Why are we not in lockdown right now?!

[InkyPinkyParlezVous]

If things are as bad as they say, why are we not locking down right now?

Surely waiting til after Christmas is just too late to stop this "tidal wave"

I agree that the best thing to do to minimise the effects of omicron would be to lockdown or go to harsher measures now, possibly allowing mixing on Christmas day, and ramp up the booster programme even more to get everyone who wants to be vaccinated done before easing restrictions.

But the effect on the economy on lockdown just before Christmas would be huge. Many people wouldn't comply.

Although I would suggest that there is a higher probability that omicron is going to cause chaos with huge swathes of people being off sick and the NHS won't be able to cope or we will need to go into lockdown to prevent that than the likelihood everything will be fine, we still don't know enough to be 100% certain that will happen. The government isn't going to want to lockdown when there is still a chance it could potentially be unneccessary. The damage to the economy and the backlash would be massive.

@FourTeaFallOut

There is no public appetite or political will for a lockdown.

And that is basically the answer.

Plus, there's no money. Lockdown as a policy is a bit last year.

@Warblerinwinter I actually take the whole thing pretty seriously. Makes no difference to me if in lockdown or not because I don't socialise much anyway 😅

Our household has covid right now despite being really cautious. You can catch it anywhere. We hadn't been to a pub or a party. Dp caught it at work off someone who went in ill and we've all caught it from home.

It's true that the vast majority of us brits don't like being told what to do. Just have to look at the amount of people who just refused to wear masks. Yet other countries have never stopped wearing them.

@InkyPinkyParlezVous

If things are as bad as they say, why are we not locking down right now?

Surely waiting til after Christmas is just too late to stop this "tidal wave"

Did you see the conference yesterday? That was answered quite early on in the pre prepared scripts and in answer to questions. If you go back and watch it gain you could hear Chris Witty answer it, he was, as usual, clam, informative and logical.

The short answer is vaccination rates and boosters and still having to learn to 'live with it' rather than lockdown which is made less necessary by vaccination rates.

no furlough so unsustainable it will get bad but unless they offer money to help businesses again it just cant happen

the answer isn't to lockdown
the answer is to build a health service with the capacity to deal with a new disease that will be a permanent fixture
the gov't known this all along

@InkyPinkyParlezVous

Lockdown almost broke me last time. I'm currently in the grips of real depression, for which I take medication daily. My mental health will decline even further if and when it happens again. Please don't assume. It's not kind.

Lockdown also broke my mum’s mental health. She lives alone and some fucker reported her to the police because when bubbles were allowed she formed one with her single friends. She didn’t see us, because we were too far away and via video link. Luckily for my mum, even though the neighbour called the police twice on her, she pointed out that she has cctv so could prove that she only had one visitor for months under the rules. Knowing she has a neighbour willing to maliciously report her like that has really caused her a lot of stress.

Cos not everyone's a hysteric.

@DismantledKing

Best not to post threads which look like we would accept it. You never know who is looking.

Well there’s paranoia, and then there’s this.

Expand on what you mean please! Surely few people want this shit show government thinking that we would like another lockdown?

We want them to know that we wouldn't, if anything. If you are trying to paint me as some sort of conspiracy theorists l then I am afraid you'll be rather disappointed. I'm just someone pissed off with all the hysterical melodrama.

@InkyPinkyParlezVous

Just to be clear, I don't want to lockdown. But, if we are that concerned about the NHS and the country being overwhelmed then surely the time to act is now. I suspect were the finances in place we would be in lockdown today.

Spoiler alert - the NHS is already overwhelmed but nobody will admit it. According to the modelling, at current growth rates, every single one of us will have been infected by the New Year. The lockdown will occur naturally as the entire nation takes to its bed.

@InkyPinkyParlezVous

If things are as bad as they say, why are we not locking down right now?

Surely waiting til after Christmas is just too late to stop this "tidal wave"

You know who the government is?

I don't think a lockdown would be effective right now - best to focus on vaccination. Boosters for those who haven't had them yet, as these are currently proving very effective, and outreach to the vaccine hesitant who haven't yet had any vaccinations are going to be our best options.

I'm planning to get my kids (all over 18 and double vaxxed) boostered over their Christmas break from uni.

