Myths re lockdown was wrong

[Betsyhilton]

Just seen someone on another thread basically trying to claim that lockdown didnt reduce deaths. The contested John Hopkins survey seems to be encouraging people who basically behaved selfishly, ignored medical advice and did what they liked to now claim retrospectively that they just knew lockdown was wrong.

AIBU to think these are just basically selfish irresponsible people who ignored official advice at the time because it caused them inconvenience and are now jumping on any theory to try to justify their self centred behavior?

Absolutely right. Those 'thinking for themselves' people are forgetting about the doctors, nurses, supermarket workers and transport workers who died early on in the pandemic from mass exposure to the virus. Also the medical staff who suffered extreme trauma from working in such difficult conditions at the time. I know a student nurse who was training during the pandemic and has only just started working again in a clinical role having not taken up her registration because she was so traumatised.

There is an argument that we were locking down for too long after people were vaccinated but the early lockdowns were absolutely essential to stop the health service becoming overwhelmed and the viral load people were exposed to being reduced.

Do people really forget the Italian doctors begging us to lock down so they could avoid what they were experiencing there?

Vitamin D was mentioned v v early on, I mean within the first month of lockdown. I know 4 people who died, three were under 60 (2 were under 50). Those saying 'I never had it ', you don't know that. I had a PCR test only because my DC had it and I had it but had absolutely no symptoms bar exhaustion at being stuck at home alone with them that week/10 days! Those who elderly parents were left alone and regret it, that is very hard to take. For our part, we decided as a family that we 2 siblings would see our elderly DF as an extension of our families and continued visiting etc. As the rest of us were locked down it made no difference to his risk but a huge difference to his mental health. I didn't see that as breaking rules, and told the police on traffic checks at the time what I was doing and they were more than helpful.

Were it to happen again I think many would ignore the rules and many would be slower to blindly follow without question.

Best answer. Why everyone has to be totally for or against I'll never understand.

What? Lockdown harmed people who are now suffering from long Covid?

Easy for you to say. I'm autistic, so one of the people who would have been DNRed had I become severely ill.

Sorry if I’m missing something, but why does being autistic lead to DNR in case of severe illness?

Has anyone ever complied stats on those who died by suicide, DV, purely giving up on life like the elderly people mentioned early in the thread because of lockdowns?

Have we ever had clarity over the number of deaths directly from Covid opposed to 'with' Covid?

My partner was terminally ill at the time - I felt first hand the conflict between preserving his life and depriving our child of hers. He caught Covid and survived it, it was obviously a scary situation for us, but the reality is, that for someone that vulnerable, any cough or cold is a threat.

There were lots of incidences where people with learning disabilities were put on DNR. Here's a quote from the Guardian
"People with learning disabilities have been given do not resuscitate orders during the second wave of the pandemic, in spite of widespread condemnation of the practice last year and an urgent investigation by the care watchdog.Mencap said it had received reports in January from people with learning disabilities that they had been told they would not be resuscitated if they were taken ill with Covid-19."

@Neurodiversitydoctor

Routine health visitor visits were stopped
Nurseries closed
Informal support networks disbanded.

But for how long were these things discontinued? And in case, was it long enough to cause particular harm? The December 2021 Annual OFSTED report doesn't note lasting harms of note.

I want to make it really clear I am not talking about middle class DCs doing potato prints and turf trays with their furloughed parents and zoom calls with granny.

You didn't make this clear, no. The odd bias you show here in concerning for a supposed 'doctor', TBH.

I am talking about either single parent families or families where their only employment might have been insecure and not eligible for furlough or a keyworker. Older siblings no longer at school and therefore getting fed at midday, digital poverty. Do I need to go on ? If you really can't see or understand how that might impact a child's development I don't know what to say. This is how between a quarter and a third of children grow up in this country.

I understand and sympathise with how lockdown might have affected different types of parents. My question was specific to toddlers, though, not older children.

I said children born into disadvantage in late 2019. The pandemoc widened inequalities that has been widely recognised. Childcare settings and schools were ultimately closed for most of the year March 2020- March 2021. Opening in the Autumn term was highly sporadic and disrupted, certainly not normal. Having school age children at home ( particularly primary school age) has a direct impact on the available respurces material and otherwise available for the younger children.

None of this is remotely in question. It is simple fact.

