery, outpatient appointments, investigations etc to prevent spread within hospitals. Without lock down there would be even more covid patients and even less capacity for non-covid stuff.

Why do people continually conflate lockdown with the effects of the virus on the NHS? I don't get it.

[quote Puppylucky]@Princessnutnuts - you seem like a really clever person, so I'm genuinely surprised that your modus operandi is to keep asking faux naive questions - surely even Louis Theroux has recognised the limitations of that approach. Anyway, I digress. It's surely not news to an informed person like yourself, that waiting times to be seen in the NHS have quadrupled, whilst 68% of people with serious illness have been denied ongoing treatment. Add to this, the elderly and vulnerable, who have been denied the social contact that can help aliviate mental and physical health issues, plus the health issues caused by lockdown itself ( obesity and loss of stamina if you need it spelled out) and we are facing a serious health crisis that might well end up dwarfing Covid in it's impact. No snark - I am genuinely amazed you can't see that![/quote]
Since the facts are that lockdowns save far more lives than they cause, I always wonder what logic led people to say something so counterfactual - so I ask.

All the missed appointments and operations etc are caused by diverting resources to treat the covid that has been allowed to spread out of control.

Not lockdown.

We know this because we came out of Lockdown on Dec 2nd and hospitals did not revert back to pre Covid norms, they carried on treating the covid patients the hospitals were full of.

@Fidget

That's why we should never have let covid get out of control (3? times now.)

You'll get no argument from me about the deleterious effects of lockdown.

But since the government won't do Test Trace and Isolate properly, and Heathrow arrivals are packed in like sardines every day, we'll probably have to have another one. (Or two.)

Politically he has to say this to justify a policy measure which has caused so much misery, killed so many businesses, etc etc.
Yet with so many variables involved, I don’t see how it is remotely possible to be 100 pc sure what has caused cases to fall.
If you look around the world, case numbers generally seem to have followed most closely the pattern of season flu. Who would have thought it 🧐

No, that simply isn't true anymore. You keep referring to the initial chaos of the first wave, when it really was all hands on deck. What is increasingly happening, is that the aftermath of the initial crisis and the new NHS treatment directives are limiting patient treatments and reducing care, not because of any real pressure on the NHS but because the new protocols that have been put into place - viz a shift to telemed and digitally led services that meet the socially distanced norms of lockdown but actively disenfranchise the elderly and the less advantaged. You must be able to see this!

You're still muddling lockdown with social distancing within the NHS. Totally different things.

We shouldn't have had long extended lockdowns OR over 150,000 deaths, 1 million+ suffering long haul covid, and businesses struggling across so many industries.

As an island we could very easily have done the same as Australia, New Zealand, East Asia, Africa, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands.

Strict border restrictions and real quarantine would've meant being mostly back to normal months ago. But the government prioritised international travel above all else. Above lives, long term physical and mental health, and above all other industries.

Separately, of course the last lockdown more than vaccines kept cases low. The majority of the population is only partially vaccinated. For the future, there's positive indications from Israel that vaccines do go a long way to keeping numbers low. Once a large proportion of the population has had both doses. So hopefully we'll get there in a few months.

Also when people express concern over suicides and mental health, they need to remember a lot of it will be not because of lockdown but because of bereavement, fear of catching covid or long covid, or distressed overwhelmed frontline NHS workers. It wasn't lockdowns that caused all this misery. It's the pandemic.

@Puppylucky

No, that simply isn't true anymore. You keep referring to the initial chaos of the first wave, when it really was all hands on deck. What is increasingly happening, is that the aftermath of the initial crisis and the new NHS treatment directives are limiting patient treatments and reducing care, not because of any real pressure on the NHS but because the new protocols that have been put into place - viz a shift to telemed and digitally led services that meet the socially distanced norms of lockdown but actively disenfranchise the elderly and the less advantaged. You must be able to see this!

Surely the main aim of these NHS initiatives was to manage infection control to protect patients and staff?The nature of this highly infectious disease meant without doing so more (already medically vulnerable in many cases) would be at risk. Even with these directives we can see how difficult it is to manage infection control in institutions such as hospitals.

@Mrshoho
Yes I get that, but no consideration was ever made for those for whom social distancing and the concomitant treatment changes weren't just an inconvenience, they were a barrier to effective treatment. And lockdown was the socially acceptable rationale that made this happen. You can pontificate all day about the theoretical lives saved by locking us all up, but unfortunately I think we are about to see the wave of suffering that has actually been caused by the decisions that were made. Hence Johnson's early attempts to rationalise.

mrshoho is right. It's about infection control and trying to keep vulnerable patients as safe as possible under very difficult circumstances.

Around 40% of covid cases were caught in hospital.

Lots of people are still not vaccinated. This variant is much more transmissable. An ease of restrictions will likely see an increase in cases. Most 18-35 year olds are not vaccinated, they are the most socially active group. When they socialise more cases will go up.