Beyond that we should probably enforce restrictions of numbers in shops, social distancing, hand washing and mask wearing. But not another lockdown.

Expand on what you mean please! Surely few people want this shit show government thinking that we would like another lockdown?

Some people want another lockdown, others don’t. If you thing that the government has people trawling the dreariest board on Mumsnet in order to make decisions about public health measures, then you’re a loony.

Lockdowns are there to buy time. In March 2020 it was to learn all we could for it to suppress it down (and the original variant was much easier) which enabled scientists to work effectively to get a vaccine in place within 9 months.

Then Alpha hit and we locked down to give us time to get everyone vaccinated.

Omicron is far more infectious and other than getting as many boosters in as possible we have very few cards left to play. We just have to manage with a few restrictions to try and lengthen the doubling time

I posted this somewhere else

news.sky.com/story/covid-uk-latest-news-omicron-coronavirus-skynews-12469075

But Chris Whitty this morning has really helped me get my head round it and the issues

If you listened to Whitty they acknowledged the effects of lockdown on mental health and other illnesses.

Why do you need lockdown to minimise your own risk?

@Sprogonthetyne

Basically money, plus compliance. They'd have to pay furlough again but it would have less impact then previous lockdowns because a lot of -idiots- people would still be going to see granny for Christmas.

The clinical part of me thinks someone will have done cost vs lives saved calculations, and come to the conclusion it's not worth it.

Like NICE have to all the time? As someone who was on CEV list,I struggled with this the first couple of months of first lockdown:but vaxed now,more is known about it,and we're (personally) being sensible. It's just the hard truth of the utilitarian argument.

I would love the lockdown fans to tell me how long they propose to lockdown for? What happens after when cases rise again? Another lockdown? What happens when another variant comes along? Another lockdown? How do we deal with all the horrendous problems that your beloved lockdowns cause? What's the end game?

@InkyPinkyParlezVous

If things are as bad as they say, why are we not locking down right now?

Surely waiting til after Christmas is just too late to stop this "tidal wave"

Because things aren't as bad as they say.

Because no one is dying from this new variant any more than the old ones.

This is what herd immunity starts to looks like. It spreads like wild fire but we survive it. We can’t lock down for every new variant, the country would collapse.

@jgw1

So you want lockdown then?
Can’t see Labour screaming for lockdown either ?

Stressed people get sick more easily. All this hysteria is really detrimental. We can’t realistically lockdown again and if the virus is so contagious it wouldn’t work anyway. Best look after our own health by sleeping well, eating well and not reading the news too much and crack on with things. Remember contagious respiratory viruses around Christmas are nothing new and we have a lot of population immunity to this one.

Because it would show the vaccine programme to be a failure - vaccinations were supposed to be our way out of this and worked well for delta. There’s every suggestion they prevent serious illness (but have little impact on transmission) for omicron.

It would destroy many industries and businesses already on their knees.

We have just seen a child death where lockdown was implicated as a factor for why signs were not spotted. Sarah Everard was able to be kidnapped because she knew she’d broken lockdown rules. Cancer detection and treatment has fallen off a cliff and 100,000 children didn’t return to school after the first lockdown. The average age of those dying with (not necessarily from) Covid in the first wave was over average life expectancy. They aren’t worth the astronomical cost.

[quote SagittariusDwarf]@SLH2003 quite possibly I would do that! I'd also meet up with friends indoors. A lot.[/quote]
Maybe this is how natural selection solves the problem.

@HermioneWeasley

Because it would show the vaccine programme to be a failure - vaccinations were supposed to be our way out of this and worked well for delta. There’s every suggestion they prevent serious illness (but have little impact on transmission) for omicron.

It would destroy many industries and businesses already on their knees.

We have just seen a child death where lockdown was implicated as a factor for why signs were not spotted. Sarah Everard was able to be kidnapped because she knew she’d broken lockdown rules. Cancer detection and treatment has fallen off a cliff and 100,000 children didn’t return to school after the first lockdown. The average age of those dying with (not necessarily from) Covid in the first wave was over average life expectancy. They aren’t worth the astronomical cost.

Very sensible post. Add to that heart disease which is on the rise due to inactivity over the past 2 years.