Sick of narrative that lockdowns were pointless

[Bagzzz]

I think lots of people are forgetting quite how scary the early days were, overwhelmed hospitals and exhausted (and now a lot burnt out) medical staff.

Many mistakes were made and some things that might have have been avoided but we know with the benefit of hindsight.
Scientists if not politicians were doing their best.

Maybe could distinguish later lockdowns but they weren’t done lightly either, knowing it would affect mental health and business.

And when you speak about the impact of school closures on children’s health - your balancing one shit situation with another shit situation.

Which situation was likely to be less shit?

An out of control virus with no vaccine - that could possibly mutate? A functioning school needed not only healthy children, but healthy adults to teach them/a healthy community infrastructure in order to support those children? Hospitals that could cope?

V’s

The damage caused to their mental health/education through lockdown.

Again - the global scientific consensus thought was lockdown until a method became available to tackle the virus.

@1dayatatime My mum worked as a nurse in London during both previous flu pandemics and the death toll and working conditions were horrendous, its also probable the death toll was higher, we simply didn't collate data like we do now.

But you are correct, had CV happened say 20 or 30 years ago, we wouldn't have had LDs, we d have had far higher death tolls instead.

NHS waiting lists and people not finishing or starting cancer treatments? anecdotal but my Aunties on going tests for cancer continued throughout and my line manager was diagnosed and treated for Hogkinsons too, there were delays but they were caused by EU staff leaving the NHS and thats not caused by covid.

We are treating less patients now than pre CV, there is something else going on here and as the waiting list was over 3m in 2019, its hardly surprising they are increasing.

Yet this isn't at all how lockdown became consensus to the extent that about 50% of the world's population were in one by April 2020. It hadn't been tested, let alone any of the other steps. The move to support was something that happened very quickly after China introduced it. There was no consensus prior to that.

None of which is to say that lockdown wasn't the least worst option available, of course. It may well have been. In the fullness of time we should hopefully be able to get a better idea. But if it was the optimum policy choice, it certainly wasn't because it went through this process.

There were lockdowns during Spanish Flu, its nothing new. Western lockdowns were nothing like China's. Of course it had never been tested, how would you test it, aside in small scale research which had been done? They had to make decisions and move quickly, do you think it would have been better to wait a year or so?

I despair at those claiming hospitals were empty. I can see why people have different views and feelings on lockdown, that's normal and healthy, but to buy into a false narrative of which for it to be true you'd have to think all hospital workers are in on the scam is genuinely pretty crazy. Some settings were empty as staff had been redeployed, some had to isolate because they were high risk and do work from home (remember lots of healthcare staff died, in no small part due to inadequate PPE at the start).

There were not lockdowns in the way that they were practiced in 2020 for the Spanish flu. People who claim this are inevitably conflating the existence of some restrictions with full national lockdown, which is a problem when they're such different things.

As for tried and tested, the very obvious point there is that people shouldn't be making claims that scientific consensus requires this when clearly it doesn't. As I said, if lockdown was the best option available to us in spring 2020, it was the best option available to us despite it not having been through the process that the pp describes.

I was one of the people who thought "fuck it".

Not in March 2020. At that point we were ALL terrified due to the unknowns and the messaging from the government and everyone I knew stayed at home and did as they were told.

But this thread is about lockdowns plural - not just the first one. By May 2020 deaths were extremely low and continued low through that summer. The Scottish government went harder against Covid in their ridiculous elimination approach and for the rest of 2020 and all of 2021 we had more restrictions than anyone else - don't leave your local council area, no indoor mixing, masks, hospitality closed. My 19 year old did his first year of Uni 2021-22 entirely online.

By mid 2021 when we'd all had at least 1 injection, they were still telling us to stay at home and not see anyone, we were most definitely at the fuck it stage.

I think this is a very simplistic view of the situation. People who were at very low or no risk from covid had to stay at home, close their businesses, not see loved ones and not send their children to school for the sake of others. Just because they didn’t necessarily follow it as religiously as you would have wished, didn’t make them selfish. The majority of people were at no risk from covid and yet they still made huge sacrifices for others.

@SirMingeALot but it was the consensus opinion - even though it wasn’t tried and tested in that scenario. Prior to sending a rocket to the moon, you’d have a consensus opinion on how best to do that - before the rocket goes up. It would then be adjusted based on the outcome. And there would change consensus opinion. But that’s just how consensus opinion works! I don’t quite get your point?

My point is that a poster said a majority opinion doesn't happen until something has been 'thoroughly tested, researched, peer reviewed' and gave this as an argument in favour of locking down. But lockdown quite clearly wasn't any of those things, so it's not a sensible argument to make.

What you're saying here is that this isn't the appropriate test for lockdown because of the nature of the circumstances, ie that you don't agree with the post I was disputing either. We both concur that consensus opinion didn't work at all like that in spring 2020.

From all I’ve read retrospectively since lockdown - I don’t see many articles saying they were completely unnecessary. I see articles suggesting that they should have implemented more speedily to have a better/quicker effect. I’m certain that - if faced with another pandemic and no method of control - the consensus opinion would be to lockdown - until a solution is found.

@SirMingeALot - thoroughly tested, peer reviewed etc - to change the consensus opinion. There isn’t a global consensus of ‘lockdowns don’t work’ opinion from the scientific community when you look in retrospect.

