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?

“I do wonder, when people say "Never again" just how strong they would feel about it, if/when an even worse virus came. Like if a virus killed 99.9% of patients and was as contagious as Covid. Would they still not want to lockdown? What if it was more contagious than Covid? I'm just wondering if there is a point at which those people would consider it the right thing to do?”

Precisely this. And it’s not as if it’s easy to tell, at the outset of a worldwide pandemic with a rapidly evolving virus, how bad it’ll end up. There’ll be a range of projections, from best case to worst case scenarios. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

’No lockdowns, ever again, no matter what’ is complete lunacy.

Of course lockdown was essential.

Britain under so many years of Tory rule (and so many years of the Tories weaponising hatred of disabled people and trying to scapegoat disabled people by pretending the country's financial problems are due to all those workshy scroungers raking in benefits), this country has become an extremely selfish place with no culture of looking out for others.

We don't embrace being part of a society the way countries in Scandinavia and elsewhere do. I've lived in a lot of countries and Britain feels the most harsh, like everyone is just out for themselves and hostile to anyone else. Just walking around the streets, seeing how people barge you out of the way on pavements or shove inside tubes without letting people off, it's just a "ME FIRST AND ME ONLY" mentality that doesn't exist anywhere else that I've lived.

And disability has a huge yet complex role to play here. The government didn't give a fuck about people dying (or about the fact Covid is/was a mass disabling event), they were worried first because elderly people were second most affected after disabled people and elderly people have the highest voting turnout and statistically are more likely to vote Conservative, and second because they didn't want the NHS being overwhelmed and crashing before they could sell it. Which certainly would have happened without a lockdown. And then third they did it for appearances, because they had to be seen to be doing something about a terrifying pandemic killing millions that at the time had no cure and no vaccine, which no one knew much about.

But lockdown was very much framed as "stay home to protect those most vulnerable to dying from Covid", and the government's messaging relied on emotional manipulation and guilt-tripping. So the message was "stay home to prevent disabled people from dying" and that message was never going to go down well in a country that's been brainwashed by years of propaganda dehumanising disabled people. 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, and I remember lots and lots of threads on MN basically saying "it doesn't matter if disabled people are needlessly killed because they have no quality of life anyway and probably wouldn't live long even if they didn't have Covid."

A lot of people really don't realise that disabled people are just normal people, the spectrum of disability is broad - there are tons of disabled people who work full-time, have successful careers, raise kids, and have the same life expectancy as anyone else. But that's not how we're portrayed in the media.

So basically years of anti-disabled propaganda put out with the intention of dehumanising an entire group, coupled with the country's innate selfishness, coupled with the fact a lot of people were absolutely shafted and ignored during Covid (especially those with MH needs), created a situation where a lot of people's emotional reaction was "fuck disabled people, I'd rather they die than suffer myself" which they then tried to justify by making up comforting lies about disabled people all being doddering and housebound with not long to live anyway.

This poster swallowed and has now regurgitated the governments dictionary of spin and hyperbole.

War against a new enemy? Oh dear.

Inflation resulting from Covid spending continues to cause misery for millions.

To be fair the reasons the UK is struggling with inflation cannot solely be laid at the door of Covid, there are other things that have contributed to it more. Also the UK debt prior to Covid was huge even with 10 years of austerity measures, its actually quite astounding it isn't higher. Add on Sunaks 11billion not managing debt correctly and the Truss/Kwarteng disastrous budget, plus a sprinkling of fraud and the economy was never going to be in great shape.

They clearly aren't, and clearly don't know how pandemic transmission works.

If the Govt had locked down sooner and used that time to start researching the virus, how it spreads, and how it affects patients, we would not have needed that second lockdown.

it was obvious boris did not want lockdown because he knew it would financially be a disaster . But Labour were not arguing either were they ?

it’s like this only happened here . It didn’t .

It's true, lockdown policies are only one of multiple causes.

I know someone who travelled to scicily and if you did not wear a mask you were challenged with a gun

If you can’t see that cutting off supply of goods while printing and borrowing a £ trillion to pay healthy people to sit at home causes inflation, then you don’t understand basic economics.

Our family all had Covid when Covid wasn’t heard of in December 2019.
We all recovered

The damage lockdowns did to our family I doubt I will ever recover from.
Dh has never mentally recovered from being told that he had to isolate. His body might be with us but his mind died sometime during lock down and I am left trying to hold it all together,
Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be happy again

We know more young people who committed suicide because of lockdowns than we know people who died or were badly affected by Covid

Lockdowns weren’t just inconvenient. They were fatal

@LindorDoubleChoc I think I can guess what a fof is but...can you clarify in case I'm way off? Thanks.

@Yalta I'm so sorry. My cousin was in the shielding group and totally ignored it, but was told to work at home,

another friend continued commuting and working from a planning site, but he was scared his employers would find out he had a shielding letter.

This and the eat out to help out was a terrible idea.

Yabu. It's not selfish to want small children to get an education.

@VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia yes, I see that. They don't even realise that they've been sucked into a culture war, because of the very ideological beliefs of those that fucked us all in the first place by undermining the sacrifices and measures that were eventually taken.

You don't even need to look as far as Sweden.

Just look north to us in Scotland, where our dear leader saw Covid as the perfect chance to go harder and further than Boris. So our kids were out of school longer, hospitality was closed for longer, we weren't allowed in friends' houses for longer, we wore masks for longer, we weren't supposed to be travelling out of our county, my student son started uni in 2021 and was fully online for the full year.

No statistical difference with outcomes in England.

I think most of us supported the first March 2020 lockdown as we just did not know what we were dealing with. So many unknowns and yes, we were worried the health service would become completely overwhelmed. But after a while when we knew how it was transmitted and what to do to avoid getting it, the restrictions went on far too long.

“Our family all had Covid when Covid wasn’t heard of in December 2019.”
How do you know that? There weren’t even Covid tests then.

@TurquoiseMermaid

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.

It's called "lying through his or her teeth".

It probably did reduce deaths, but as I said at the time, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Death is part of the circle of life and by trying to prevent as many deaths as possible, it’s one reason why this country is fucked and will be for many years. I think we owe a few trillion pounds? The government will wrap it up saying it’s all because of the ear of Ukraine but no, one factor is that we spent billions of pounds for people to sit on their arses watching Netflix for months.

Have to disagree there. Bribing people to go out and eat, drink, socialise, may have lessened the mental damage done by the lockdown. It certainly got us comparing notes and thinking more clearly.

I struggled with SAGE’s over inflated figures.

Yalta, what is the data on this please?

And the WHO.

Have to disagree there. Bribing people to go out and eat, drink, socialise, may have lessened the mental damage done by the lockdown. It certainly got us comparing notes and thinking more clearly.

Could have done that anyway without the government borrowing.

I think it was actually closer to a gazillion pounds, and more people were watching Disney plus, as it was new out at the time, but like you, I'm speaking from my arse in this post.