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.

I think the scary thing is a reluctance to accept death at the normal life expectancy. The average age of death for COVID was 84 which was higher than the total life expectancy. I worked throughout the pandemic as a HCP. On my ward we lost half our patients to COVID, on the surface that sounds awful but they were not expected to live much longer without COVID in the picture . It's common for people with progressive incurable conditions to die of pneumonia/flu.

I backed the first lockdown, I thought the subsequent ones were silly.

Agree it was incredible to be told by the government that we had to stay at home and we all did. Still blows my mind.

A relative was a doctor on the covid wards and by jan 2021 it was bad. Really bad. 10 adults in paediatric ward meant for 3 kids etc. They got very close to being overwhelmed and the system collapsing. So on balance I think the lockdowns probably were necessary.

What I cannot except is those that claim that we had no idea at the time of the subsequent impacts (mental health, economic etc) of the lockdowns and that all this is now with hindsight. It was clearly spelt out at the time and the majority of the population were fully supportive of the lockdowns, so presumably are now fully accepting of the consequences.

You're completely correct in your first sentence @1dayatatime but I think the second goes a bit too far.

It's true that we weren't completely innocent of the consequences in March 2020, and the narrative that we couldn't have known is actually quite a dangerous one.

However, I don't think we can say it was clearly spelt out at the time either. People would've had to look for the information, or at least be encouraged to think very critically about it, and that just wasn't happening in the mainstream. Politicians, mainstream media, they weren't doing it. The few voices who did say this weren't platformed, and in early March when the government didn't want a lockdown they made a complete bollocks of explaining or selling that approach. Then by the time the government decided on lockdown, they wanted to try and actively make more people fearful in order to increase compliance. We never as a society had the discussion about is the juice worth the squeeze, this is what lockdown is going to cost and where the money will have to come from if we do it. People would've had to be actively doing the work themselves.

@TheaBrandt but I think it depends where you are.
I know someone who was paid a lot of money to work in one of the nightingales and it had no patients at all during her shifts.

He came home from a night shift while we happened to be on a family zoom. He said it was like 7/7 every day but slowly they were getting dangerously close to not coping. Very senior and very low key undramatic person.

A bit like the government, a large proportion of that 80% (if that is even a real figure) supported lock downs for other people rather than themselves. Only 1 in 5 self isolated when they were asked to, so it seems support was rather half hearted.

Well, a lot of people never got covid until a long time after the initial lockdown, so plenty of time for minds and/or finances to change. But I think you touch on a good point here which is that there was a tendency for people to be more supportive of restrictions that they weren't going to bear the brunt of. People who go to pubs for a meal rather than to get drunk not understanding the impact on wet pubs, for example. And of course, not everyone's lockdown was equal. The people who made the rules and didn't include provision for people living on their own to have human contact, or make specific provision for people who were out exercising to be able to sit and rest so elderly and disabled people weren't functionally denied access, they weren't the ones who were going to suffer because of the lack of this provision.

Even now, people who eg want the return of mask rules often describe it as an easy win or similar, meaning they aren't people for whom masks are a problem or who might get lumbered with attempting to enforce it.

But they were pointless.

They did not eradicate the virus, only delayed the inevitable.

Politicians were not ''doing their best''. They were busy partying, ignoring the rules and making sure their mates made a lot of money out of Covid contracts and then there is Dido Harding...

Lockdowns destroyed businesses, wasted millions on furlough fraud and affected people's mental health really badly. Not to mention that people's immune systems weakened which is why we have kids and adults being so badly affected by bog standard viruses as a result.

There was a rational for giving a first lockdown a go but after that repeating something that simply did not work was madness.

The media failed to challenge the government rhetoric and what the lockdown showed as well is how scarily easy it was to control the population...

I should have added as well that many people were not diagnosed and treated properly and in time for other illnesses like cancer because all the focus and hysteria was on Covid and GPs not seeing patients. These people died needlessly.