It's a huge reach to make that assumption about the future. Even if it does eventually become clear that the positives outweighed the negatives (which isn't necessarily the same question as should we have locked down in 2020, particularly as it was basically politically unavoidable in the UK by the time we did it) the circumstances would make a huge difference.

Because lockdown cannot exist without quite a few factors being in place to make it possible. Pandemic we cannot control is only one of them.

There has to be public support, for one thing. That's one reason why the messaging was so important early on, because outside a police state people will only lock down if they want to. Otherwise, we'd just be inflicting the downsides without the corresponding reduction in contacts. There has to be money to pay a good chunk of the population to stay at home, which includes either public acceptance that it's going to have to come from somewhere or the public not really taking an interest in that part. It has to be politically possible: at the moment, for example, the parliamentary arithmetic simply wouldn't allow it.

And perhaps most importantly, the pandemic would need to be not only serious enough that most people were scared enough to agree to restrictions, but also not so serious that society stopped functioning. The covid lockdowns existed in quite a sweet spot where the people who are needed to work outside the home in order to keep society functioning were for the most part willing to do that. There's no reason to suppose any future pandemic would do the same, and we're all fucked well beyond the remit of any lockdown if the people we need to keep supermarket shelves stocked and utilities working decide to opt out.

Indeed there isn't, which is why I didn't say there was. This doesn't address the claim that was made about how lockdown became majority opinion, though.

@SirMingeALot But there can be a majority scientific opinion prior to an event? The opinion would never be rigid - and if sufficient evidence was gathered that the initial consensus opinion was wrong/not working them THAT would become the new consensus.

Again, this would be an argument for not making claims about how majority scientific opinion was arrived at wrt lockdown in March 2020. You can't say this is what happened and that it couldn't have happened. It has to be one or the other.

@SirMingeALot

Sorry - I’m still not getting it!

The global consensus of scientific opinion in March 2020 was : in order to save lives/to stop hospitals becoming overwhelmed/to control the spread of Covid - we should lockdown until we have a way to control.

Why was that not the consensus opinion?

That’s why half of humanity were in lockdown - due to consensus scientific opinion. If most scientists were not agreeing that it was the best thing to do - then we’d have done something else!

It's not that it wasn't the consensus or at least majority view, particularly in the most economically developed world. It's that when you said a majority opinion doesn't become a majority opinion without thorough testing and research, that clearly wasn't the case for lockdown. I agree that it couldn't have happened like that in the circumstances, but that's all the more reason not to say it was.

Yes - that’s right. Prior to lockdown it would have been a prediction. I guess based on previous response to SARS - it wouldn’t have been an idea plucked from thin air. And most scientists globally would have agreed it was the right thing to do. In order for that consensus opinion to change - that would need sufficient evidence that it destroyed more lives than it saved. In retrospect, consensus thought is not saying ‘lockdowns don’t work’ - I think it depends on so many factors. The majority would still agree it was the right thing to do - but to learn from what didn’t work - e.g it should have been a quicker decision.

Well, a large percentage of the world having tried lockdown now doesn't actually mean there's a consensus opinion about what should be done in future pandemics going forward, so we're not in an established status quo situation. This is what I mean about how should we have locked down in March 2020 and was lockdown in retrospect the least worst option available aren't necessarily the same question. There are, as you say, a great many factors that have to be taken into account. Many of which haven't happened yet.

Human nature being what it is, a lot of people wanted to be key workers partly so they'd be allowed out. That's not to diminish the importance or the sacrifice but it is the case. We were torn between wanting to stay safe and looking wistfully out the window. Human nature, particularly in herd form, is contradictory and immature. The only thing we know about future lockdowns is that it would be so again.

It's hugely inaccurate to say that the majority were at no risk from Covid.

It went through a war time version of this process and we weren't babes in the wood. Technological advances have allowed scientists to gather data, share, predict and communicate faster so it was not quite the fly by night process you're implying. A lot can be done in a short space of time. We also had thought about pandemics in theory before so there was a body of research in place already (admittedly part of that research simply said plaintively that we weren't prepared - a sign that we would never, ever have come to this pandemic completely prepared because that conclusion was ignored by politicians).

It also happened in the context of a considerable body of work already having been done on a vaccine that could be applied to Covid, which made a difference. Although we weren't familiar with the virus and there were many unknowns, such as speed of mutation and public behaviour, there were other ways in which our experts were able to mobilise quickly.

“You are looking at the negative outcomes that we ended up with. They are not negligible and no one thought they would be.”

hmm but people weren’t allowed to talk about them at the time, whether they were considered more or less desirable outcomes than not locking down. don’t deny that please, we do remember

i don’t know why there is the view that we had to have the specific kind of lockdowns we had or nothing. They could have been managed very differently, more humanely, perhaps giving people more room to do the things they needed (such as socialising, seeing dying loved ones, funerals, keeping businesses going) in less “covid risky” ways, even from the beginning. Most of us could see that there were more sensible ways to do things than outright banning everything

What did I deny? You can acknowledge what you want.

I don't know what you're suggesting should have been not banned, as it were, but I do know that the minute nuanced were introduced it became ridiculously confusing and no one had a clue what was actually allowed. We did learn that public messaging and rules have to be really simple or everyone gets pissed off. Really really pissed off!