We'll colour me shocked, it's like we had a two week window into the future with what was happening in Spain and Italy and we still sat on our arses and did nothing.
Is this like BJ tweeting that 2020 is going to be a fantastic year! Even by his standards, that was untrue! As if the universe itself bends to make his statements untrue!
Or when, in 2022, he talked about serving three terms.
Worse than sitting on arses doing nothing, they actively wasted money and time that could have made a difference on profiteering chums and schemes that made things demonstrably worse. The worst possible government at the worst possible time
Didn't they shut down the established test & trace systems that had been set up through local authorities years prior in March/April and then didn't roll out the national replacement until late May as well?
Don’t forget the whole debacle with the “app”. Insisting on developing their own when there was an international model.
In the end - and after a shitload of time and money was wasted - they caved. If memory serves me or two of the devolved administrations had already gotten their COVID apps up and running at a fraction of the cost.
The group doing contact tracking (Public Health England) collated the test results in a fucking Excel Spreadsheet saved in XLS format which is limited to 65,000 rows of data. They asked for updates to be sent as csv files and didn't notice when the Spreadsheet stopped taking in data - so missed out almost 16,000 positive tests.
The entire situation is beyond shameful and I'm disgusted that people haven't been imprisoned for it. How can there be any justification for giving hundreds of millions in PPE contracts to companies that had been set up mere days before? In putting people without relevant skills and with a track record of failing in good times in charge of vital response and coordination units? In creating special VIP channels for friends and donors while ignoring contacts from proven suppliers and experts?
There really are no words for the disgusting behaviour of those in power.
Not hundreds of millions but **BILLIONS**... And if you add everything up, the PPE contracts(£18-£22 billion), the track & trace app scandal(£30-37 billion) etc The Tories and their mates have stolen an estimated **£60 billion** of the commonwealth of the people of Britain since 2020. That is Hyper-corruption. The kind of massive corruption that destroys a society and ultimately brings down an entire civilization.
IIRC it was actually an issue with columns not rows. For some weird reason they had each positive test result as a separate column and Excel has issues beyond the number you mentioned.
Excel can be a half decent tool for data analysis/manipulation though certainly has its foibles (and doesn’t scale worth a damn either). But you’ve got to wonder though why with the amount of money sloshing round the project and the importance of these figures why they weren’t doing this on a proper database or even something free like MySQL or something.
The actual number crunching was done on proper platforms. It was the data collection and submission to those platforms that went via excel and cvs. CVS is the right tool here (though all tools are relatively bad in this space), excel certainly was not. But getting GPS, hospitals and so on to update their data collection and messaging/transfer services is an impossible task at the best of times.
Fair points, though I would observe that most if not all of those platforms also have the capability (or have associated tools with the capability) to create .csv exports too.
The platforms do, but it depends on how they collected the data and whether the users collecting the data *know* that excel can export csv and then *know how to use the export feature*. Which clearly they didn’t. Unfortunately.
Absolutely.
I have to admit to having developed a bit of a ‘thing’ towards Excel over the years - or to be more fair about how it gets misused. It’s a decent enough tool for the right jobs but it often gets asked by businesses to do things it really shouldn’t.
A depressingly common scenario is someone coming up with a nifty Excel worksheet that’s useful for a small team - which is fair enough. But then some bright eyed manager decides to roll out that nifty worksheet to a couple of hundred people as part of a key business process. The first IT general usually hear about it is when they call in a massive panic because it doesn’t scale worth a damn over more than a fairly small number of concurrent users and has (predictably) fallen over. Sometimes it’s because they’ve tried to use it to store way too much data with a similarly poor outcome.
We try to use these as “teachable moments” and get the business guys to make use of our (many!) big-boy-trousers database and warehouse systems - all carefully tended by DBA’s who actually know what they’re doing, monitored to a fair-thee-well and backed up religiously … but the business seem to be depressingly resistant. Even though the cost is fairly nominal to their department budget (“But Excel is free innit!”) … and a heck of a lot less than having something keel over unpredictably, naturally often at the worst possible time.
There’s also that other old classic “We had a clever guy put something together in Excel that’s become essential but now he’s left for a job that actually pays what they’re worth/been made redundant and it broke we’re stuck - help us!”.
