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?

@ollyollyoxenfree
I think studies show that immunity lasts at least 8 months. It could be much longer but we don’t know yet because when they did the studies covid hadn’t been around that long. And no lockdown doesn’t mean no vaccines - you would still have used vaccines once they were available so no need for covid to circulate as a very high level endlessly.

@ollyollyoxenfree no one in the world knows how long immunity lasts for sure yet so I very much doubt you do

hence why I caveated it in my post?

I have not claimed to know (or that anyone knows) how long immunity lasts, and indeed it'll depend on the characteristics of the person being reinfected and how genetically different the virus causing the secondary infection is.

But my point still stands - secondary infection occurs, which is the main argument against letting coronavirus rip through the population. This is without considering the emergence of new variants which will be exacerbated by uncontrolled transmission.

Utter carnage.

In March 2020, before we locked down, there was already plenty evidence that the number of recorded cases (and deaths) was doubling every three or four days. Put another way, one infected person became four infected people in a week. It doesn't sound a lot but unchecked that one case becomes 1,000 after five weeks and 1,000,000 after another five weeks. What would have happened when we ran out of people to become infected I have no idea.

Not wishing to derail the thread, but I think there will be quite a bit of 'pandemic-lit' coming out in the next few years (whether anyone has any appetite for it is another matter). I'm sure there will be at least one 'What if...' novel, with looting, cannibalism and packs of feral cockerpoos roaming the streets. Maybe you should write it, OP!

feral cockerpoos

eagerly awaiting this stage of the apocalypse

@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?

Why on earth would you imagine it would be "over"?

You know the reinfection rate in some areas of Brazil is really quite high - estimates range from 30 to 60%.

Viruses spread, people develop immunity, virus mutates and spreads again. It does this until the direct route to a mutation capable of evading existing immunity sufficiently to allow propogation, becomes blocked. At that point, the virus goes away and only comes back when one of two things occur:

1. People's immunity falls sufficiently to allow a new wave to occur,

2. It jumps into a different species, mutates there, and then jumps back, which can open the door to whole new branches of mutations.

We have no idea how many mutations of covid we'd have to endure - it could take 10/20/50/100 years before we reach a state where it's suddenly unable to continue the mutation/reinfect loop. Or it could already be nearly done.... I wouldn't bet on that though!

But your point comes back to the argument that the ONLY viable way to deal with covid, is to eliminate it almost completely from a local population. Anything less than this, and you are trapped in an endless cycle of mutation/surge/lockdown/recover etc.

People are often talking about "living with covid"- but we have absolutely NO idea what the consequences of trying to do that would be. Sure at the moment, vaccines are working and the IFR, particularly in the vaccinated population is low... but now think about flu - normally almost benign, but periodically a new variant comes along that kills a lot of people. Covid's starting place is about 1000x more dangerous than regular flu - imagine what a BAD variant of covid would be like!

Vaccines?? As you get more and more mutations of a virus, our immune system tends to become less and less effective at processing immunity to it - one of the reasons why influenza vaccines have such low efficacy.

In short, if we allowed this virus to stay and just tried to adapt to it, sure we could do that, but the consequences would likely be a significant fall in life expectancy, together with a much more negative prognosis for anyone with cancer or other diseases that result in immune system suppression and THAT's assuming the vaccine efficacy generally holds up.

[quote OnTheBrink1]@ollyollyoxenfree no one in the world knows how long immunity lasts for sure yet so I very much doubt you do[/quote]
Google SIREN study.

But bear in mind that this is immunity to only the variants that have dominated in the UK.

By contrast, check out some of the reports from Brazil where reinfection rates are quite high - it's one of the reasons WHY one of the Brazil variants is labelled one of concern.

Lots of people would have died of non Covid conditions like stroke and heart attacks as the hospitals would have been constantly overwhelmed.

Places that didn’t lock down have not fared worse. Such as Florida, which chose not to close everything but to protect the elderly by not sending infected people out of hospital to care homes. They’ve done better than California which has been very strict.

@ReuT3 brilliant summary of the half of it. The only upside is we wouldn't have the noxious Toby Young harping on from the sidelines with his nonsense oh and Boris might have died.....

