So, six months on....

Sorry? care to explain?

 

Just to reiterate a point I've made before, it wasn't so much that they didn't stop flights but they actually advised UK residents who were abroad to travel back to the UK. Not doing so then put those who chose to ignore that advice, such as myself, in a dangerous position regarding insurance and health cover. Surely a more sensible short-term option in a global pandemic would be to provide support for people to stay where they are until appropriate measures (effective quarantine, testing) can be put in place.

As an aside I'm once again in quarantine, in Scotland this time, and I was actually sent an email and received a phone call on the first working day after I arrived this time reminding me what I was supposed to do and asking me to confirm that I understood and was complying. So that was nice.

 

Nobody said this. And I'm probably on balance in favour of lockdown and also one of the biggest losers from it.

 

I’m sorry, you are just wrong. Yes, they did. I got these from a single search for the phrase ‘bounce back’.

http://barnsleyfc.org.uk/threads/big-jump-again-today-to-562-deaths.290147/page-4#post-2452087

http://barnsleyfc.org.uk/threads/10m-now-unemployed-or-on-furlough.291300/#post-2474151

 

It's not unreas ro suggest that over a longer period of time the economy will recover. That will however be of little comfort to the people who's lives have been destroyed along the way.

 

I agree with a lot of this. My view is that the government acted far too slowly and were very much unprepared for the Pandemic. I thought we needed to lockdown quickly as we really didn’t know what we were dealing with. I think the government is equally unprepared for the second wave which is even more unforgivable because it was foreseeable.

just to play devils advocate here however, let’s say that not entering into lockdown measures could have led to say six figures of excess deaths with hospitals overwhelmed, not enough ventilators and so on.....what was the right solution. I’m still not sure what the right answer is.

I do think there is an argument for focussed lockdown measures for the vulnerable groups and so on until we obtain a vaccine, but that brings about another debate and I accept that there is perhaps something morally unpalatable about singling out sections of society in that way.

 

I have to pick fault with this, public sector workers being the ones who have worked throughout lockdown to keep the country going and throughout wanted to get back to normal as soon as possible as they are often providing the very support that our children, the vulnerable, and society needs to keep going. And many of those jobs definitely couldn't be done from home.

I'm sure you're going to cite teachers here as an example to the contrary but my experience of teachers - of which I'm definitely not one - is they wanted kids back in school ASAP where they knew they were safe and being educated. They might have pointed out absolutely that the initial rules where conpletely unworkable but that's because they were rightly of the view that if the science said kids were safe to return then let them crack on, get them back, without ludicrous rules that played to emotive concern rather than fact.

 

‘. Lucky industries’ just fek off

 

Other parties may not have handled it better, we dont know, what we do know is, unlike this lot, they would have at least gave a ****.

 

I have worked thru lockdown from home and think its a terrible idea to lock healthy people away. We could have got herd immunity over the summer if we carried on as normal but imposed some restictions on large gatherings like sweden and simply protected the old and vilnerable. Too late now maybe but i still think its a massive over reaction. More people dying from normal flu atm than covid. I think johnson getting it was bad - its couding his judgement. Lets get back to something like normal and do the best we can. This isnt living its existing. Torys trying to irradicate it and thats hopeless.

 

Left to run riot without any actions being taken the knock on concequenses would have been far worse.

 

Very aggressive tone. A lot of anger at people who whether they agreed with lockdown or not had no say or control on whether it happened. It’s not like we voted for it.

And you are looking at it from the point of view of the inevitable negative consequences of locking down - with absolutely no consideration of what was achieved or even what they set out to try and achieve. It doesn’t matter what anyone will say to you; you will insist you are right as the things you say about education and the economy and so on are factually accurate. But that isn’t really the point.

How would you have felt about the tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of additional deaths that not locking down would have led to?

How would you have felt if the NHS was completely overwhelmed and wasn’t able to provide any basic services to anybody for anything at all?

Explain to me how locking down increased hospital admissions rather than reduced it to contribute to your future deaths figures. You quote 75,000 excess deaths over five years for other conditions - how many would that have been had we allowed the spike to continue spiking? Don’t try to suggest it wouldn’t have. The NHS could and likely would have missed more diagnoses and appointments - so not only would there have been thousands upon thousands of additional covid deaths, the drain on the nhs would have led to more longterm deaths too.

And to whoever it was who quoted Sweden not locking down - no they didn’t.

Their population isn’t rife with ‘I’ll do what I like’ types that ignore common sense rules like social distancing and so on, we have far too many of those. Though the comparison doesn’t work anyway as the U.K. spread was a lot to do with population density, we don’t have vast expanses of mostly unpopulated land so had a rapid spread, as opposed to only having concentrated pockets like we’ve seen in USA etc. Sweden has a lot of land and relatively low population.

It wasn’t wrong to lockdown. It has horrendous and long lasting consequences, but so did going to war with the Germans in 1939.

What was wrong was that it was done 10-14 days too late, and the time wasn’t used effectively due to an unfit for purpose government that has failed to supply a proper track and trace system, did not quarantine international arrivals until weeks or months after the ship had sailed and which had gone down a road of ‘herd immunity’ for several days too many before finally realising that it would cost hundreds of thousands of lives and backtracking. Too late.

 

My biggest take on everything that's happened is that I didn't agree with a nationwide lockdown but I could at least understand the theory that it was to buy time. But what has been done with this time? Absolutely nothing.

It's over 6 months since the lockdown was first started and only this week has bumbling boris announced he's going to get one iPad for every two care homes to share. Wtaf? Six months and that is the closest he's come to protecting care homes.

We were in lockdown for a long time and when it ended he didn't have a clue whether people should be working from home, from work or from the moon. Open pubs, close pubs, open them, close them. Masks, no masks. Eat out to help out. How dare you go out?

Locking down didn't buy any time for the government because they didn't use that time planning a single thing. They used it chasing their tails trying to get hold of the PPE they had ordered from their friends and spent the last few weeks of it focusing all their attention on defending Dominic Cummings's blatant breach of the rules.

 

The same can be said about some of those against lockdown. It generally interferes with something they really want to do, such as going to the pub while daft o'clock or getting spit roasted on a beach somewhere. To suggest it doesn't affect some people at all is ludicrous. There are people who can make sacrifices and not be moronically selfish.

 

I wonder what the end games going to be with this lot, what if we,re still sitting here next summer waiting for a vaccine?, is there going to be a point where we just have to accept that the virus is here to stay and unfortunately it will kill people but the vast amount of the population will be fine, so stop testing and stop reporting on it and get on with our lives, or are we willing to live like this permanently..?

 

have some people got being spit roasted on a beach somewhere, on their bucket list, I really have lead a sheltered life, I once had an enjoyable hour flying a kite at Colwyn Bay and the day I found a metal spade with a half broken handle was quite good after years of my dad saying your not having one you will cut your toes off,but think real reason they was twice as dear as the plastic ones

 

Vaccines are the end game. So much money has been invested in them. It's just a waiting game now until they're proven and ready. Unfortunately they have to be proven first which takes time. The consequences of launching un-proven vaccines would be astronomically expensive for the drugs companies.

 

Shhh don't mention Colwyn Bay

 

The biggest difference between us and Sweden is that they have a very trustworthy government. The Swedish people are fully behind the decision makers and trust them. Something I dare say we'll never see again in this country.

 

Two posters, neither of whom gave a timeline.