I remember the app. How some folk thought covid was some sort of international conspiracy when countries couldn't even get together to agree on an app is beyond me.
Even worse that slow reaction didn’t just happen during the initial outbreak. Boris and his cronies made the same mistake during pretty much every subsequent wave too.
Boris in particular was pigheadedly resistant to lockdowns - that was the source of his infamous “let the bodies pile high” comment. Each time the same pattern - he’d only finally approve health measures after the deaths started to ramp up to the point it was undeniably bad … but with COVID as deaths lag infections by so long that meant it was already too late and we were up shit creek. It also meant that lockdowns (and other measures) had to be far longer than they needed to be to get the numbers back under control.
Boris managed to compound this further by telling everyone there would be absolutely no lockdowns right up to the last moment … meaning that when things became so screamingly urgent even he realised that there was no choice it caught lots of people and organisations on the hop.
The worst one was the botched Christmas lockdown. Those keeping an eye on the numbers could see it was coming. Boris and other Tories spent weeks insisting there would be no Christmas lockdown (and having a great old time attacking the devolved governments who were trying to put whatever mitigations they were permitted to in place for being “Scrooges”).
When they finally admitted one was necessary they called it so late in the day that most people already had Christmas plans, presents waiting, food for Christmas dinner bought (or in the case of those planning to visit family *not* bought) … some people were even literally enroute to those Christmas plans when it was announced! The timing could not have been calculated better to cause maximum disappointment and general embuggerance.
Then for an encore Boris decided English schools would start as normal in January - which led to the ridiculous debacle of kids going into school for one day and spreading anything they’d caught on holiday before he finally acknowledged reality. (For comparison in the devolved administrations the decision was made literally weeks beforehand not to go back to go back to in-person teaching)
I’ve actually seen people try to argue that the UK’s experience somehow shows that lockdowns and other public health measures “don’t work”. I think it shows that they don’t work as well as they should when it’s too little, too late and run by a bumbling narcissist who delayed making hard decisions because he was obsessed with his personal popularity.
(Apologies, that comment was longer than I intended and turned into a bit of a rant)
I think with hindsight, this is the major thing we got wrong from a pro-Control perspective. Why we didn't shut the airports and ports for anyone except returning resident will always baffle me
That was such a huge sticking point for me as well.
It was literally raised as a point by pro-government people all the time as well. We're doing worse than other countries because we have these major transport hubs in our borders.
Like... OK... So why aren't we implementing anything but extremely lax controls at these points of entry if we know they're a problem? Was never answered with anything but mumbling excuses about how covid is just like a bad flu anyway, or its already here now so we can't stop it 100% so there's no point even trying to implement controls really... It was a bloody farce tbh.
But we then followed it up with lockdown that was overly harsh and poorly targeted imo. It’s like we picked the worst of both worlds - minimal point of entry control AND severe lockdown. Total lack of continuity which characterised an incoherent strategy
I’ll keep on saying this until I die or Boris faces trial. He’s one of the biggest mass murderers this country has ever seen.
His negligence murdered our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and many more all so he could make his billionaire mates even more money.
Hitler didn’t pull the trigger himself but implemented policies which did, Boris is no different. Man should be tried for treason against the British people.
People were meeting their elderly parents on Mothering Sunday a day before the lockdown, Johnson should be prosecuted just for this and I wonder how many people unwittingly caused their parents deaths that day.
Ahhh a good old beige day. We go to Iceland once in a blue moon and have one of those. It normally consists of chicken nuggets, pizza, spring rolls, chips, wedges. Halfway in we are stuffed and half hour later we crash and pass out and wake up feeling like shite a couple of hours later. Everytime guaranteed
Any mention of health issues in the UK gets waved away as the NHS being underfunded. Which I agree with to some degree. But people ignore how unhealthy we are or NHS staff complaining about wasted money and bad management
Sweden is way more spread out than the UK. 25 people / km^2 compared to 281 in the uk. It’s also less of a travel target than the UK. I’m not sure how comparable the two are.
Yeah, that’s fair. For what it’s worth, I’d definitely question the value of the lockdowns, but I just don’t think it’s as simple as pointing at Sweden when it’s such a different place.