Electricity,gas, water, fuel,broadband, sewage, rubbish collection, food supply chain etc etc are not done by magic. Too many people sick at once and these things suffer. As well as the health service of course.

@murbblurb

Electricity,gas, water, fuel,broadband, sewage, rubbish collection, food supply chain etc etc are not done by magic. Too many people sick at once and these things suffer. As well as the health service of course.

I have never understood why people could not get this into their heads.

@bookworm1632
Covid cannot be 1000x more dangerous than flu. In a bad flu season 25,000 people die even with a vaccination. If covid is 1000x worse this would mean that if a similar number of people caught covid to people who caught flu 250m would die (4 x the population of the uk).

The IFR of covid is about 1%. The IFR of flu with a vaccine is about 0.05% so covid without a vaccine is about 20 times worse. In younger age groups like babies flu is more dangerous.

@murbblurb
This hasn’t happened anywhere. There has been nowhere where the lights have gone off due to too many people being ill that I know of. Without lockdown we still wouldn’t have had everyone ill at the same time. A third of people have no symptoms. Another big chunk have very minor symptoms which wouldn’t require them to be off work. I suspect the requirement for self isolation has had a bigger impact than illness due to covid would have on staff availability without lockdown.

I think it was calculated (I can't remember where this was from now) that 500,000 people would die if we hadn't gone into lockdown. So five times more people should have died than actually have so far.

Could the morgues, funeral directors, crematoriums etc have coped? That is why we locked down, not because Boris actually cares whether your Dad dies or not, but because we can't have bodies piling up on his watch.

We watch with horror at how things are in Brazil and India, and know that could have been the UK if we hadn't been able to lock down effectively. I expect other parts of the world will also experience similar infection rates in the future.

I think we'd be in an army run state with rationing, only the direst health care needs tended to, etc. Things like getting food into and around the country, or getting your dead relatives interred in a timely fashion, would be the things we'd be judging Boris on, rather than when we can next go to Costa or have a holiday abroad.

@JesusInTheCabbageVan

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.

The early days of it the 999 system was a victim of hysteria over it all.

At work we had a customer need an ambulance with suspected appendicitius with a history of such troubles. She was left on the floor for 3 hours, not a priority. when the ambulance finally showed up the crew were very much "Covid innit" and the only priority was covid patients.

This was the point I lost respect for what we were doing at that time, especially when empty A&E departments had "go away staff" at the door to turn people away.

Thankfully, this nonsense came to an end when they remembered what they were for and then Whitty was on TV pleading with those who needed hosptal treatment to attend, although hardly surprising given the 2 months or so acting like how local councils treat tax payers.

Protecting something works both ways.

@Suranjeep

Potentially burning it’s self out

Or

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

UK went through what happened in Italy.

Folk refused hospital treatment, dying at home, a health service that could do little else.... we had areas that ran out of oxygen and ICU capacity too plus our death toll at the time was far higher than Italy's.

I thought Brazil was closest to this?

It’s not over there, and recently was suffering from high cases

Lights etc didn’t go off but public health was extremely strained in a way we didn’t see

@murbblurb

Electricity,gas, water, fuel,broadband, sewage, rubbish collection, food supply chain etc etc are not done by magic. Too many people sick at once and these things suffer. As well as the health service of course.

People also forgot that this was essential stuff though during the whole “schools are supposed to be closed but parents are taking the piss by sending in their children and claiming key worker status” etc. It worked both ways.

@Suranjeep god, three hours, that must have been terrifying. I hope she's OK.

I’m not anti-lockdown in the way that people like to characterise by screaming “so you just want it to rip through you selfish arsehole” - no, I didn’t want that, but I did have criticisms of some of the restrictions and the way that some public services placed restrictions on service users.

FWIW I work with HCPs and I know a number with PTSD, and I also know as many women who had babies during the past year who have PTSD as a result of restrictions placed on maternity and postnatal care.

Look to Sweden. No lockdown there. I think we would have done similar: some people would have been frightened and stayed home anyway, economy would have taken some hit as a result, but not as much as U.K. or other lockdown countries.