Do you think that at times what we have referred to as ‘the science’ has got it wrong?

[MarshaBradyo]

I’m thinking about the many times people said well it’s going to go badly wrong and the science backs this up

But a few times this hasn’t happened

July opening
Omicron and not doing ‘circuit breaker’ and not ending in lockdown
Not getting close to best case for omicron

And so on - maybe other examples

What do you think - was it unnecessarily pessimistic?

And the economy is linked to all other parts of society. If your economy is struggling you don’t have the funding for healthcare, jobs, education. It’s all linked...

We should be welcoming all these studies so we can learn from our mistakes from the future.

For the future

@Emergency73 I’m not saying evil! But when I read the ‘weeding’ and smoke screening that surrounds the ‘not’ Johns Hoskins study it IS frustrating.

And I’m not really buying the ‘time will tell’ argument either because this WOULD be addressed pretty damn quickly if it governments globally had ‘got it wrong’, and there were increasingly overwhelming signs now that they had ‘got it wrong’.

It’s not as black and white as ‘got it wrong or right’.

It’s far more complicated. For example, did we base our decisions to enter a prolonged lockdown based on modelling that was completely inaccurate?

The first lockdown may have been needed initially to protect the NHS but did it need to go on as long? Did schools need to be shut when pubs were open? What has been the impact on women and children who seemed to suffer disproportionately throughout lockdown?

Why wouldn’t we want to study and look at this? Of course it will take time.

It’s naive to think we will just accept our multiple lockdowns were the correct strategy and there will be no study or discussion on this. This will be looked at for years. And I’ll be watching with interest.

Every countries situation is different. Nobody is saying globally that governments that locked down got it ‘wrong’

It’s the detail. Should children have been kept indoors in Spain for 6 weeks when we know that outdoor transmission is low?

Governments need to be held accountable for these harmful policies or what kind of world do we live in?

Did schools need to be shut when pubs were open?

Do you mean ‘should schools have been open more widely as they had been open to targeted year groups for a month by then.

The govt did state its intention to fully open primaries by then, but it had completely failed to realise that it was impossible given its social distancing requirements meaninh half classes.

Are you saying they should have re-opened primary schools in the summer with no social distancing?

@Delatron

It’s not as black and white as ‘got it wrong or right’.

It’s far more complicated. For example, did we base our decisions to enter a prolonged lockdown based on modelling that was completely inaccurate?

The first lockdown may have been needed initially to protect the NHS but did it need to go on as long? Did schools need to be shut when pubs were open? What has been the impact on women and children who seemed to suffer disproportionately throughout lockdown?

Why wouldn’t we want to study and look at this? Of course it will take time.

It’s naive to think we will just accept our multiple lockdowns were the correct strategy and there will be no study or discussion on this. This will be looked at for years. And I’ll be watching with interest.

I hope so. I hope the appetite and funding is there. We might feel the immediate threat has passed but learning from actions might prevent same mistakes at another time.

Yes I am saying schools should have opened after Easter 2020 to all primary school children. Maybe on a staggered scheduled but not just to YR6.
My YR6 was in from June. My YR 5 didn’t go in at all until from March until September.

Do we really think primary school children were social distancing?

Do we think we should have been eating out to help out when children weren’t even getting an education?!

It would have been easier and far more beneficial to have them in then with windows open and making the most of the nice weather, being outdoors. Than to keep most of them off then pile them all back in at once in September just as we went in to Autumn/Winter flu season. Everyone when they back to work and school at once. Universities all back in September. Utter madness.

I have a friend who is a doctor in a hospital in London. Worst time for admissions/deaths and being overwhelmed? Feb/March 2020 from May right through to August he said it was very quiet.

@Delatron

Yes I am saying schools should have opened after Easter 2020 to all primary school children. Maybe on a staggered scheduled but not just to YR6. My YR6 was in from June. My YR 5 didn’t go in at all until from March until September.

Do we really think primary school children were social distancing?

Do we think we should have been eating out to help out when children weren’t even getting an education?!

It would have been easier and far more beneficial to have them in then with windows open and making the most of the nice weather, being outdoors. Than to keep most of them off then pile them all back in at once in September just as we went in to Autumn/Winter flu season. Everyone when they back to work and school at once. Universities all back in September. Utter madness.

I have a friend who is a doctor in a hospital in London. Worst time for admissions/deaths and being overwhelmed? Feb/March 2020 from May right through to August he said it was very quiet.

Yes I remember seeing a chart for hospitalisation and it was so flat during summer. We should have used ventilation in summer time (better than freezing classrooms we’ve had) and had all dc in.

Yes I am saying schools should have opened after Easter 2020 to all primary school children. Maybe on a staggered scheduled but not just to YR6

I agree, I said the targeted year group approach was wrong upthread. By staggered schedule do you mean a rota? (E.g 1 week KS1, next week KS2?). My DC were in the same situation of one in, one not.

Marsha are you saying children should have been in school in August?

"The science" doesn't provide single answers for these kinds of questions.

"Science" says that reducing social contact is probably going to reduce spread of a disease spread by social contact.

"Science" also says that shutting down businesses is bad for the economy.

"Science" also says that shutting schools is bad for children.

"Science" also says that allowing a disease that causes death to spread will result in some amount of death.

What "the science" does not tell us, is how we should balance and prioritise all of those scientifically true facts in order to come up with an action plan. Different people can come up with different plans, and neither is necessarily wrong or "unscientific", they might just be prioritising different things.

So that's 3 of us here that had 1 DC in school and one DC not allowed in school following the first lockdown. Both DC needed some form of school contact it was wrong to disallow one any school for 6 months.