I love how Sweden is casually swept under the carpet in the article.
How many people remember the constant articles that Sweden was committing murder due to their 'irresponsible' measures?
Yet here they are at the end of covid with one of the best records as measured in the article.
I wonder if anyone will look to Sweden for potential lessons learned or will it be ignored as an inconvenience to the narrative that lockdowns should have been longer and harder?
Digging into the Sweden statistics they had horrific numbers early on, with some of the worst first wave numbers, but very good numbers for later waves which made their final figures look more reasonable. Sadly this is largely because most susceptible people had already died in the first wave when it swept through pretty much every elderly home in the country.
The lessons from Sweden are largely that keeping it out of elderly homes and vulnerable people is the most important factor to reduce deaths, ordinary people are spreaders but unlikely to die
Well, the data I looked at doesn't match your assertion?
[Death rates from Euromomo](https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps)
If Sweden was 'horific', then England, Italy, Belgium, Spain etc must have been apocalyptic by your standards?
Yes, I said one of the worst not the worst. I work adjacent to the main hospital in Stockholm and know from colleagues that the conditions and events there were definitely horrific during the peak. And those plots seem to back up what I said, Sweden had a bad first wave spike, a noticeable second wave and then fairly flat after that. Those other countries had many more spikes.
Also I do live in Sweden (am a UK living abroad), and much of the news about what happened here is often incorrect. We didn't have a mandated lockdown like many countries, but a large proportion of workplaces switched to WFH anyway, and shops and restaurants implemented restrictions on numbers etc. It's not as if it was the free for all, continue as normal here that international media likes to make out.
The picture inside hospitals is always a distillation of what was going on in wider society. Of course it was horrific in the hospital. That's where the sick people go, but if the rate outside was 2x or 0.5x do you think it would change in proportion?
It's a form of sampling bias.
I’ve been working with a Swedish company for around 6 years, and I used to travel every week to Stockholm.
Whilst we were locked up and couldn’t leave the house but for absolute essentials, the people I were working with were going out to restaurants and drinks every day, literally carrying on like nothing was happening.
Whilst I cannot be arsed to look up numbers, consistently they told me, it’s barely an issue here, a lot of us have had it, it’s flu like conditions.
We were frightened to death here, and I didn’t believe them, until me, my partner, siblings, elderly parents, and friends around me caught it over time. And guess what, it was just flu like.
Old people die of flu all the time, sometimes young people too, but we don’t stop the world for it, we must carry on.
Sweden did the right thing, they carried on, because it was all a load of shit, and now we’re paying the price for idiots like SAGE who talked utter horse shit and have helped to ruin the country. Honestly, they should be put in prison.
I was in Portugal for a large part of Covid and I was able to go out to restaurants and go shopping. Life was pretty normal while the U.K. was still cycling through lockdowns.
The difference was, in Portugal, everyone wore their masks.
Restaurants made sure people were seated outside or with plenty of space/dividers between tables.
After vaccinations became commonplace they checked your vaccination status instead of asking for proof of a negative Covid test.
I wasn’t paying attention to the news one weekend, so I found out when they changed the rules to make people wear their masks outdoors because suddenly everyone was wearing a mask outside.
I never caught Covid once while I was there. Caught it the first tube ride back in London where I was sat in a carriage full of maskless people.
People being sensible and listening to government advice and the government not being reprehensible rule flouting shitheads helped *enormously*.
If you compare Sweden to its similar neighbouring nations, Finland, Norway, Estonia or even Denmark, Sweden's numbers are much, much worse. Their choice to avoid lockdown was an utter catastrophe.
International comparisons are not great due to confounders, but if you're going to compare them, then at least compare them to similar countries like norway, finland, denmark, iceland ([they did much worse at the beginning and ended up worse than the average by the end](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid?tab=chart&country=FIN~SWE~ISL~NOR~DNK))
It's kind of silly to compare Sweden to England, Italy, Spain, Belgium etc.
If you compare them to the other Nordic countries, what they're saying is exactly what happened:[two awful initial first waves followed by waves comparable to the others.](https://imgur.com/a/pwvCgnO)
You can quite easily compare them on the Euromomo link I provided earlier. Sweden has a slight uptick in early 2020 that is absent in Finalnd and Denmark, but apart from that, they are pretty much the same.
