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.

The fact that we never had an across the board full sick pay scheme, when you think of all the money there was available to be pissed away on so much other covid related stuff, is inexcusable.

Indeed, no surprise at all that people continued to go to work when they had symptoms or had tested positive for covid, when they'd not get paid if they stayed off. Absolutely criminal that the Govt could use taxpayers money to pay 80% furlough to millions of healthy people for months/years to stay off work, but not enhanced statutory sick pay to those with covid to stay off work and help stop the spread! What's the point in spunking money on millions of healthy people to do nothing and yet not paying genuinely ill/poor people doing essential work to stay off work for just a couple of weeks. It's madness.

The stories that it was mild and an over reaction is untrue, I have friends who worked in the NHS in this period it was terrifying

I never supported it and didn't bother with most of the rules and guidance. I knew right from the beginning that, further down the line, we (and our children) would all be paying a huge, terrible price, and yep that's happening, in so many ways.

Totally agree, this was me from the start

I don't think they were pointless. The first one was probably needed in a crisis situation.

But we were kept locked up in Scotland for so much longer, it was over 2 years, masks weren't dropped until April 2022. TWO YEARS of guilt tripping "just because you can doesn't mean you should", and being banned from leaving your local council area. The longer it went on, the more disproportionate it was.

That's what lots of people have an issue with. That we were forced to give up 2 years of normal life, and if you voiced that you were having difficulties, you were a selfish covidiot.

Whether the lockdowns were the right policy or whether they will result in more deaths / illness / financial cost in the long run is impossible to prove one way or the other because there were lockdowns.

Yes you cite the examples of countries like Sweden but there will never be hard evidence so ultimately it comes down to subjective opinions.

But returning to OPs original post and having read the posts shown here and regardless of our views on the rights and wrongs of lockdowns I do think that the popular narrative that the lockdowns and restrictions were essential and supported by the majority of the population is slowly changing. Many now are questioning why have we done a complete 360, why no measures are now being taken, what was the point of it all and was there an overreaction panic at the time.

I strongly believe that this narrative will gain ground in the coming years and a key player in spreading this narrative will be the presidential candidate Rob DeSantis who will use the absence of lockdowns as a key component / message of his presidential campaign.

Lots of children now are paying the price of covid. I have a four year old. Him and the other kids he mixed with throughout lockdown are healthy and robust. The ones who were 'kept safe' have one health problem after another and it's not a coincidence. Bronchitis, endless bugs and colds, viral infections, sickness. It's so sad.

Never agreed with any of it but I live with a data analyst who worked on the same programs as Neil Ferguson and a friend works on the ICU in our local hospital, husband worked all the way through and due to his job works in fitted respiration masks and where I live we have 5 nursing homes and 80 percent over 60 and we have had no deaths with or from covid! But we have had 12 due to lockdowns!

I think the pandemic planning severely backfired and has caused mistrust. If we got a very deadly infection like say Ebola but more infectious, I worry how many people would actually believe the government and comply. COVID was very mild for the mass majority of the population.

You're saying your area has zero COVID fatalities have you seen statistical evidence of that? How big is the area?

This worries me too.

Partygate was sooooo damaging in that respect. Whatever one's feelings on lockdown, it's clear that levels of trust in the government in March 2020 were pretty high, and indeed through most of both lockdowns there was public support. Those in the heart of power clearly didn't think covid was enough of a risk and/or that restrictions were sufficiently effective to bother observing them, and then even those Tories who didn't attend events mostly spent months trying to minimise and pretend it didn't matter. That erodes public trust in politicians trying to take health measures.

I think it's a very good thing that there won't be any more covid restrictions, but we have potentially another two years of a government so utterly compromised that they're not going to be able to engage in any substantive public health messaging at all. That's very risky.

Also, because nobody consented in advance to lengthy lockdowns comprising months, it was only ever a few weeks at a time, there wouldn't be trust about the duration again. There was a thread in AIBU the other day where someone mentioned wanting a two week circuit breaker in schools cos of strep A etc. That's a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but one is that nobody would actually believe the two week part. There's going to have to be a lot more water under the bridge before the public will give any credence to that sort of promise from a politician again.

But returning to OPs original post and having read the posts shown here and regardless of our views on the rights and wrongs of lockdowns I do think that the popular narrative that the lockdowns and restrictions were essential and supported by the majority of the population is slowly changing. Many now are questioning why have we done a complete 360, why no measures are now being taken, what was the point of it all and was there an overreaction panic at the time.

From what I can see, for England the centre ground seems to be that the first lockdown was essential or at least justified, it should've been lifted earlier and the tiers system/other pissing about in the 2nd half of 2020 was stupid. Then opinion is a bit more mixed on the 2021 lockdown, and people aren't bothered enough about the brief return of Plan B in winter 2021-22 to talk much about it.

I think also virtually nobody actually defends the more obviously stupid and cruel policies like single householders having no legal right to other human contact in the 1st lockdown, primary school aged kids being the only group functionally excluded from socialisation in the 2021 lockdown etc: but then that's not really about lockdown as such because it would've been perfectly possible to tweak most of those policies and still lock down.

