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.

Except for the delivery drivers who delivered stuff to the laptop class. The people who worked in the Amazon warehouses. I wonder if that will be remembered now they are voting to strike.

Well they were pointless. The problems with the NHS that we were told that they were needed for are just happening now anyway. All they did was kick the can down the road, cause lots of harm, and solve nothing.

The worst COVID wave was over before the first lockdown. We should have done what had long been accepted guidance - protect the vulnerable and everyone else get on with it. Instead we sent infected old people into nursing homes and destroyed the economy.

Lockdowns were very badly handled. And people misread their purpose. They were designed to pace the virus not eliminate it. So far more thought should have been given to the impact on children who had little socialisation for two years. When you are 6, that's 33% of your life. or to young adults, heading off to uni, getting into deep debt, only to have a couple of hours' Zoom a week and shitty sandwiches posted through their dorm doors.

Some unis treated students like prisoners. Mental health wasn't taken into account. We now have distrastorus levels of anxiety, social lack of cohesion, anger, impatience, isolation and grief.

I can barely face thinking about the final year of my dad's life, alone in a strange hospital miles from his home, refused any visitors, not even my mum, with staff too busy to hold a phone to his ears so we couldn't even talk to him. He felt utterly abandoned before his death. Everyone has such a story.

In retrospect, I don't think lockdowns worked though I completely supported them at the time. I think they stored up a new set of longer lasting problems. We should have made sure vulnerable people were very safe, giving choice to the elderly as to whether they'd prefer quality of life over longevity, and then gone about daily life as usual but with sensible approaches to air circulation, hand sanitation, masks etc, as we did post lockdown.

And I found Covid a lot less scary than the removal of liberties, closing schools and places of work etc by the government on a whim. It was and remains not a life threatening illness for most people. The problem were the volumes. It wasn’t Ebola

I completely agree with all you say, and so sorry to hear about your dad. There was simply no sense of balance and the damage some of the “measures” were doing. Things like taping off park benches, moving on people sitting on grass alone in the fresh air, and of course preventing poor people from seeing their loved ones when they really needed them. The first lockdown may be excusable - the others, no way.

If you look at countries like Brazil, where the government took fairly minimal action, the death toll was horrific (and likely under-reported).

I'm sorry but this is incorrect. What would have happened is that thousands of people would have died because there would have been too many infections for our hospital staff and equipment to deal with at any one time. Go back and look at the footage from Italy in February/early March 2020.

The problems now are complex in cause:
The NHS had been chronically underfunded and mismanaged by the Tories since they came to power. The service was struggling before spring of 2020 ( look at the rising graphs of 26/52 week waits pre 2020). Added to this is that people either couldn't or wouldn't (due to fear) access treatment in a timely manner for a range of conditions which is now causing a backlog of more complex cases. Additionally the service is haemorrhaging clinical staff (Brexit, pay, stress - a range of factors).
COVID has contributed obviously to all of this but it's simply untrue to say that the problems now are down to lockdown.

And Uni students who were living together in groups of more than 6 (i.e. flats of 8, 10 or 12 etc) weren't allowed to go out together in a group of more than 6, not even for a walk, and certainly not in Uni bars/cafes. Uni security staff would break up such groups, even when presented with evidence (key fobs etc) that they were living together as a household!

Lockdown destroyed the economy and people's sanity. Also, literally ANYONE who questioned how necessary they were were leapt on by the mob who called them conspiracy theorists by saying that anyone who wasn't a tory government approved scientist wasn't allowed to have an opinion.

I don't for a minute think that any of this stuff was necessary or appropriate but people were bloody terrified. An invisible life-threatening virus, spread by social interactions. No effective treatment, no vaccines and no way of knowing who would be the lucky ones with mild symptoms or who would die.... We have to look at the actions taken in the context of the time. I agree the taping off of park benches and moving people on in parks was unnecessary, but I can understand the intentions behind them at the time.

So what evidence based approach do you think should have been adopted in Spring 2020? The circumstances being thus: a brand new virus, no human immunity, overwhelming amounts of people attempting to access hospitals in the early waves in places like China and Italy, no vaccines, no effective treatment, not enough lifesaving equipment for all that would need it.
The only tool on our box at that time was to limit the number of infectious. This being a virus transmitted via social interactions, we had to limit them. It was bloody shit for all of us and the impact will be felt for years to come.

But what do you think should have been done instead?

People were terrified because mass propaganda wanted them to be terrified. There was a deliberate campaign to terrify.

I thought the data had proved that lock downs were pointless.

Only if you think that dying from Covid was worse than any of the harms that lockdowns have caused. I don’t.

aishah231 how exactly would you have protected old people and let everyone else get on with it? Who would have worked in nursing homes and would al their kids have to have stayed home from school? Who would have looked after then? We are an integrated society and you can’t isolate a large demographic with high care needs from everyone else.