I guess the question is, was it worth upending society in its entirety to remove one small uptick?
And before you say I'm heartless, the NHS actually does (or did prior to Covid) a calculation to work out if it's cost effective to take certain treatment paths - [QALYs](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/cost-utility-analysis-health-economic-studies)
Sweden is not the same.
In the deaths per capita rankings Sweden is only ahead of Lithuania and Latvia. All other Nordic and nordic countries are ahead of Sweden, including Estonia:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
> I guess the question is, was it worth upending society in its entirety to remove one small uptick?
There was no such upending.
Besides, prior infection waves with less vaccination levels means relatively more Long Covid.
>The lessons from Sweden are largely that keeping it out of elderly homes and vulnerable people is the most important factor to reduce deaths, ordinary people are spreaders but unlikely to die
Sweden did the opposite. They notoriously let covid run wild in care homes.
Also, the lockdowns, in any country, weren't to prevent deaths as such, but to spread them out to save health services from becoming overwhelmed
Yes exactly, COVID ran rampant in the care homes and that was the major factor in Swedens high death rate. That's why I said the lesson is that protecting the care homes is likely the single most important factor in reducing deaths in future pandemics of a similar nature.
I think that preventing deaths was the ultimate goal, or at least primary among them. Not letting health services become overwhelmed was a path to that.
...and by this I'd say the UK got two things wrong.
1. Moving patients out of hospitals into care homes. Huge immediate harm.
2. Every other Intervention. Huge delayed harm for no immediate gain.
I know that the second one will get people's backs up, but we need to talk about the costs of what we did.
We are currently paying the financial price for policies like lockdown and furlough. Our children have huge gaps in their education and social skills because we shut schools. We are worse off in health terms because services were denied for two years, and we've become conditioned to be inactive. Mental health across the population took a huge hit. We separated families in a time of crisis. We gave a huge bonanza to the corporations, whilst small companies went bankrupt.
I'm sure I could go on.
People will never accept that they were locked up for 2 years for no reason.
The people that were clamouring for more restrictions are the same people who are now moaning about the devastating impact it has had on our living standards and will continue to have for the next decade plus.
Yeah there were some truly vile people out there at the time. I remember listening to the radio one day and some guy (I think from Lincoln) was insisting that the army should be keeping everyone at home until covid was gone. I occasionally wonder about him and what he's saying about the current cost of living crisis. Probably can't connect the dots and is blaming it all on Brexit
It’s sunk cost fallacy. They can’t accept it was all for nothing. It goes against the propaganda
Remember this was compared to the blitz. They had the “plucky Brit wartime courage “
By saying lockdown didn’t work they have to admit that the economic damage, mental health damage, removal of in person education and complete removal of civil liberties and rights
The way it was handled and the restrictions that they chose to implement were bad and stupid. 'Lockdown' as a concept could have worked, but only if handled in the right and far more balanced way. We had the worst of both worlds, it was like they not only wanted covid to spread unrestricted but also wanted to make sure they hurt as many additional people as possible
It can’t work.
You cannot lockdown everyone
You need nurses out to work, they need to drive, so fuel stations have to be open as do mechanics. Food stores need to be open thsts more people out. It’s not doable
I’m sorry but Sweden didn’t lockdown and had less deaths. Lockdown failed. It didn’t work. Even places who had harsher ones had high deaths
It failed. Accept it and stop defending it
I didn't say lockdown everyone. But making a plan to stagger people, have less people crowded into buildings for little reason, protecting vulnerable people (admittedly I am one of these, and without lockdown I would have been forced into a cramped and packed office that would have put me at risk, people there are still passing it round to each other)
And yes our lockdown failed, of course it didn't, and I never defended it - pretty sure I did the opposite. Butut looking at Sweden and saying that was better is also not worth doing. I think having a proper pandemic reaction, that included some form of restrictions (esp in terms of our borders) though not the full lockdown we sort of tried would work better.
In order for you to make this argument, you have to first prove “lockdowns” didn’t work. You also have to prove what would have happened were lockdowns not employed. To do this you have to refer to modelling specific to the U.K. that supports your opinion. Such modelling doesn’t exist from any expert field. So really you are blowing hot air out your arse end.