I believe there should have been some form of rota ( they were more commonly used in other countries) to allow all children some in school education / contact.

I think some of the policies should have been firmer on who qualified to go in to school under key worker places too. I know a parent who was a furloughed hairdresser but because her husband was a keyworker her DC were in school full time. If there's a furloughed parent at home surely they should have had to homeschool as everyone else was doing to reduce contacts?!

Similarly I know a part-time healthcare worker (2days per week) who had 3 fulltime places at school for their DC. If keeping children out of school was to reduce contacts / aid social distancing why weren't they required to homeschool on the 3 days a week they weren't working? They also had a partner wfh - so why weren't they required to homeschool like the rest of us?

Meanwhile other people were FT homeworking and homeschooling and their kids missed months of school.

And to think Gavin Williamson has just been knighted after presiding over the shambles of school returns, missing catch-up & mutant algorithms!

In terms of "learning", it is rather foolish to think that we can somehow arrive at a formulation now that will prevent lockdowns from needing to be used in the future.

We were facing a new pathogen and a lot of the measures were very reasonable in terms of potential risk to health and society.

If we have another pandemic, again of a different, new pathogen, we will have a different situation, and more unknowns again.

Everyone knows that shutting businesses and schools is something only done as a last resort. We were in a situation of last resort, you can't imagine that away with hindsight.

It is tragic how many people have died from covid. At the same time, policies need to focus on the vulnerable otherwise either the costs are too high, or the benefits spread too thinly. That is why universal credit is not universal, it is rightly given to those in need.

So while £400 billion spent on the pandemic will have saved lives, many more will die in the future as we will now struggle even more to fund the NHS. More of our taxes will be used to pay off this once in a generation debt, not to redistribute to the less fortunate, which again will cost lives as poverty shorts life expectancy.

In our well intentioned efforts to save lives, many more will die in the long term. This is the harsh reality.

@Delatron

And the economy is linked to all other parts of society. If your economy is struggling you don’t have the funding for healthcare, jobs, education. It’s all linked...

We should be welcoming all these studies so we can learn from our mistakes from the future.

I’m fairly certain those studies have already been done There are certainly studies relating to the 1918 pandemic and I’d guess there are more recent ones relating to epidemics rather than pandemics. They may be less relevant to current global economies but I don’t think there’s much come out in the last 2 years that contradicts it. Those countries that did a better job of controlling the virus inside their borders, tend to suffer less economic damage.

The issue here was that social media and politicians got into this false economics vs science argument. Lockdowns are bad for the economy. So is not locking down. Best for the economy in the mid-long term is getting control of the virus so you can open as much as possible up.

Seems unlikely we’ll be learning any lessons. We don’t want to.

The research I have seen (which was a summary of numerous studies that have already been done) was that the costs were between 2.5 - 25 times higher than the benefits. So in terms of, say, saving lives we would have been much better off to spend a fraction of what we did, and save the rest for, say, the NHS in the future. It is important that we learn from our mistakes, but personally I doubt we will.

Yeah, Chris Whitty has said several times that you can't just prioritise the economy and not deal with the health issues in a pandemic; we are still getting the same old arguments though on this thread.

People don't or won't deal with the issues...

@RacheLSkates

The research I have seen (which was a summary of numerous studies that have already been done) was that the costs were between 2.5 - 25 times higher than the benefits. So in terms of, say, saving lives we would have been much better off to spend a fraction of what we did, and save the rest for, say, the NHS in the future. It is important that we learn from our mistakes, but personally I doubt we will.

Could you link this review of several studies @RacheLSkates?

I haven't seen any epidemiological studies that estimate this, nor a meta-analysis that gets anywhere that finding.

At the same time, policies need to focus on the vulnerable otherwise either the costs are too high, or the benefits spread too thinly. That is why universal credit is not universal, it is rightly given to those in need

GBD again.

@noblegiraffe

At the same time, policies need to focus on the vulnerable otherwise either the costs are too high, or the benefits spread too thinly. That is why universal credit is not universal, it is rightly given to those in need

GBD again.

Yes

Not sure who the original poster was but poverty isn't contagious in the same way an infectious disease pandemic is. That's why targeted univeral credit works, but targeted suppression policies would not have done.

I’m fairly certain those studies have already been done There are certainly studies relating to the 1918 pandemic and I’d guess there are more recent ones relating to epidemics rather than pandemics. They may be less relevant to current global economies but I don’t think there’s much come out in the last 2 years that contradicts it. Those countries that did a better job of controlling the virus inside their borders, tend to suffer less economic damage.

And yes - spot on @InCahootswithOrwell

What these kinds of false dichotomies of "health versus economy" miss is that an uncontrolled pandemic will damage the economy more than suppression policies will in mid/long term.

This has been pretty well established over the past 2+ years.

There’s a middle ground between ‘uncontrolled pandemic’ and full on lockdown that goes on far too long. That’s where the discussion lies.

See Sweden (which yes blah blah we couldn’t have done here) but their economy comes out of this far stronger, children didn’t miss out on school, hospitals weren’t overwhelmed despite everyone thinking they’d done completely they wrong thing and it would be carnage. Their waiting lists are in far better shape that ours too (partly due to crap NHS) but it shows lockdown in all cases multiple times over and over again may not be the right call.

And nobody was arguing for an uncontrolled pandemic with zero suppression measures. It’s which measures and when that are being questioned and discussed.

Not really. I'd rather take my chances with science than with political motivations. Have recently visited a European country where they still take it a lot more seriously than we do. Eat Out to Spread Covid was a joke. Our world-beating claims are just lies. While I appreciate isolation has been hard for many, the covid deniers believing it actually wasn't that bad are imbeciles. The statistics don't lie.