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"

@DynamiteFilledRadish I can never understand this argument. It's like having a hole in your roof that's getting bigger all the time and just refusing to patch it JUST LET IT RIP until we get a whole new roof.
Surely hobbling along and trying to support each other is better than all of us just collapsing to our beds at once. @orzoisorange ... do you have some inside information that Chris Whitty is missing?

There can be no justification whatsoever for a lockdown over 15 hospital admissions.

@DismantledKing

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.

Opinion pollsters trawl all social media even though most of it is at least as batshit as here.

Thankfully most of it isn't taken too seriously. The loonies are people who think that what they write is totally private.

Social media has been used to influence public opinion on some notable occasions too, like for Brexshit etc. So best not to say anything anywhere that makes it seem as though you want what you don't.

I don't honestly care what your opinion is on that.

And then what?

I can never understand this argument. It's like having a hole in your roof that's getting bigger all the time and just refusing to patch it JUST LET IT RIP until we get a whole new roof

Actually, it's better to get a new roof because you can keep patching it, at great expense, and the problem isn't going to go away. You can keep repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result but actually, the hole is still there, you need a new roof. Whilst you're patching the hole the rest of your house is falling into utter ruin but never mind, you've dealt with that one issue with the hole in the roof.

@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.

I'm sorry to hear that, I was similar.

It's important to put all the info in the first post. It does read as if you want another lockdown.

I've been thinking a lot about this op as there is a chance the next 2 months are going to be very bad indeed (I really hope not!) and I wonder if we'll look back and regret not taking much more drastic action

My theory is that

a) we're just too late for any lockdown. So many people are being infected each day that there is literally just no point. I think even if we locked down today and hard, every infected person will just infect people in their homes or travelling to shops etc. It's going to make absolutely no difference

b) You can only lockdown a population that wants to be locked down. How else do you enforce something like that beyond getting the army out, fining people, imprisoning people etc? People would be horrified (understatement!) by that kind of action and rightly so. There is no appetite for a lockdown. The government are waiting for that to change, which it will if deaths skyrocket. People then lock themselves down, essentially. If deaths don't skyrocket, there's no real need for a lockdown anyway so it's ok.

c) there are other strategies beyond lockdown - one being pushing hard to get vaccination levels as high as possible, which is the one the government is going for. The population is getting vaccinated in really large numbers, thank goodness, and that is going to help more than anything, even if we do end up with high death rates before the effects of the boosters kick in properly (because it takes 2-3 weeks for immunity to develop). We might have to wait to see it make a difference but give it 4 weeks and Omicron will be slowed down and run out of people to infect or kill

I hope you're ok OP and getting some support. This is really scary isn't it? I hope things will be manageable, there is lots of reason to think we will be ok. If things are dreadful, this wave should be short and sharp just because of how quickly it's moving so by February/March, things will be significantly easier. I'm going to be keeping myself as busy as I can until then!

I've had enough of lockdowns. People can lock themselves down if they are worried.

@thedefinitionofmadness

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

Well yes, but that’s not really an answer is it. We can’t grow a fit for purpose health system in the next fortnight.

It’s quite clear from the data what the trajectory of this thing is. We’re in for a default partial lockdown for January while a sizeable proportion of the population is isolating because they have Covid. What we need to worry about most is how badly the NHS will collapse (more patients, fewer staff) and how quickly it can recover after the wave has swept through.

Because the general public won’t adhere to a lockdown till they can see how dire it is and things start falling apart. It’s pretty inevitable now I think, just a matter of when…my guess is they’ll try to get through Xmas…

My life would change very little with another lockdown, work in a job that can't be shut down or done from home, don't socialise much anyway or see family regularly.
It would affect my DD the most, she is in 2nd year a levels and missing more college wouldn't be great for her results or chances of university. But that said she did manage to maintain her grades and even improve a few small points when colleges were closed.
The wider implications though are huge, and I can see that, and in all honesty though I appreciate the need to 'protect' the NHS and services we rely on from massive staff absence and being overwhelmed, I think it's time that some money and proper management was put into these services to enable them to be available, and stop expecting the citizens who pay for it to 'do the right thing' and save services that have been underfunded and poorly managed for years, over and over again while continuing to underfund and poorly manage them.
I'd comply with a lockdown through default really, it's pretty much how I live anyway, and in the first one and to a certain extent the others I had the attitude that we've got to work with what we've got because no funding or changes are going to be effective fast enough, we're two years in now and nothing has changed and so we're just forever on the same merry go round of stopping life to protect services we need rather than doing something actively to make them more robust.