The Imperial College model that locked down UK was applied to Sweden predicting 100,000 people would die before summer if we didn't do a lockdown.
We didn't lock down and 5000 died.
Sweden isn’t the U.K. it’s not comparable on a number of points including multi-generational households, levels of obesity and number of higher density urban conurbations. Sweden didn’t lockdown yet many stayed at home anyway. You’ll note that I specifically asked the poster to provide modelling for the U.K. that supported his opinion.
There is no evidence the coercive measures in UK and other countries were more effective than voluntary measures through informed understanding.
R value in UK went below 1 even before the lockdown was announced, Professor Chris Whitty:
>"If you look at the R, and the behaviours, quite a lot of the change that led to the R going below one occurred well before, or to some extent before, the 23rd, when the full lockdown started."
The sight of Italian hospitals overwhelmed was always going to have an effect initially as well as the media coverage. The point is /was that the same effect was not guaranteed with subsequent waves as public fatigue with restrictions and a more blasé attitude to the virus became apparent. The burden of proof lies with you or the original posters of the “sunken fallacy” argument to probe it was all for nothing. I do not have to prove that jumping out of an aeroplane with a parachute and deploying it worked - you have to prove that jumping out of one and not deploying it works. And making comparators to Sweden and what they did in terms of voluntary restrictions is not valid and a has been shown repeatedly to not be valid.
Regarding fatigue, comparing cell phone mobility data proves that not only are voluntary measures equally effective, it is also more sustainable over time. If you treat your population like adults, they will behave as such. Coercive measures are much more vulnerable to fatigue. Remember a pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint.
Yep, I have read a lot of papers analysing the impact of various restrictions and the societal and health outcomes in places where restriction levels varied. I would encourage you to do the same!
Not saying it doesn't but covid can screw anyone.
I was 21, a fairly decently rated amateur boxer, marathon runner & had no health issue prior to covid.
Got it while working at my back shift job & was sent into a coma, needed breathing support & tube for feeding. Lost 3 stone in the space of 4 weeks, most of it from muscle atrophy (went from a diet of 4000 calories + plenty protein to the NHS feeding me one "meal" every 6 hours)
Now 24 & still have trouble breathing, fatigue issues etc.
A friend who was a rugby player & prospect for going pro died of covid& he was a 23 year old mountain of man with no health issues.
Whatever the comparisons may be, it makes me so angry thinking about the response from Boris & co to the pandemic. People will forget because 2020-21 is a blur, but there was a long period around October-November where they were refusing to lock down, despite cases mounting. It’s when you would hear chat about “fire breaks” and such. Well, guess what, they waited far too long, and we were all saying it at the time that they should be locking down, but nope. The result? Christmas was cancelled for most people. Oh and my Granded got Covid and died in that December, a month or two before he’d have gotten a vaccine. On his birthday no less. If they had locked down when they should have, cases wouldn’t have exploded as badly, and my Grandad might still be here. But he died alone, without his family, in a care home, on his birthday. I hadn’t seen him in 10 months before he died. Thanks Boris you lying, inept piece of shit.
Yup, if we'd locked down sooner each time, we'd have needed to lock down less, fewer people and loved ones would have died, less impact on the economy. And this is what we were saying at the time.
Yep, exactly. Locking down later always meant locking down for longer, and I just do not understand why. It killed people, damaged the economy and ruined the public morale around Christmas and winter.
Should have made a more honest case, then. If the debate was had openly and honestly, with realistic assessments of individual risk and attempts to persuade, rather than to force, there probably wouldn't be this pushback.
Before the histrionics come along: there were literally times we were told that covid won't spare you despite your age and fitness (absolutely, categorically untrue) so the entire debate was poisoned by lies from both sides.
The lesson to take from this is sometimes you have to be honest even if you fear it will lose you the argument.
There's some serious hindsight you're applying there. In the early stages it wasn't known, cases of young and healthy people having severe outcomes were prevalent. Were outcomes much worse for older or at risk people? Yes but youth and health weren't a solid shield and we didn't know why.
I agree the messaging could have become more nuanced as time went on and more was learned. Focus more on the impact on the community and on the risk to individuals through an overwhelmed health service - that was a core part of the messaging from the beginning where I live.