Don't hear much about Wales and NI on here and the stuff about Scotland is more critical I would say. But this is just what I've read.

I completely supported and still support the two main lockdowns, even though I was expected to go into work without a vaccination even when they were available. The lockdowns gave scientists chance to develop vaccines and restricted the spread of what is a pretty unpleasant virus with far reaching consequences. I think furlough went on far, far too long though.

For those who say they wouldn’t ever accept a lockdown again, all it will take if for a new virus to affect sufficient children, teenagers or people of working age, plenty of photos in the media of full hospitals and morgues and you would be supporting a lockdown. Think Spanish Flu or the like!

There's always someone who says this.

In reality, lots of us can see that in the event of whatever escalated virus situation you've come up with, we wouldn't have a lockdown because lockdown requires lots of people to work outside the home to keep society functioning. Not just the obvious things like NHS, utilities infrastructure, care workers, food chain etc, but also people in jobs that kept the population pacified like Amazon and Deliveroo drivers. Those people can't be so scared that they stop working, or it's game over. If there were morgues full of children, what on earth makes you think parents would go out to work? What we would actually have in that situation is widespread social instability.

For lockdown to work to the extent it did in 2020 and 2021, the threat needed not only to be high enough to make most of the population change their behaviour, but also low enough not to frighten people into refusing to work and completely lose their shit. Any scenario that doesn't tick both of these boxes is a scenario that will be understood by plenty of us not to be conducive to a successful lockdown.

I did NOT support the second or third lockdown You supported the length of the lockdowns but not the length of the furlough that went with them.

Okay, I supported lockdowns (and furlough) from March 2020 until February 2021. I still do as I believe they saved lives. Once the vaccinations were available and taken up by the most vulnerable, there was less need and certainly no one should have been paid not to work by May 2021 unless they were in a vulnerable group waiting for the vaccine. That is with the benefit of hindsight though.

There is a lot of talk on here on how you would NEVER tolerate another lockdown. Yes, you would, especially if you were in the at risk group. The panic over Strep A has shown how that would happen. And whilst a country cannot completely shutdown, it can certainly go back to the levels seen in March 2020.

I really hope another lockdown is never needed (I’m not a ‘lockdown lover’ or whatever the inane phrase was) but we could and there might be a time when we must.

This idea you have that being in a greater risk group means a person must support lockdown is complete bollocks, though. There are people who were high risk who didn't agree with the ones we'd previously had even before they'd experienced them, just as there were people who were themselves low risk who did. It's a ridiculous generalisation.

It's also very far from a certainty that the country can ever go back to March 2020 style lockdown. I assume it's a given that it couldn't happen in the near future, especially not with the current shower, but further into the future there's just no point being so absolute. We really don't know, particularly as we don't yet fully understand the implications of the ones we've just had.

What we do know is that for 2020 and 2021 style lockdowns to function, a lot of factors need to fall into place. Changing one of the at risk groups (and the panic over Strep A clearly goes nowhere near the population showing any signs of supporting a lockdown over it) doesn't mean all the other factors stay the same.

But given that most people are selfish (the me and mine narrative), it does have an impact if a virus affects you and yours. Anyway, I do (and did) support lockdown to save lives whilst we found out about a novel virus, but I understand others did support it and now don’t, or never did.

Fingers crossed there are no further pandemics in our lifetimes so we don’t have to see who is right!

Selfishness has an impact doesn't come remotely close to indicating that a person at higher risk would support a future lockdown though. For one thing it tells us nothing about their priorities and what they consider their self interest to be. Some higher risk people living alone in 2020 and 2021 felt they'd prefer to take their chances than weather the isolation, for example. It also doesn't address whether those same higher risk people think another lockdown would actually work. If they don't, that further complicates the question of what they view as being in their best interests. Being at higher clinical risk doesn't stop a person from making their own value judgements.

Oh, come on! It has a massive impact. The people who broke lockdown did so for themselves (‘MY mental health’…MY family’s needs) as opposed to society’s needs. If the next virus affects the young and middle-aged, many of them will change their stance. They got off lightly with Covid so could afford to take risks.

Has anyone else seen the announcement not to make any unnessasary journeys tomorrow.

Yes, selfishness has a big impact on people's views. We agree on that. The problem is that you think your assessment of what a person's selfish interests are must be the same as theirs. And there's no basis for that at all.

Vulnerable Person A is afraid of death and selfishly wants restrictions to try and reduce their chance of dying of an illness. Vulnerable Person B has exactly the same health condition and prognosis but is more afraid of the isolation that comes with lockdown, so selfishly opposes restrictions. They're both making self-centred decisions based on their own priorities, it's just Person B hasn't made the assessment you think they would.

And if the next virus does affect a different cohort, you cannot simply assume that everything else will stay the same. Which is what you're essentially doing here when you say lockdown could definitely happen again, could be needed and would be supported by whichever groups might be most vulnerable then. Lockdown needs much more than scared people supporting it to happen, and indeed if too many of the wrong people get too scared, it becomes impossible because society will stop functioning.

No. Why is that?

Because of the ambulance strikes. In case of accidents