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 Senegal sound like a good example of lockdown working successfully.

Ebola is one illness I would lock down for, If it developed into a very infectious strain. You internally hemorrhage and the mortality rate is very high for all ages, it's very nasty. I worry if something like that did happen who would lock down as COVID was so mild for the mast majority of the population. The government pandemic planning has severely backfired.

I'm worried about the ongoing impact of trust erosion too.

i think there would also have been - more mental health problems had we not locked down. The death toll would have been higher - so you have the mental health of the families affected there, plus the mental health of thise who could not get medical treatment , plus those who could not get mental health treatment - as NHS care would have non existent, plus more people affected by Long Covid/mental health. Plus a school open - but many too ill to run the school effectively, or the whole infrastructure of the school too ill to function.

I know two thirty years old parentswith a young child who were both in hospital with Covid during the first lockdown- they had no one to care for their child. That kind of situation would have a huge impact on children’s mental health.

CEV’s with families or children - the children could be coping with the loss of a parent….

Realistically, the closest we're going to be able to get for a fair bit of this is some pretty complicated modelling once the pandemic is over. Some of the things we need to know about haven't even happened yet. Obviously we should still do it though.

i think there would also have been - more mental health problems had we not locked down. The death toll would have been higher - so you have the mental health of the families affected there, plus the mental health of thise who could not get medical treatment

Lockdowns were only argued to delay deaths (or spread them out) rather than prevent them.

I think Sweden would be a good case to consider—I haven’t heard they are any worse off with mental health or long Covid, iirc the children and adolescents fared better as their activities weren’t curtailed

This is Senegal’s strategy. It’s worth a read:

Senegal’s early policy of isolating people in treatment centers or hotels — combined with other top-down public health measures, such as curfews, mass gathering bans, and temporary school closures — sought to slow transmission in a place that has limited hospital beds, doctors, and resources. A 2017 World Bank study estimates that Senegal only has seven doctors per 100,000 patients. The United States, by comparison, has about 260 physicians per 100,000 people.

The country relied on its experience battling other outbreaks, from the Ebola epidemic in 2014 to HIV/AIDS, to prepare and act early. Senegal depended on local leaders and health agents, all front-line workers, often with multiple job descriptions: communicators, contact tracers, caregivers. They tried, and sometimes struggled, to make the Covid-19 policies work in their communities. They handed out masks. They went on local radio to talk about the coronavirus. These tiny acts, replicated from neighborhood to neighborhood, helped persuade a public to comply with public health measures.

@MintyFreshOne I’ve read somewhere that the comparison with Sweden is difficult - they tend to live more in smaller households or more distanced as a community. So it was easier for no lockdown strategy to work. Sweden’s suicide rate is higher than the UK.

Seems the measures in Senegal were unpopular, people feared the economic fallout. I don’t blame them, developing countries were especially harmed by lockdowns:

www.africanews.com/amp/2021/01/07/protests-erupt-in-senegal-over-new-covid-19-measures/

www.equaltimes.org/the-protests-may-have-stopped-but?lang=en#.Y6x9HSXXclQ

(the latter even said that there were fines for not wearing masks! Horrible thing to do when surgical masks have not been proven at all and they cost money to buy!)

@MinkyGreen

Scandi countries always have had a higher suicide rate. It hadn’t changed from the background rate which is the important thing to note

@MintyFreshOne

But they slowed the transmission with very, very, very limited hospital capacity. There could have been an incredibly high death toll.

@MintyFreshOne

Plus they’d had the experience with Ebola.

Say if Ebola hit here - and it was killing children - would a lockdown be appropriate? Should we be learning things from how a lockdown CAN work?

My point is to those who say we didn't need LD's, Covid in a population with little immunity will cause great damage.

What i'd like to know though is why is China being so heavily affected by what we are told is a variant of covid which is supposed to be mild?

People i know catching CV now, vaxxed or not, are getting quite ill, me included :( (i'm all vaxxed up)

I don't know much about Ebola and what the risk might be to a population like ours if it were here, but in general I'm sceptical that anything very dangerous to children would result in a lockdown of the type we had for covid. The reason being that if the working age population had good reason to worry that their children might die, we wouldn't see anything like the level of willingness to work outside the home that we saw in the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns. There'd be a risk of severe societal disorder because the peopel who keep the shelves stocked etc would be much more afraid to go to work.

