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?

One of the doctors on Sage said a year after the start of the pandemic that when they said there were 100 cases they later believed it had been 100, 000 by that time.

Actually my husband is Swedish and his MIL is in hospital.

Yes to 1, yes to 2, no to 3 and definitely no to 4

I am autistic, 5 (possibly all 6) of my children are on the spectrum. 1 of those was locked in his assisted living facility for almost 2 years, not allowed visitors unless he quarantined afterwards.
I know nobody that died or was hospitalised because of covid. I know of 2 people who committed suicide as they couldn't cope with their lives and routines being changed so much.

Here's a link to the actual study if anyone is interested. Some reports on the paper seemed to imply covid infections do not lead to cognitive decline.

www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(23)00187-3/fulltext

The paper shows cognitive impairment from lockdown exacerbated issues e.g. alcohol, loneliness, depression.

It also talks about the risk of cognitive decline from covid infections.

e.g. 'The worsening of cognition in people with a history of COVID-19 aligns with literature reports of the cognitive effects of the disease, in which up to 78% of people report cognitive impairment'

So lockdown caused cognitive impairment and covid caused cognitive impairment. Is there any other disease for which we would give perfectly well people the symptoms that ill people get. That’s taking equality too far I’d say.

@GrannyRose15

Or it’s a question of - not only cognitive impairment - but additional fatalities/wider impact on health where hospitals are inundated and unable to function - caused by allowing a new virus circulate and mutate freely without restrictions or method of control.

You're not on the "inside". Covid and the reaction to it affected the whole country in different ways. The world does not and should not revolve around the NHS.

Lockdowns had a huge effect on the economy which is still ongoing - that will affect the NHS.

Lockdowns killed people in different ways - that affected the NHS.

Lockdowns had a very debatable effect on lowering the virus.

ICUs being overrun with covid patients is not the experience of all hospitals - many hospitals were just empty.

I had a head injury in April 2020 and was unconscious for 30 minutes, A&E booted me out and recorded it as a "faint" with no scans or checks when it was a seizure. The A&E was completely empty. When I asked, one of the staff admitted to me that they had plenty of beds and their ICU was fine.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia · 21/10/2023 21:59

So being guilt tripped into hurting yourself and your family in order to protect a group of people you've been taught to regard as sub-human led to a lot of resentment. Anti-disabled hate crimes rose by 50% during 2020

It would be really interesting to run a poll on here with the following questions:

1. Are you disabled, including autistic or living with Downs Syndrome?
2. Do you have any disabled family members?
3. Do you know someone who was hospitalised or killed by Covid?
4. Do you support lockdown measures?

I suspect that the number of people who say NO to 4 and YES to any of 1-3 will be very low indeed.

1. Yes. Autistic (diagnosed), ADHD, epilepsy.
2. Yes.
3. I know of two people - very elderly distant relatives of my stepdad.
4. Absolutely not. They were useless and did more harm than good.

There is no way to long term prevent a virus of this kind from circulating. You are trying to carry water in a sieve.

In every place where they had strict measures that might have temporarily slowed it down, as soon as they stopped doing those things it moved through the population freely.

So unless you are prepared to keep people isolated and all the rest permanently there isn't much you can do.

There are ways to lower the circulation though.

@Rudderneck

That’s not right though. The method of control was the vaccine. And over time thanks to vaccine and natural exposure - we are acquiring hybrid immunity. Which is leading to less serious cases requiring hospitalisation.

This is why I think lockdown should be carefully considered and probably would be used as a measure - as a last resort - if we are in a situation again with a new virus/no method of control. Lockdown buys time to find a solution/vaccine.

i think the first lockdown was needed with Covid. I think subsequent lockdowns were debatable. I think a balanced evaluation is needed as to the pros and cons of restrictions - not sweeping, biased statements which fail to acknowledge the reverse side of the argument.

But you're not aware of what the regions have announced? I got an SMS notification from my region.

There's no evidence that arbitrary lockdowns helped anything. All they did was delay herd immunity.

