If we hadn't locked down at all...

[bathsh3ba]

Would this all be over by now? Obviously with a much higher death toll and I am absolutely not suggesting we should have done that. But theoretically... what would have happened? Are we prolonging the pandemic by 'squashing the curve' and are we going to be be able to come out of this without either opening up and accepting more deaths or accepting rolling lockdowns for some time to come?

Potentially burning it’s self out

Or

Scenes like northern Italy or India (which is what the press/media want)

Surely the NHS would of collapsed which was the whole point of lockdown?

I don't understand what "burning itself out" means.

If a virus runs out of people to infect it will no longer spread, therefore have burnt its self out.

Variants, you all scream.

If covid had been allowed to run rampant enough to run out of people to infect, we would have a hell of a lot more dead people.

We would have starved. We only locked down because France said if we didn’t they would close their boarder to us.

@ChocOrange1

I don't understand what "burning itself out" means.

Either killed it’s hosts or the host develop immunity.

@Fitforforty

We would have starved. We only locked down because France said if we didn’t they would close their boarder to us.

What if no one locked down though? Many more deaths yes and deaths not covid related because of no health care available, but would the first strain of covid have stuck around and run out of people to infect? People blest on constantly with the line ‘generally pandemics last 2 years’ Yes that’s if you don’t lockdown and take the extraordinary measures we have in 2020/20201

I would imagine Dr's and Nurses would be in an even worse situation... I know of a nurse who has had to have counselling for ptsd because of the impact on her, I think we'd have lost alot of Dr's and nurses and we'd have been in a massive backlog of even bigger nhs waiting lists etc.

@ChocOrange1

I don't understand what "burning itself out" means.

Like Sars did going to google now ha

If we carried on as normal doctors and nurses would have had more sick people than they could have capacity for. China might send more aid but British government might turn it down. Volunteers would be asked to cover for nurses if the army nurses, travel nurses and doctors had fallen sick.

Policing would become weaker as the police force caught the pandemic too but less officers survived. The postal service would carry on but staff would get sick so a few deliveries could be a day late or delivered at the end of the day. When staff die they might replace them quickly but that would mean more infections as new staff take the virus home.
Children that caught the virus later because they were the most protected wouldn't have a hospital bed and would be nursed by their mums, dads, carers. Who might be unwell themselves. They'd take time off work and a temp would come in and probably catch the virus from their workplace which have had it for a month or so.

Whole families would stay at home coughing up germs and making sure they don't lay on one side for too long. The parents would loose their jobs or go in coughing. A few would wear a mask but managers would ask them to remove them in commercial settings so that customers would feel welcome. Fogs stands would carry on and events but they would be understaffed and the managers would be too busy dealing with a member of staff that wants to go home because they developed a temperature throughout the day and no one is available to man the stand.

Companies would be more cautious about who they hire knowing that they had to pick between someone who would put customers at risk of a virus and someone who might not turn up without letting them know they're sick.

Papers would still write stories around the matter but depending on how good the researchers are the staff will start acting more cautiously. Wearing masks and advising on health or taking risks and having to hire new staff because someone got sick and it spread or a bit of both. 1 Getting sick everyone going to work from home and changing the way they pass on information and self reporting from survivors.
There'll be families that have less trouble from the virus and out of those will be a few complaining about people jumping on the bandwagon about getting the virus and leaving their jobs. No one will challenge them even though a relative died that they haven't visited in a while.
Everyone would complain that the nhs is rubbish but the drs are few and far between and half educated because they had to fill in for dead drs. Government would push for paid nhs to solve it which would be argued that the disabled and low income families wouldn't be able to afford it. Including families that all caught covid.
Cleaners would have to take extra measures to clean with no more extra hours as no one would take is seriously and causes of outbreaks would be argued whose responsibility it was to do what. Schools would tell them parents that it's their responsibility and teachers would get sick because parents have to go to work to pay bills. No one would furlough because companies wouldn't be asked for this compassion....

See India

Isn't no lockdown basically what happened in Brazil? They then ended up with a situation where virus mutations that were good at reinfecting people who'd already had Covid once had a competitive advantage. Isn't that how the Brazilian variant developed?

Well we don't lock down for the common cold/flu/chicken pox/Norovirus etc and they haven't burned themselves out yet so I doubt covid would have either.
The more people who catch covid, the more opportunities the virus has to mutate into new variants which makes re infection and vaccine breakthrough more likely. Several people have caught covid twice - so having covid once does not stop you catching it again (and spreading it).
This is also aside from the fact that many more people would die unnecessarily by catching covid at a time when no medical support was available. Even if we end up with the same total number of covid infections as we would have without lockdowns, but spread over a much longer period, more people will survive their infection than if we let it run though everyone quickly. I really don't think the science supports your theory.

Oh god.
I don’t know about the virus because all that comes into my mind is the vision of all of those people dying in front of our eyes in the most horrific ways.
The situation in India was where we would have been 100%.
Run out of oxygen, beds, Drs, nurses, people not being allowed into hospitals, turned away at the door, told to go home & die.
You have taken me right back in my head to the beginning of it all.
And as pp said, yes to PTSD.
Some days, I don’t know how on earth we survived.
I look at people driving around and out and about and I look at those people as fellow survivors of a pandemic.