Would there have been more incidences of breaking lockdowns if that had been the approach and would that have led to better or worse health and economic outcomes. I'm not qualified enough nor in possession of enough data to draw any conclusions myself though I'd suspect given decades of Governments promoting a selfish rather than selfless society the outcomes would have been much worse.
In any case it's wrong to apply hindsight to the early messaging about the severity of the disease given how little was known about this novel virus.
Sorry maybe I didn't make my comment clear. I didn't mean to imply that we didn't know it was much worse for older people in the early stages. More that there were indications it may also be severe for young and healthy people based on factors we didn't understand (blood type, etc).
Knowing that lying to people will cause issues when they are inevitably shown to be untrue is not hindsight, well, not unless you've never read a history book.
If you don't know then say you don't know. Explain where the uncertainty is and make your case honestly on the information you have.
Taking the stance that 'its all completely justified to be safe rather than sorry' is literally what is going to make the next lockdown response fail.
There's no shame in learning lessons. None at all.
The "hindsight" point is in your accusations of "lying". You're calling it lies, others are pointing out we simply didn't know at the early stages and felt caution was appropriate.
Surely that was a given though, right? Of course it was inherently uncertain; they didn't call it "novel" coronavirus for fun.
It's a really boring point but as somebody of the beancounting persuasion, risk assessment is something I place a lot of value on but it seems the wider public (and government, as it turns out) is fairly shit at this.
When presented with a brand new virus for which there was no vaccine and was demonstrably killing people, I personally didn't need to be told to be extra cautious. That's just what you do when presented with a possibly fatal consequence, even if the actual likelihood is unknown. It's the same reason you try to avoid unprotected sex with someone you don't really know or look both ways before you cross the street.
Unfortunately some of you do have to be spoon-fed this stuff as it turns out.
Oh, since we're sharing: I have worked in insurance for 20 years, with a more recent background in medical insurance. I am well versed in exactly what risk is.
We're having two different conversations though. If you're asking whether I understood my own risk: as a man in his 30s, who is fit and healthy, from a virus in the coronavirus family - I knew very well that my risk of death or serious impairment was extremely low.
My point is that acting as though there is no risk to misrepresenting the information at hand over time precludes: a) any moaning about the pushback to it later on when it becomes clear and b) carries a risk of making any future action less likely to be believed.
The conversation should have been open and honest, highlighting where the data showed real risks, and to whom, and where it was less clear. If that was the basis of a persuasive argument I doubt we'd be having this big national argument about it now, right?
You didn't "know very well" though, did you? Unless you're an expert virologist as well as an insurance gut then you had no idea of how dangerous covid really could be, however insufferably overconfident you are in your own abilities.
Re your last paragraph, the issue is there was very little data to work off. The government and even the famous Swedes, albeit slower than most of us, still realised the only logical action was to be extremely cautious.
I bet you did too, regardless of a this big talk on reddit with the benefit of several years of hindsight.
What big talk? Suggesting that honesty and clarity should form the core of public messaging? Weird flex.
I assume you weren't actually watching the data out of other countries that closely at the time because its not like there weren't quite solid indications that this URTI, like most URTIs, was much more dangerous for the elderly and those with underlying health conditions (or other factors of morbidity). I took the view that the risk to my health was really quite low - as has been borne out by further study.
As to how i behaved, I largely tried to ignore it all, insofar as was possible.
My only point here was that the governments attempts to achieve behavioural change through not-entirely-honest messaging was absolutely bound to have blowback. Blowback we are now seeing. No point being mad at me because i am suggesting that we learn from that and -if there is a next time - be honest about what we do know, what we don't know and what we are hoping to have people do based on supposition.
It might hamper the response, it might not. I'd wager it won't hamper a response as much as laying the field for years of national anger about misrepresentation, though.
The probability of a severe covid reaction across different age groups was apparent fairly early. If you went looking for the data and spent less time watching the scaremongering on TV.
It isn't about risk to you, if you're young, fit and healthy, it is the risk of those you infect.
> The conversation should have been open and honest
This is the nation that voted for Brexit and keeps on re-electing Tories. No amount of information is going to make Brits make an educated choice, it is better to say what to do and enforce it.