Money.
The city won't wear it and they drive everything. It's not politicians that run the country.
If they could make money out of a lockdown we'd be doing it.

Omicron is soo transmissible that it's going to infect everyone anyway imo. No point fighting it too hard and prolonging the wave. And if it's a milder variant then it's good to have it replace delta.

We don't need to be... plus I'm quite sure boris knows there wouid be uproar!!!

@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.

Completely agree.

@Myusername2015

Firstly they don’t want to offer financial support to industries and individuals so this effectively is a “lock yourself down” scenario secondly Johnson couldn’t even get plan B through his own party vote so could never get a lockdown in.

@Myusername2015 This^

The vaccine programme is a failure? Nice one. Think back to 2020 and scenes of hospitals in Italy and people here hospitalised (Eg Boris) and dying or left very ill indeed (Derek Draper). All those Nightingale Hospitals were to be dying rooms . But oh no, vaccines are a waste of time

Vaccines haven’t been a magical solution and ended the pandemic, but they have been miraculous in preventing serious illness and hospitalisation which would break the health service.

The thinking of some posters and applauded by others is not just ignorant but dangerous: presumably you want vast numbers to shrug and say they’re not bothering with vaccines because it’s all some government ruse (quite what for, no one can ever articulate….).

@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 very few are dying. And the nhs isn’t collapsing, the 2 previous lockdowns were to avoid both of these things. Last time round only a few oldies have had 1 jab. Now most adults have had 3.

Lockdown isn’t necessary and it would kill the economy and many people’s mental health.

I don't want another lockdown either, very much not. However, there's something I don't quite understand and I'm wondering if anyone can explain it to me.

Purely from an infection minimisation point of view, wouldn't it make sense to lockdown briefly while as many people as possible are vaccinated in this booster drive and then for a further 2 weeks or however long it takes to build up antibodies from the vaccine? Then reopen completely with an enormous percentage of the population protected from omicron.

The only potential other benefit I can see to lockdown is that the government would have to offer some financial support (I know there's no magic money tree of course). What worries me is that without a lockdown but with people catching omicron in such huge numbers, sectors like hospitality will lose huge amounts of business anyway without the government having to provide any support. The same for individuals not entitled to enhanced sick pay.

As I say, the last thing I want is a lockdown. The last one nearly broke me mentally and financially. I also agree that the consequences for vulnerable children and other people at risk of harm in their homes would be appalling. But what I don't quite understand is why it wouldn't work to manage transmission if it was used to make the booster drive more effective, it wouldn't be the same as locking down and then opening up again to the same old problems (like last time).

The ones who want to cancel things are. The problem is, businesses are being affected via cancellations and shortages of staff. It seems they aren't going to be helped because there's no official lockdown. It's concerning.

@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 we don't all live in cities, where I live the take up of vaccines is 83% the rest are children or those that are unable to have the vaccines

Also since Omicron symptoms seem very mild for most, I would I,give this variant would be a good way of achieving herd immunity with very few deaths and hospital admissions…

It would undermine the vaccine program and we can’t afford any more furlough.

The cynic in me also recognises that we have a huge issue with how we cope as a society with adult social care. Allowing an environment to develop which results in earlier deaths of the elderly and infirm makes good economic sense in the med/long term.

@HermioneWeasley While I agree with most of your post it has to be said that women being the victim of abusive me has been going on since forever. The deaths of two little children are mentioned as being attributable to Covid this has been going on for as many years as children have been born. It is the lack of acceptance by the authorities that they have failed in the basics of the purposes of their jobs.
You also missed elderly people being abused because they are isolated and have to rely on others sometimes/all the time. This too has been going on for ages. Again there are supposed to be protections for those situations.
All we can really do is be very careful and try to avoid catching the Covid virus

There's no money for a lockdown.