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.

Only if done China-style.

They lock you in your house, or the building you happen to be in at the time they raid (shopping in ikea), cart you and your kids off to isolation (separately of course) if you have covid, and don't even think burning to death in a fire is a good enough excuse to leave home in a lockdown.

I don't think anyone ever disagreed that forcing people to live in entire isolation for a month would stop a virus from spreading. It's just that noone wants to live that way. The Chinese had to riot to make their government stop torturing them.

They were pointless. I worked in a service station and families were coming in for coffee a frappes when they should have been at home.

We were horrendously busy

Oh one positive about lockdown. London was deserted on the streets. Was amazing walking about in the middle of the day and hardly seeing anyone rather than having to walk around people etc.

Walking along the wobbly bridge and Thames during the day without a bazillion people stopping to take pictures.

No chuggars trying to flog you something.

And homeless people were housed. Shame that bit didn’t last.

Exactly. As per my previous post, the question with any lockdown that's been observed enough to get contacts down is whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

I supported them at the time and followed all the guidelines but now with hindsight, it was really quite horrific especially allowing people to die alone in hospital and restricting funerals. I had my daughter during the first lockdown and found the time alone in hospital really traumatic as well as the lack of support available afterwards (both from family and from the health service).

They had a huge impact on mental health for lots of different reasons and I think there's a bit of collective/mass trauma at play. Lockdowns may be over but I don't think things feel the same anymore and not sure they will ever go back to 'normal'.

I think some, people forget why we had a lockdown in the first place ,it was to,prevent the.NHS from being overwhelmed ,imagine if the .NHS,had got overwhelmed,there would have been far more deaths for starters,nobody getting even basic treatment
there were certainly mistakes made and some of the restrictions made no.sense but ,March 2020 was a scary time and the scenes coming out of Italy were terrifying,hindsight is a wonderful,thing, it's easy to look back now,life is more or less normal for most people,and say lockdown,should never have happened ,but what was the alternative?

Short initial lockdowns, yes, were necessary. But we were still suffering harsh restrictions when the number of people in hospital had fallen drastically, and even when daily covid deaths were in double figures. That was ridiculous. It was as if they were trying to achieve zero covid, which was never going to happen with open borders! How on Earth they allowed plane fulls of people to come and go (we all saw the pictures apparently of "essential workers") when the police were fining people for sitting having a flask on a park bench and Uni students were barriered into their Uni halls by security guards?

Yes I agree it went on far,to long ,and yes not closing the borders but having very punitive ,restrictions,were contradictory,also closing schools for the second time ,but sudden!t every man and his dog was a key worker was questionable,schools either needed to close in January 2021 or they didn't .

@x2boys

"I think some, people forget why we had a lockdown in the first place ,it was to,prevent the.NHS from being overwhelmed ,imagine if the .NHS,had got overwhelmed,there would have been far more deaths for starters,nobody getting even basic treatment
there were certainly mistakes made and some of the restrictions made no.sense but ,March 2020 was a scary time and the scenes coming out of Italy were terrifying,hindsight is a wonderful,thing, it's easy to look back now,life is more or less normal for most people,and say lockdown,should never have happened ,but what was the alternative?"

++++

I don't think I was ever clear why we had a lockdown in the first place. The rationale kept changing. Firstly it was a short breaker to "flatten the sombrero" to keep cases down, then it was to stop the MHS being overwhelmed until things like the nightingale hospitals could come on line, then it was stop hundreds of thousands from dying, then it was to stop granny being killed.

As for how many would have died if there had been no or less lockdowns this is impossible to show as there were lockdowns, equally it is impossible to say how many more would have died if there had been no lockdowns or shorter / less lockdowns or equally how many lives could have been saved if the lockdowns were longer or more strict as in China. It is all a matter of opinion now.

I have to push back strongly against the notion that it easy to say lockdowns should have been shorter / less of with hindsight. Many many people were pointing this out at the time but were shut down as Covid deniers/ anti vax or selfish granny killers.

Lastly you ask what was the alternative? Again this is a matter of personal opinion with no way of knowing what the outcome would have been. Personally I would have stuck with the first lockdown for the time it was originally stated to be for. Then I would have introduced guidance and support for the elderly and vulnerable to stay at home. Then I would have ensured that state sick pay was enhanced and extended to cover all workers. But to lockdown an entire society when the majority were not at risk was both madness, damaging to the healthy, sacrificed an entire generation of children and young people and economically crippling as we are now seeing.

But that is just a personal opinion with no means of showing what the downsides of such an approach would have been.