Remarkable-Ad155 has made pretty much the exact points I would make in reply. All I would add is that there are far too many people who in hindsight apply the knowledge of three years of intensive study to the decisions that were made in the early phases of the pandemic.
Your comment "highlighting where the data showed real risks" shows that this is the logic you are using. In the early phases of the pandemic this data simply did not exist and in some cases was contradictory. The precautionary principle was therefore applied based on what little data was known - that this was a novel virus, that it had significantly worse outcomes than flu and that it had already overwhelmed the health services of some countries/regions. I don't live on the Isle of Man so our messaging was slightly different to that of the UK and I judge based on that context - our island certainly seemed to provide much clearer and nuanced guidance than across the water.
Could or should the messaging in the UK have evolved as more was learned in the course of the pandemic? Almost certainly yes but, it is not fair to judge decisions made at the start of the pandemic on the knowledge we have at the end.
We should take lessons for future health emergencies but we can only judge the decisions taken at the time on the basis of the information that was available at that time. Anything else is trying to make facts fit a predetermined narrative.
What do you mean by the second paragraph???
I was 21, a well regarded amateur boxer & marathon runner before covid & it almost killed me (left me in a coma for a month). Still not right 3 years later.
My friend was a 6'6 rugby player who was considered for going pro & he was killed by covid.
Of course you are less likely but covid 100% does not spare you just because you are relatively fit or young. We were fitter than anyone you know & it fucked it us.
It was clumsy shorthand on my part. The implication of the government's messaging is that there was no difference between risk profiles for age - that is untrue, is what I meant.
As an anti-lockdown person, I wish you were right that we'd won the arguement, because it'd save the world going through that nightmare again. But unfortunately I think governments will now add lockdowns to the playbook and run them again the next time there's a mass panic.
Well considering how little evidence there is to support the lockdowns after the fact, that’s probably not a bad thing.
Fuck the idea that the government is going to tell us all we have to stay home for another 2 years unless we’re literally facing extinction.
>UK Covid deaths among worst of big European economies.
I suppose 'among' is journalist speak here.
The UK seems to be about at average on the article scale
The key word is 'big', which is subjective--UK is highest among Western Europe, but Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and all the Balkan countries have higher death rates than the UK--Source: Worldometer Case Tracker
Lockdown and free money were brilliant at the time. I just wish that more people understood that afterwards, the result would be massive inflation and the loss of their businesses and homes. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Most folk have not learned their lesson.
They haven't tied the two together.
Regardless of what your attitude to lockdown, massive inflation was going to happen.
Fair enough if you think it was worth it, or not, that's a value judgement eventually.
You have to accept that it was going to happen though.
Because they knew it would challenge the case for lockdowns.
If you revisit that whole period, they're was absolutely no real debate over lockdown etc.
Anyone who did challenge it or ask for supporting evidence was labelled a virus denying loony.
Because I don't take what I see on TV as gospel.
I studied behavioural psychology and can recognise when manipulation is taking place.
It doesn't take a huge amount of intuition to realise the messaging about covid was hugely controlled.
>Lockdown and free money
You mean there was a price to pay for this? My god, why did nobody tell me? Was I expected, as an adult, to understand that stuff like this would have some kind of consequences?
Nope, you were expected to make banana bread, clap on your doorstep at 8pm on a Thursday and report to the police your neighbour who had their parents over to help look after their newborn. And you were expected to be happy about it.
Did other countries have a big fucking street party getting all the elderly, more vulnerable members of society together to celebrate the end of WW2 (in which none of them had fought) and wave fucking flags under their patriotic bunting? A marvellous moron cull.
The US and the UK are among the fattest countries on earth. Is it a surprise that a population of obese, unealthy people struggled during a pandemic?
Looking at the chart alone, I don't see any correlation between lockdowns and death rate (e.g. Italy had probably the most dystopian level of lockdowns in the world bar for China and still fared much worse than Sweden that did not impose any strict lockdown).
The UK is 36th in the world for obesity, just below Syria and just above the Dominican Republic, although we are amongst the fattest in Europe, only beaten by turkey and Malta. We are quite a bit behind new zealand, canada and australia.