There will be more pandemics. What used to be a once in 100 year event will be more common as we now have 10x the global population and rising. The thing about Covid is that there was disagreement over the need for a lockdown because it was bad but not too bad, the death rate was <2% in all but the oldest age groups. As soon as there is a pandemic with a 20% death rate or even a 5% death rate, or one where there is a high death rate among children, everyone except conspiracy theorists and people who deny reality will agree that another lockdown is needed until we can effectively treat/vaccinate. People who say it will never happen again are naive. There’s probably an even chance of it happening again in our lifetimes and a high chance within our children’s lifetimes.

I fully supported and would continue to support the first one. We didn’t know. The second long one (technically the third?), and particularly the restrictions on outdoor meeting and on young children and the second school closures - those were unforgivable.

Would help if people stopped going on about it and making more posts!

@MichaelFabricantWig I'm sorry you find yourself in a situation where you would rather be dead and I sincerely hope that life improves for you.

While on both personal and societal levels we face many daunting challenges, I'm glad to be around to face them. I think most people would rather be alive having survived a shit time than dead.

Tired of the bullshit retrospective narrative and collective amnesia about the danger that COVID posed. Nobody is saying that it won't impact in the same way that global catastrophies will always do. But it was necessary to save lives at the time and isn't that what a civilised society should do? Act collectively to protect the weak and vulnerable in the best way it knows how?

The problem with this analysis is that restrictions also kill, which we knew at the time as well. It was always a value judgement about who to prioritise. I have no objection to people preferring to prioritise one group over another, but don't be under any illusion that there was any option that didn't involve protecting some of the weak and vulnerable at the expense of others.

I'm not sure they were pointless but I do think they went on for far too long. I also don't trust that "80% of the public agreed" when we were scared into submission.

I know very very few people who obeyed the rules after the first few months.

@SirMingeALot I understand your point about value judgements but respectfully disagree.
Had COVID been allowed to simply run it's course without intervention, the sheer numbers would have meant that a horrific number of young healthy 'economically productive ' lives would have been lost. We know this from the evidence of the very early first waves in places like Italy and iran. Yes, we saved lives of the elderly and clinically vulnerable but many many more were also saved. Governments all over the world acted with this in mind. Covid in early 2020 was a brand new virus to which humanity had no immunity, no real evidence based treatment and with unknown potential morbidity and mortality.

I think it's clear will only be with hindsight and years of excess deaths statistics that we will know the long term effects of the actions taken. And even then, we will need to assess the impact of population health pre pandemic, and the state of our health and social care infrastructure pre and post pandemic etc etc. But nobody had this knowledge at the time.

There was so much we didn't know.
It took a long time to prove that it was airborne (how could it not be?)

Its infection rate and incubation period before symptoms were, and arguably are, a major problem, as those who are able to spread are usually still unaware of their own illness.

The asymptomatic anomalies were undiscovered but meaningful to environments like transport, and the Diamond Princess.

It appears to be a respiratory illness but the clots, neurological elements, and heart problems are other manifestations (that are still very quick in the scheme of deterioration, and poorly explained).

What treatments did we have? Oxygen? Nearly ran out of that in some hospital locations, if you remember. Ventilators? Nowhere near enough and not something you can free up for a new patient easily. Then the discovery that the CPAP was less brutal and perhaps offered more hope. Basically, the discovery that turning a patient onto their front might end up being slightly more successful, which is not a lot...But treatments, cures? So prevention, and prevention of health services' and supplier chains' total collapse, was not stupid.

There was a lot of data to compare in this article, from a time when social distancing and soap were more or less the only interventions in the picture and medical care had large numbers and wavering success rates:
www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-cities-flattened-curve-1918-spanish-flu-pandemic-coronavirus/

This is basically you giving reasons for your value judgement about who to prioritise. Which is fine but doesn't refute my point at all.

And it just isn't correct to say we didn't know, indeed in some of the previous disaster planning work lockdown had been dismissed because of things we knew about the risks. Lucy Easthope on twitter is very good on this.

It wasn't new information in March 2020 that there existed abusers who lived with their victims, that restricting access to healthcare would mean some people's problems wouldn't be picked up and that there would eventually be deaths because of this, that humans in forced solitary don't do well, that access to green space and places to exercise is very unevenly spread across the population and that not moving robs years off lives, that there are people who are very reliant on the rhythms of normal life happening for their welfare... none of this was new information. It just wasn't part of the narrative at the time. Because of the value judgements that were made

You're absolutely correct on your point that we'll only fully understand this in years to come, which is very much my stance too. But if we think that, we can't conclude that it was necessary on welfare grounds at this stage (necessary on political grounds is different).

One element that I hope doesn’t get forgotten is the fact that lockdowns involved children and young people sacrificing so much for older people. Schools shut, playgrounds taped off, uni students with no face to face teaching and no social opportunities etc. All for a virus that was very very unlikely to severely affect them. And this was all done in the name of protecting the vulnerable (ie mainly older people).

Yet, anytime it’s tentatively suggested that the older generations might need to make a generational sacrifice it’s immediately shouted down. Time to end the triple lock on pensions? Nope, cant possibly do that despite the tax burden associated with the triple lock being untenable. Cut down on flights so that today’s children don’t inherit a burning uninhabitable planet? Nope, can’t do that when there’s multiple holidays and cruises to go on.

I think when history looks back at the covid era the generational aspects will be a key focus.