Luckily my OH is still with us, but he was due to start chemotherapy the week when lockdowns were announced. He was phoned on the morning of the first session to be cancelled and told they'd get back to him to re-arrange. Weeks passed, he heard nothing. He phoned, only to constantly get an answerphone, he left numerous messages but no one got back to him. After around 2 months, he went in person to the oncology dept to find it closed. It was around July when he finally managed to make contact with someone (by phoning the hospital general switchboard and insisting they connect him to someone who was actually there, rather than the answerphone). Apparently, he'd "fallen through the cracks" and should have started his chemo the week after, but had been marked down as "FTA" and no one bothered either to tell him of that revised date nor to chase him up afterwards! Finally started his chemo in the August after having to have loads of tests again as the ones they did in February were out of date (x-rays, MRI scans, bone marrow sample, etc). Rather than a "total response" they were expecting from the chemo, he's now going to be on chemo drugs for the rest of his "shortened" life as the levels of cancer in his blood were too high to be "zapped" by the traditional/usual chemo course. All thanks to covid, well actually, the incompetence of the NHS who couldn't run a piss up in a brewery, covid just cancelled the first session, it was NHS administrators who cocked up not following up with revised treatment dates etc and the oncology dept who were apparently happy to "forget" him!

I'm sorry to hear about what happened to your husband. Obviously the NHS has to treat as many Covid patients as there are. So it made sense to reduce the numbers getting it because that would help to keep other services running. The incompetence issue is separate to the principle. Unfortunately the presence of Covid in the community made having chemotherapy much more risky for to impaired immune function while on it and while lockdowns mitigated this, sometimes chemo wasn't offered for this reason

due

I agree with this. The pandemic exposed just how bad we are a s a society at dealing with and accepting death. Old, frail people die. Of course it’s upsetting for their family and friends but it’s inevitable.

Yet, during covid, to suggest that the death of a frail 93 year old with multiple heath conditions was par for the course was unsayable. And any politician who dared suggest it wouldn’t have lasted a day longer in their job!

@Reindeersnooker

"I'm sorry, you don't seem to t have taken on board anything I have said about what waiting lists and services would have been with l without lockdown, except to say 'of course Im right and things would have been much better'. That doesn't stand up to any analysis which is why I suspect you haven't bothered.

If the child you mention is real, I'm so sorry for your loss. During Covid, patients with cancer symptoms were encouraged to come in and get checked as usual. The peak was flattened for just such a purpose."

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Firstly thank you for your kind thoughts on the parent with the suicidal child and whilst it is not my child, the child and mother are sadly very real and I suspect that there many others in a similar situation.

You are right of course that it is impossible to say what waiting lists would be like right now had there been no lockdowns because there were lockdowns. Similarly it is impossible to say how many more Covid deaths would have occurred had there been no lockdowns because there were lockdowns. Or similarly what the mental health situation, or economic situation or cancer and cardiovascular deaths would now be had there been no lockdowns.

Ultimately it is a subjective opinion as to whether the long term cost to society including excess deaths as a result of the lockdowns and other covid measures is greater or less than the short term cost to society including excess deaths had there been no lockdowns.

It is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that cancer patients were encouraged to come in and get there symptoms checked. Whilst this might be correct the reality was that cancer referrals by GPs were significantly down and many patients with symptoms were either too scared or didn't want to burden the NHS to get an undiagnosed symptom checked out. Such that the number of excess deaths now is actually higher than during the pandemic:

www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-are-excess-deaths-higher-now-than-during-covid/

That's related to the messaging the government pursued once lockdown had been implemented. It's all very well saying that cancer screening should still be available, but if people are deliberately frightened as a matter of policy, some of them are going to be too afraid to seek healthcare.

many patients with symptoms were either too scared or didn't want to burden the NHS to get an undiagnosed symptom checked out.

Surely this would only have been exacerbated by the absence of a lockdown? The NHS was stretched to breaking point at that time and the lockdown brought deaths down allowing them to treat other conditions. If nothing else, the lockdown partly got rid of flu for the season, sparing the NHS from having to deal with both.