The initial lockdown was sold as a means of spacing out the spread of infections somewhat and to give the NHS time to prepare. NHS got pretty rapidly with it in terms of redeployment, discharging anyone they possibly could etc... but by then the terror had been ramped up so much that the mood was loud people baying for longer and harder. We (collectively - many countries made a similar error) restricted ourselves into a corner we couldn't get out of - and I have to say - we let the loudmouth lockdown lovers bully any dissent into quiet enclaves of resistance - and we're seeing it now with people trying to silence any discussion of lockdown harms on here - the harms have been fucking colossal, catastrophic to many people - including some incredibly vulnerable sections of society. It's important that BOTH sides are allowed an equal contribution to any reflection and discussion of how things are handled so that we have a better knowledge base to deal with whenever Mother Nature/Chinese Government/US and UK Fiddling About With Shit decides to deal us another infection to manage with.#

I think lockdowns proved that our thoughts that we could somehow outsmart a virus were incredibly arrogant and naïve.

I think we did outsmart it to a certain extent in that we avoided the scenes such as were being played out in Italy. The people who moan about the lockdown are always people who didn't see the inside of a hospital during this period but would have expected to get in there if they'd needed one.

Anyone remember the long queues outside supermarkets, yet when you went inside it became like normal, with people in every direction.
Fucking pointless. Just like blocking off every other public toilet and sink.

Yes crazy people couldn’t go to a park, yet airports were open and people were trusted to isolate. Made no sense. Much of it really looking back.

They were wrong - had we had a short month fine as a circuit break fine just to assess but the extended lockdowns and the narrative on protecting the elderly was totally wrong. We have created a huge problem for the young. The care homes should have just shut their doors, the guilt tripping of the population was appalling. It has made many intolerant of the elderly an old an I don't blame them as they threw the young under the bus.

It wasn't to protect the elderly it was to protect the NHS,and contrary,to popular belief lots of people who were considered clinically extremely vulnerable,were not 80+ sitting waiting to ,die,my dh,was classed as CEV,because he was diagnosed with Diabetes,just prior to the pandemic he was 46 at the time.
I do agree it went on far to long though.

Your post is appalling. The elderly, as you refer to them, threw nobody under a bus. They did not have decision making powers about policy. You should know better.

You should also recognise that care homes don't have a choice to just close their doors. Care homes went above and beyond in circumstances that placed them at the bottom of the pecking order. A great deal of suffering went on in care homes amongst workers and staff who couldn't get an ambulance.

Don't forget that numbers of Covid were kept down because any higher and we'd have been leaving people to die of Covid and anything else, old or young. You can't argue with that.

I wasn't scared and no one I knew was scared, not even pensioner relatives. Everyone resented the lockdowns. Most people I knew/met ignored them as much as they could.

It was collective madness and I said the same on here right from the start.

That's irrelevant. You or your relatives would probably have broken a sweat if you couldn't breathe and, crucially, you would have wanted medical care. The fact that you were as non compliant as possible illustrates why an obligatory lockdown was required - the alternative is merrily providing inadequate care or no care to patients - and not just Covid patients. Funny enough, doctors and sick people tend to be against that. Do would you be, if you were sick.

Good for you 🙄
I have a disabled child and we had know way of knowing at the time how it might of affected him ,thankfully he was fine ,my dh,was classed as CEV,due to being diabetic ,I'm glad you were so muc h more,enlightened than the rest of us though .

Yabu.

Did far more damage than good. May have saved some lives. Ended and ruined other healthy young lives, fucked mental health and the education and anxiety levels of the younger generations, fucked the economy, and has left many in poverty.

@x2boys
@Reindeersnooker

So presumably then you feel that the price of the lockdowns in terms of missed cancer and cardiovascular disease, increases in mental health problems, loss of education, economic damage, increase in poverty as a result and the fact that excess deaths are now higher than during Covid... was a price that was worth paying?

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

It was fucking disgraceful.

they were doing their best at making people scared, yes.

I'd say the main perspectives are the public in General only know the information from the media, for all we know it could of been some james bond wanna be villian, but for national security etc, the gov't ect needed a cover story.

The early days were scary only because of the threat of lockdown (which came to pass, and which was monstrous) and because of the threat of people wanting to enforce it (who could, frankly, fuck off).

Lockdown was clearly a mistake at the outset, and anyone with half a brain could see it.

I am still angry about lockdown, and am even more angry that there were so many people who blindly went along with it. In fact, I'm still fucking furious.