We really don’t know that, do we? You cannot just say it would have been worse with no proof.

And the economic fallout has been more horrific than has been reported, hence the rioting.

The Covid-19 lockdowns has made them actually more hesitant to use the strategy with Ebola:

www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/ebola-uganda-lessons-covid-show-heavy-handed-lockdowns-may-be-bad-idea

Researchers, using income data, have estimated that economic losses across Uganda as a result of lockdowns were the equivalent of 9.1% of GDP. Over 65% of the population was affected and nearly ten years of poverty eradication efforts were erased

I’d say that’s worse than Covid for a population that’s generally younger and less obese.

My point is to those who say we didn't need LD's, Covid in a population with little immunity will cause great damage

But why forcibly ‘protect’ the healthy, working age population? We already know who is at risk, we don’t need to lock away the young and healthy.

What i'd like to know though is why is China being so heavily affected by what we are told is a variant of covid which is supposed to be mild?

China has a lot of elderly people that refuse to vaccinate. Even Chinese authorities don’t want to force them to vaccinate.

While they could have taken greater steps to protect the elderly, the fact is they could not keep up the zero Covid policy for much longer—the economy was taking a nosedive and omicron is extremely hard to contain.

@SirMingeALot

I agree with you when you said earlier about Covid existing in a sweet spot. Almost clever in the way it caused so much controversy, speculation and division on how best to tackle it.

A hypothetical situation of new virus hitting our shores. Highly infectious and killing young and old equally. No vaccine, no effective treatment and no method of control. Would a lockdown help control the spread of the virus until an effective treatment was found?

Unfortunately different modellers with different assumptions and different inputs and different data sources will produce wildly different results.

Unlike say the true science of the genome of the Covid virus itself or how it is transmitted there is no "one true science" to modelling.

We are only left with subjective opinion and how history records what happened with the Covid pandemic will depend on the popular consensus at that time and who is writing the history and this will change over time.

For example in the 1920s WW1 was depicted in history as a glorious battle against the evil German Empire but by the 1950s onwards it was depicted in history as tragic waste of young lives.

A hypothetical situation of new virus hitting our shores. Highly infectious and killing young and old equally. No vaccine, no effective treatment and no method of control. Would a lockdown help control the spread of the virus until an effective treatment was found?

I actually think that anything really dangerous would seriously risk societal collapse. The one advantage people have had in previous awful plagues, like the Black Death, is they could only see what was happening in their immediate vicinity. Now we have 24 hour news channels that's no longer the case. Humans struggle with that at the best of times.

As I said upthread, whether people were illegally going to their friend's house would be the very least of anyone's concerns. There'd be people out looting and worse.

Unfortunately different modellers with different assumptions and different inputs and different data sources will produce wildly different results.

It will also depend on what's considered important to model, which is political just like all covid policy has been.

I also fully agree with the trust erosion impact and creating fertile grounds for conspiracy theorists for any future pandemic, crisis, war etc.

China has a lot of elderly people that refuse to vaccinate. Even Chinese authorities don’t want to force them to vaccinate.

Isn't their vaccine ineffective as well?

Not ineffective, but less effective than the Western ones.

I suspect if they did have access to a vaccine that could outrun Omicron in a population with so little previous immunity, which tbf I'm not sure the Western ones would qualify as, the regime would be giving stronger consideration to forcible vaccination. Since they know they don't, there's not much point doing something that controversial. Insufficient benefit.

@SirMingeALot

Societal collapse is interesting. Are we collapsing or are we thriving? 8 billion of us and counting? Has Covid actually stopped us globally in our tracks?
And then - does my daughter have better career opportunities, medical care, technology available to her today or - say - 10/20 years ago. I don’t know - I feel I need to have optimism for her sake. There is such beauty out there and I want her to experience it.

If 5 years ago - that hypothetical virus (killing old and young) had hit, and the public was not so tainted, we had economic means - I think there would be very little debate over whether lockdowns work. So surely the conclusion there is that they DO work and CAN work. The problem is that it was managed so poorly by our government - who had run hospitals to the ground even prior to Covid. They then dithered throughout the whole thing and made things far worse. So now we have people hating the government AND hating the science because of what they did.

And fully, fully agree with trust erosion. THAT is so sad.