I agree there are many unknowns but I think we can agree that the first lockdown artificially shortened the period of highest mortality rates to a relatively brief peak. It would not have come down at that time without it.

I have tried to look back. At the first lockdown did we know it was only airborne? Did we know it would not spread of surfaces? If we didn’t know one way or the other maybe the playground stuff and wearing disposable gloves when filling car with petrol made more sense.

I’m not sure how quickly we knew it was less severe in children - RSV for example affects younger children more.

It's well accepted that you have peaks and troughs as a matter of course. Covid would have peaked and started to fall even without lockdowns - that's how they work. There's no way of knowing how much higher the peak would have been without lockdowns. I think the majority of people would have taken their own precautions anyway, to some extent, without being told to stay indoors.

The length and severity of the lockdowns/restrictions were absolutely ridiculous. I can just about accept the need for lockdowns, but there was certainly no need for them to last so long with restrictions (often nonsensical) lasting months. We should have opened things up a lot quicker than we did, and the damage would have been a lot less, i.e. fewer business failures, fewer redundancies, fewer lost homes, fewer suicides, and much reduced cost to the taxpayer!

As for the tiers system - what baffoon thought they'd work? They completely forgot that some people have to travel between areas for work, family commitments, healthcare, etc., so banning people from mixing in one area, when it was allowed just a few miles away was absurd.

Made worse by GP surgeries actively discouraging patients from contacting them!

Ours had "keep out" signs all over it, the reception doors were locked, yellow/black hazard tape across them, etc. If you dared to phone, you had about 5 minutes of pre-recorded message telling you only to contact them if absolutely necessary, etc. If you were brave enough to persist, you'd almost certainly get fobbed off by the GP with an antibiotic prescription (funny how they were suddenly happy to prescribe them after years of reluctance!).

My OH needed medical attention several times at the start of the lockdowns - he has cancer and his chemo was cancelled, but he had numerous instances of health problems at the time as he was immuno-compromised due blood cancer. The lack of any serious attention or care from his GP surgery was criminal - all they wanted to do was fob him off, time and time again.

The peak tended to occur about three weeks after the lockdown, didn't it? There seems to have been a pretty obvious correlation I think. A higher peak would have overwhelmed the NHS further so I'm glad we can agree the need for a lockdown. In relation to the timing and tier system, I honestly don't have an informed view.

I don't think we can assume that people would have taken their own precautions though - that would have left the rich able to do so and those who needed to be at work (not key workers) at risk. At least we were able to have a clear cut furlough this way.

What good is that? Without the chemo many people's chance of survival is a lot lower. I'm sure many would have liked the choice to start chemo and isolate Vs it's too late and the cancer has spread. People's agency was taken away, GPs barricaded themselves in.

Surely this would only have been exacerbated by the absence of a lockdown?

Not sure we can assume that. Part of the policy our government opted to pursue when they chose to lock down was deliberately trying to frighten people to change their behaviour- see bottom of pg 1 below.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/882722/25-options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22032020.pdf

It would be really difficult to tease out how much of the fear was because of the disease per se and how much the messaging and coverage.

Nope if you look at the data for each of the peaks they correspond to around a week before the lockdowns.
Not even the very first peak corresponded to the date of lockdown, it was around a week before (taking the fact it took on average a week from infection to symptoms, then another week to serious illness/hospitalisation (If it was going to happen) and an average of another week until death.)
During that first lockdown the focus was very much on deaths and while its true they took a couple of weeks to start dropping, the actual infections had started dropping before lockdown was implemented.

But surely that was because people had started staying home and had seen the news from Italy?

Yes, indeed, people had already started to take their own precautions, which kinds of supports the view that draconian restrictions weren't actually needed.

People are more than capable of making their own choices, and had the Govt provided the facility for people to stay off work either if sick or ECV via an enhanced statutory sick pay scheme, we could have saved billions of pounds that was spent on paying healthy/young people not to work by supporting the most vulnerable and letting everyone else get on with life, with lighter restrictions.