@ChocOrange1

I don't understand what "burning itself out" means.

Once everyone's had it, the vast majority won't get it again. It's natural immunity.

Of course, lots more people would have died if the vulnerable people hadn't shielded, and the NHS would have been completely overwhelmed, so it wouldn't have worked.

Would this all be over by now?

no

a much higher death toll, Scenes like northern Italy or India

yes

If a virus runs out of people to infect it will no longer spread,

waning immunity & variants, probably more UK variants, would mean we still had potential for spread

It's an interesting question. Much higher deaths seems a very likely scenario. And not just from Covid but also from the knock on effects of a collapsed health system.

But I do wonder what the strategy would have been if this had happened pre-internet. Our ability to stay at home, particularly for the length of time this has gone on for, has been so reliant on the internet. My dad did a similar job to the one DH does now and there's no way that my dad could have worked from home for over a year like DH has. Shielding has only been possible thanks to online shopping etc.

It is very difficult to see a correlation between the strength of lockdown policy and deaths from covid between different countries. There are several studies which find no correlation e.g doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2020.100464

Clearly it’s a difficult data set and you may be able to show a different result if you looked at the data in a different way. I think that the data across countries does support the view that lockdowns do not significantly affect overall deaths from covid though. If there was a very significant affect e.g the difference between 150k and 500k deaths you would see it.

Brazil is one example of a country which hasn’t used lockdowns but many other developing countries haven’t been able to implement the sort of lockdowns we have seen for anything like the time we have imposed them. Most of these countries don’t seem to have been particularly badly affected though may be more down to demographics than anything. Equally there are countries like Peru which have similar demographics to Brazil but which have used some harsh lockdowns and their death rate is similar to Brazil’s.

I would be interested to know to what extent the virus goes in natural waves. No country seems to have seen exponential increase indefinitely. Sweden has seen waves despite not dramatically changing strategy.

I don’t think covid would have burned itself out but it may have more quickly become a manageable endemic disease without lockdowns. We would still have had vaccinations a year in in any case so the question is whether more people would have been infected in a year without lockdowns than without them. Antibody tests suggested that about 25% of people had had covid by the end of January so lockdowns didn’t do a great job at stopping people getting it.

Maybe there would have been more new variants. That’s unknowable as there’s a lot of luck involved. It is possible that social distancing etc results in more infectious strains of covid becoming dominant because they have a greater survival advantage.

@bathsh3ba

Would this all be over by now? Obviously with a much higher death toll and I am absolutely not suggesting we should have done that. But theoretically... what would have happened? Are we prolonging the pandemic by 'squashing the curve' and are we going to be be able to come out of this without either opening up and accepting more deaths or accepting rolling lockdowns for some time to come?

Nope. It would've been horrific.

Huge amount of death from coronavirus. Huge amount of death from other preventable scenarios like car crashes, appendicitis etc because there wouldn't have been enough staff to treat patients. Schools, bars etc would've been forced to close anyway due to an uncontrolled pandemic ripping through the country.

Immunity lasts on average 6 months. It's not like measles where you get it, you either survive or die and then you're pretty much done. We'd be in a situation with endless circulating coronavirus in the population. Many many new variants due to the uncontrolled transmission which would increase re-infection rates and lead to vaccine evasion.

After over a year of this I can't understand why people are still banging on about herd immunity and "letting nature take it's course"

Not an expert (or anywhere near) but of course we've prolonged it and we've forced the virus to adapt to become more transmissible. By making it harder for the transmission by keeping our distance from others etc, we've given the more transmissible mutations an even bigger advantage than they would have otherwise had, meaning they've squeezed the less transmissible versions out quicker.

Boris Johnson never wanted or intended to lock down the UK. The plan initially was just to crack on. I think he only did so because it became very clear very fast just how bad it was going to be. In March 2020, the death toll was rising scarily fast. People calling 999 were pretty much being told they could only come in if they were at death's door. Lots of NHS workers off sick or burnt out, so capacity reduced even more. The economy would have suffered badly anyway, because lots of people would have felt it was unsafe to go out. It would have been horrific, I'm sure.

This is a really interesting question. I am very much pro-lockdown and think the government didn’t go far enough. However, from an interest POV I would like to know what might have happened without locking down at all.

It would probably have burnt itself temporarily then kept coming back in waves. Our second wave, the one we've just come out of, would have been horrific.

@Whatever9999

Not an expert (or anywhere near) but of course we've prolonged it and we've forced the virus to adapt to become more transmissible. By making it harder for the transmission by keeping our distance from others etc, we've given the more transmissible mutations an even bigger advantage than they would have otherwise had, meaning they've squeezed the less transmissible versions out quicker.

This is completely incorrect- you say you're not an expert but are happy to state things as if they're fact?

Mutations can only occur when the virus is transmitted. By limiting transmission (i.e, with suppression measures), you are reducing the number of mutations that can occur and therefore minimising emergence of new variants.