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.

" many comorbidities that even a cold can make them dangerously ill. Which is why they’re clogging up our hospitals"

Absolutely nothing to do with the vaccine mandates for care workers of course.

@purpledalmation if it was targeting children yes of course we would have a different attitude. But COVID was unpleasant but harmless to the healthy, we had it, all it gave us was a few interesting tik toks of DH and DS eating weird things they couldn't taste.

We had a vehicle for a rapidly producible vaccine and an elderly population at risk who could be easily isolated from the healthy before it was given.

Instead we risked the MH and economic stability of the country to save them, whilst we did a full clinical trial. DH even participated in it, not one of the participant was elderly and they still had it as a double blind trial.

I am a scientist with multiple letters after my name, I signed the Great Barrington Declaration at the time.

What we need to learn is at times of an emergency scientific principles and ethics can't always be meet.

We should have thrown the ethics out the window made it illegal for the vulnerable (and households containing them) to leave the house at all. We should have tested the vaccine with challenge trials (even DH a fellow scientist would have chanced it for the right amount of money) even if it goes against scientific ethics and morals. I'm all for removing humans rights from prisoners or offering them reduce sentence to participate in risky clinical trials.

As a country we need to now in times of calm come up with a plan of what we as a country are willing to accept in terms of deaths plus risk before the next pandemic.

Quarantine is not a new concept. We've been spoilt because we've had vaccines and antibiotics so infectious diseases haven't been able to regularly curtail daily life the way they once did. But our grandparents regularly quarantined and with new viruses coming out of the woodwork along with over crowding, water shortages, under resourced health care and antibiotic resistance, those days are ending for us privileged Western folk. Other generations knew how to live with death but they also knew how to live respectfully, giving communities the best chance of survival. We'll have to learn. It may be new to our generation but these issues are as old as time.

But kinda true!

I think everyone who doesn't think a lockdown should have happened should go and spend a fortnight in a simulated COVID ward with the projected numbers minus lockdown and a dwindling number of doctors. Then they should look around and see who is left to address those waiting lists. And I would be willing to hear why the trials and tribulations they went through were worse.

Simulated things aren’t real so that wouldn’t help, not one iota.

@Reindeersnooker playing pretend covid ward, really wouldn't be helpful 🙄

Modelling is great but you are assuming that if we didn't lockdown we would still have quarantined NHS staff. The reality would have been more NHS staff coming in infected if well enough and the elderly/vulnerable left at home to die not admitted for last chance care. You are comparing lockdown vs trying to care for everyone. The reality was lockdown vs letting it run through and burning the bodies left behind.

I'm not assuming that at all. I think you've misunderstood or mixed me up with someone else.

It's also not helpful to expect policy makers to go along with a portion of the electorate who think essentially "fuck it" is an acceptable strategy. In the same way that actually sitting with a fake crying baby through the night is a helpful reality check, it might be useful to have a look at what would really have been expected of the NHS if lockdowns were axed. It's ludicrous to suppose that there would have been a functioning health service delivering better care in those circumstances. But it seems like you had to be there to have an inkling of this and some posters would benefit from an insight.

None of us would really want to live in a society where we didn't protect our services and healthcare staff. Where we would have been the only overcrowded, urban country (almost) not to lock down. That ideology would have far reaching implications that haven't been thought through.

Well, this sounds plausible. Throw ethics out the window? Make it illegal for the vulnerable to leave their homes? Use prisoners as a testing source? From a supposed scientist, no less. (She does say she co-signed the Great Barrington Declaration, so ... there's that.)

@MichelleScarn

The lockdown wasn't as simple as that. It was lockdown so that IF someone caught covid, they MIGHT become very unwell with it and MIGHT need hospital care.. forcing people into social isolation which is against human rights for these ifs/mights was barbaric.

Hmm. Wasn't it suggested, though, that the elderly and vulnerable should do just that and let healthy people get on with things? Is it not barbaric then?

MichelleScarn here's a quote from you earlier:

"So why not just isolate those that it was a certainty for? Why did everyone have to lockdown and isolate. Surely it would be easier to coordinate and control such a lockdown than a blanket nationwide one?"

So I suppose it isn't barbaric for those people?

@Cuppasoupmonster

They’ve had their lives. They shouldn’t expect the rest of the country to come to standstill to prolong it for a few more years. Sadly choices have to be made as there isn’t an unlimited supply of money and resources, and the young should be prioritised over the old. I make no apology for thinking that, and it’s a view shared by my grandma as well.

A lot of the elderly I know feel this way too. They were quite happy to stay home and wanted the young and working people to go about their lives.

As we saw in the global response to Covid, this isn't how society responds to a pandemic. It doesn't choose who to prioritise and who to effectively kill. It protects the vulnerable as best it can with those who are healthy while resources are mobilised to find solutions and responses.