Oh health visting in my area hasn't recovered yet to pre-pandemic service.

I’m an extremist? Wow is this where we are at now when expressing an alternative viewpoint? For reference I followed all the rules, got the jabs, supported the government etc. However, with our increasing knowledge now as we reflect I do genuinely believe the closing of schools was a mistake. I am not a a deranged ‘extremist’ for this opinion. I am a person capable of finding facts amongst the media led agendas and this is what I believe. The government did the best they could with the information they had at the time. I believe when a pandemic happens again they will react differently as with experience comes wisdom.
Like many people in this new world we live in, you seem incapable of accepting a different view and resort to unhinged accusations to add value to your own. I respect anyone who thinks full lockdown was necessary (even with our knowledge now) as that is what they believe and that is their right. Others are allowed to think in an alternative manner without being insulted.

We also have a vaccine for flu.
We opened up once people started getting the vaccine.

No one knew what the survival rate was when it first started spreading

Very true - which is one of the reasons so many of us stuck to every dot and comma of the regs initially, even while doubting it was the right thing to do

But not once it emerged that even some seeking to terrify us were clearly so relaxed that they roundly ignored them, and that so much of the hysteria was based on fake reports, guesses and so on

I also agree that closing schools probably caused quite substantial issues, but they were supposed to be open for key worker children and vulnerable children. You could argue that those children who were vulnerable to covid or lived with adults that were vulnerable, could have been educated at home whilst allowing others to go to school. Of course there were vulnerable teachers and support staff too, which would have reduced the capability of teaching, especially in smaller schools.
The problem with dealing with a worldwide pandemic is that mitigations have a tendency to be anything but nuanced because you can't take into account every variation of everyone's individual life circumstances.

The short answer is yes, and it doesn't appear that covid or lockdown had a significant impact. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2021registrations#toc There were registration timing issues between 2020 and 21 meaning that fewer suicides were recorded in the main lockdown period and slightly more as coroners caught up. Similarly, and tbh. surprisingly, the stats on DV show little change https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/domesticabuseinenglandandwalesoverview/november2022

@sussexman Coroners have been notoriously bad at identifying deaths as suicide. It has long been felt that squeezing a likely suicide into an unexplained or natural causes verdict is kinder on family and friends and can sometimes enable life insurance to be collected when it might not pay out otherwise.
I know someone who worked for the Fire Service and was allocated the suspected suicides during lockdown - it took an awful toll on her.

Sweden CV deaths (Jan 2023) are 3x higher than Norway Denmark or Finland despite pop. being just 2x higher.

UK has had a shocking CV death toll, as well as an over run health service, what else do you call almost 8m people waiting for treatment? no where in Europe has this.

See Germany for how to manage a lockdown.

Coroners won't have suddenly become worse at identifying suicides on 1st Jan 2020 so we should take the lack of uptick as meaning that the suicide rate stayed stable.

What we did see was an uptick in DV femicides by a quarter compared to the previous year, after a long downward trend, see p28 of https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/domestic-homicides-and-suspected-victim-suicides-during-the-pandemic. This is consistent with the number of threads started in Relationships by women wishing to flee.

OP never came back did she?! Dropped a bomb, posted several posts in half an hour, and didn't come back! 🙄

Haha I had a feeling they wouldn't!

it seems its two options from this, either trust what no one says, or if you do believe what x person says, then it helps to know there credential's to know if they are correct in what they are discussing.

Well, according to some charmer a few pages back, the places in northern Italy where people were dying were "remote" (first time I've heard Milan compared to some tiny hamlet in the middle of nowhere) and they were old anyway so it doesn't matter.
Mind you, the same eugenicist troll says that it was all lies anyway.
I'll be sure to tell my (Italian) high school classes that we did 2 years online for something that never happened.

I'm actually surprised at that, at one point just after the 1st wave we had more in icu with suicide attempts than covid

If that poster was trying to refute my post of 03:04, then yes, exactly that. Sadly, I didn't see the message prior to its deletion, so this is just a guess.

Those of us who've been discussing suicide and DV rates during lockdown have been citing ONS figures because we understand that an assertion without evidence is meaningless.

I await evidence that the Chinese govt overstated the Covid fatality rate in China. It would, to my knowledge, be a situation unprecedented in the whole of world history for a government to overreport fatalities without at the same time blaming them on a foreign power or terrorist group.