Vaccines don't prevent spread.

@Fladdermus nope, he’s had nothing.

But the argument being made here is that even mild cases cause problems and need to be prevented.

It's also not clear that in younger people and kids that the risks of the vaccine are proportionate.

It took a year to get the vaccine and could well have taken longer. If you are only really supportive of the first lockdown, then it would have gone fairly unchecked through the population after that.

The best defense against covid is like all illnesses, live a healthy life, wash your hands regularly. Though there are always limits to how much you can get people to do, it's fraught to enforce good hand-washing even in hospital staff.

@slore

I’d say there is conflicting evidence.

Royal Society study:

Measures taken during the Covid pandemic such as social distancing and wearing face masks “unequivocally” reduced the spread of infections, a report has found.

The vaccine meant that we acquired hybrid immunity. Even if they didn’t stop spread, they meant that people caught Covid in a way that was more manageable and prevented hospitalisations and deaths. We had a method of control. In order to produce this method of control, we needed time to produce a vaccine. Which is why I think the initial lockdown was necessary and - probably - right as most countries across the globe implemented this restriction.

This is why I think lockdown should be carefully considered and probably would be used as a measure - as a last resort - if we are in a situation again with a new virus/no method of control. Lockdown buys time to find a solution/vaccine.

It's also cruel to those who live alone. If we ever did have another lockdown I hope there are 'bubbles' (stupid term) so people don't have to go weeks or months without human contact again. And in case anyone says it, FaceTime, Zoom etc. are not the same.

It also depends on the type of virus

Covid was particularly difficult to control as so many were asymptomatic

I hope we get a good generational break before another pandemic as Covid wasn’t what I’d cause so much damage for in terms of lockdowns

The public are likely pretty reticent to go there again

I hope we do too. Unfortunately, the broad consensus seems to be that pandemics could become more common due to environmental factors. That really worries me, because even if we come to a broad consensus that lockdown is a legitimate pandemic tool, it may not be fundable or observable every time we might want to do it.

Unless it's Ebola, I can't see another lockdown in he next decade.

The police demonstrated that they cannot be trusted at any level; threatening the parents of children playing in their gardens, using drones to track hikers, using their warrant cards to make illegal arrests.

The government and civil servants demonstrated that they withheld pertinent information that made them feel safe enough to party from those who pay their wages.

We were lied to on an industrial scale, that trust isn't coming back anytime soon, if ever.

Oh yeah, not in the next decade. That's a given. The space where a pandemic is risky enough to get people to trust a radical policy like lockdown, but not so risky that essential workers stop turning up has been massively eroded. It might not even exist at all at the moment, but it's clearly a lot narrower than it was in 2020 at minimum. I was more thinking further into the future.

That fear factor now seem as information withheld is an interesting one

I could see the messaging used to great effect so the fear dropped down to personal risk level, which was very low and incredibly low for dc

Partygate was an annoyance to me more than anything as the media focussed on it for about a year but I can see how annoyed people must be to be coming out of feeling fearful

Yes, it's interesting because the idea of trying to increase people's perception of their own risk as a policy wasn't exactly kept secret. It's set out quite explicitly by SAGE here. Can't see how it could be spelled out any more clearly than 'use of media to increase sense of personal threat'!

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22-march-2020

The personal threat was always low. It was exaggerated for political reasons. Shame on our government and shame on all those who were taken in. As always this thread is comparing lockdown with doing nothing. Those were never the alternatives. Well before lockdown was announced people had started to alter their behaviour. If we had been trusted to make our own decisions we could have avoided alot of the negative results of lockdown and still have had many of the positive results. . We were treated like naughty children and that is unacceptable in a mature democracy like ours is supposed to be.

If that was published on gov.uk on 5 May 2020, it must have been hidden under a rock. The manipulation in 'the public good' is (to me) absolutely damning.
No wonder Neil Ferguson felt confident to maintain his FWB relationship which by coincidence seems to have broken the same day https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/uk/neil-ferguson-imperial-coronavirus-sage-gbr-intl/index.html