Your ambulance fantasy - "oh, I'm really unwell (or my 96 grandmother is) but is there a more needy child in the queue? Send it to them first!" (And or bed choice stupidity.) Bollocks. It just doesn't work that way. If your grandma is struggling to breathe, you call an ambulance. You are prioritised by the ambulance service. That's it.

And I have no time for 'the elderly were happy to stay home and die and wanted young people to live,' line that gets trotted out all the time. It's just so self-serving. You just wanted to go out, and were annoyed at all the old, at risk people standing in your way.

@MeetPi "So why not just isolate those that it was a certainty for? Why did everyone have to lockdown and isolate. Surely it would be easier to coordinate and control such a lockdown than a blanket nationwide one?"

Nursing homes did just this.
The vulnerable were kept isolated and without outside visitors. They had minimum contact with anyone.
They could wave at their relatives through the window.
Some staff slept/lived on the premises for days at a time.

Clients with dementia found this hard to understand. They received minimum mental/social stimulation. Some deteriorated mentally very rapidly.

www.alzheimers.org.uk/news/2020-07-30/lockdown-isolation-causes-shocking-levels-decline-people-dementia-who-are-rapidly

Some staff at care/nursing homes said they believed clients 'died of loneliness'.

This is a situation where 'you're damned if you do and damned if you don't'.

@Grumpybutfunny

What a hideous sounding proposal. And very interesting that the Great Barrington Declaration was lauded by groups like ReformUK. Stinks of eugenics. Also signed by the likes of Karol Sikora who knows nothing but is out make a name for himself.

No one should be forced into isolation if they don’t want it. Even elderly and those with underlying conditions. Unless you live in a communal space like a care home, where certain rules might apply due to their very vulnerable condition.

BUT it should have just been strongly advised for those living on their own to limit contact but ultimately let it be their choice.

Otherwise healthy people should have been totally left alone and advised not to visit older relatives if they have cold-like symptoms.

The authorities didn’t trust the plebs to take simple precautions on their own and placed draconian rules not based on anything and didn’t work anyway.

I won’t trust them ever again. They knew who was vulnerable and who wasn’t with the cruise ship data but operated on what ifs instead of the actual data. Unforgivable.

GBD was sensible and the John Snow will someday be derided as anti-scientific and fear-mongering.

Florida explicitly followed it after the initial lockdown and did no worse than other American states who did lockdowns. And we’ve already referenced Sweden.

@MintyFreshOne

Sensible? Sponsored by the AIER who are also keen on a bit of climate denial. What a surprise. And with Trump also a big fan.

Its been widely dismissed as genocide. But if that’s what you want for the world - you crack on. Thankfully most will see it as unethical.

@MintyFreshOne

And you’ve just given oxygen to someone upthread who said this:

We should have thrown the ethics out the window made it illegal for the vulnerable (and households containing them) to leave the house at all.

And then said : remove human rights from prisoners and get them to participate in clinical trials.

Where are we? Germany 1940?

“I'm all for removing humans rights from prisoners or offering them reduce sentence to participate in risky clinical trials”

Says an apparent co signer of the Great Barrington Declaration. Jesus.

“I'm all for removing humans rights from prisoners or offering them reduce sentence to participate in risky clinical trials”

Ah, Good Morning Dr Mengele, what brings you here? Looking for some twins perhaps?

@ClarathecrosseyedLioness

And I mean - why not just lump the vulnerable in with the prisoners too. In fact - the vulnerable ones who have illegally left the house MIGHT well be in with the prisoners.

Absolutely disgusting.

@MinkyGreen

Spare me. You’ll not find anything like what that anonymous poster wrote in the GBD (who knows if s/he had anything to do with it).

It is based on our previous knowledge of pandemics, and avoided measures such as travel bans and quarantining the healthy.

It was about focussed protection and letting the healthy go about their business—it limits the overall harms to society and won’t totally sink the economy or impact children’s education.

Did you read that article about Uganda? Lockdowns have erased TEN years of progress in poverty reduction. All unnecessary. Angered people so much that they won’t do lockdowns with Ebola … that’s how bad the experience was.

So unclutch those pearls and address the actual issues instead of beating that strawman over and over again.

Big difference between convicted prisoners being in clinical trials of a safe vaccine and what happened at Auschwitz. Using prisoners for clinical trials is no different to America who thankfully use the death penalty. It a shame we don't have the death penalty but that a whole different discussion.

Imprisoning the elderly at home with the threat of fines or prison time is no different to what we did to people infected with COVID. Just instead of imprisoning those at risk we imprisoned the healthy for two weeks. How is it more acceptable to imprison a 5 year old child because mammy got flu but it's not acceptable to imprison Doris so who has multiple health conditions that make her vulnerable to the virus whilst the 5 year old has non and a sniffle. We gave more rights to the elderly (I.e the right to be safe from a virus) by removing the freedoms and education of children.