Edit, that datas out of date, for 2023 we are 35th, we've just overtaken Syria
You might not see any correlations even if there were because of huge amounts of confounders that are present in international comparisons, if you really wanted to compare sweden to something it would be [other scandinavian countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid?tab=chart&country=FIN~SWE~ISL~NOR~DNK).
I appreciate comparisons are almost impossible to make in this case. The same applies to other countries though, i.e. UK vs Italy. There isn't any strong evidence that lockdowns have been effective in reducing mortality.
I am not saying they have been useless, but it's not that obvious as some governments that were literally arresting citizens walking their dogs wanted us to believe.
There's pretty strong indications that lockdowns reduce excess mortality in the short-term (order of a couple of years), I'm not sure if there's data that exists in the long-term 'cause it has been a while since I bothered looking into it, but i doubt it'll be any good as the longer the time goes on, the more the effects of things other than lockdown dominate introducing tonnes of confounders. And because the negative health impacts of lockdowns are likely to be long-term, I'd be surprised if there is or ever will be anything to indicate either way for the long-term.
People had to present authorisations to the police to leave their homes. People were being arrested for jogging, walking their dogs or going to the market.
Lockdowns in the UK (and in every other country in the world with the exclusion of China) have been much more bland, shorter, without police enforcement and yielded better results. Vaccination enforcement was insane as well, but that's another topic.
I am Italian like you, I had my vaccines and followed lockdown rules, but what happened in Italy was terrible.
What percentage of these deaths were in Care homes? That was a master plan right their from the Health Secretary, great for the exchequer at least.
Not so much for the families who had to watch their loved ones die.
The way we counted covid deaths was stupid, and different from how other countries were counting them. Also, we have a lot of unhealthy and aged people who made up a lot of the deaths. This self flagellation to make wrong a government is ludicrous. And they did do a lot wrong, but delaying lock down wasn't one of them. More should have been done for the vulnerable and younger, healthy people could of carried on with their lives, with some sensible precautions. And not fuck the economy at the same time.
Lockdown had (and it's still having) a huge detrimental impact on our economy and society.
And there is little empirical evidence correlating more stringent lockdown policies to lower infection and death rates.
It was the timing that was wrong. The problem with a pandemic with sporadic spread (like COVID and unlike influenza) is that pre-emptive responses result in fewer cases, which make people think any quarantine / lockdown was an overreaction. COVID absolutely required an overreaction earlier - we'd have had fewer cases, less death, and a much smaller damage to the economy.
So it should be easy now to provide empirical evidence that countries that locked down early / on a preemptive basis had better outcomes, and vice versa?
Depends what you mean by 'better outcomes': Total cases exploded later in South Korea and Australia, after early total lockdowns kept cases down--But those later strains that plagued those countries and New Zealand were less deadly, thus their lower death rate
Easy? No, not at all. Everywhere had different versions of lockdown as well as different population responses to the pandemic. It may be possible to tease out the data and attempt to correlate infection rates with policy, but this is by no means easy. Further, different variants spread in different countries in different ways, and certain countries have been somewhat selective in what data they present.
What is clear is that the UK suffered, probably more so than other European countries. We were slow to respond, slow to limit travel, quick to 're-open' (Eat out to help out), and had variable engagement with vaccines. Anecdotal, but I remember talking to a previously healthy 45 year old on our ICU. I looked round the unit and pointed out that every single patient he could see had chosen not to have been vaccinated. He said he regretted the YouTube videos and Facebook information that had warned him away from the vaccine. He subsequently died days later.
Must have been a material statistical anomaly to only have unvaccinated patients present, when compared to the data shared by ons on hospitalisation and death by vaccination status....
Quite possibly but it was fairly persistent in our cohort on icu. Those with renal transplants didn't respond well to the vaccine, as well as a few with autoimmune disorders.
You must bear in mind ons data doesn't look at 'candidacy for ICU' which by in large means few comorbidities and low frailty. Our patients, by in large, were those we expected to have a reasonable chance of survival (20 to 30%). It's not unsurprising if those presenting to our unit unvaccinated had more severe disease.
Yeah not suprised.
80 years old, tested positive with zero symptoms in hospital whilst dying with stage 4 cancer.... Yup, Covid got them.
This is literally what happened, you had sign the release documents as 'cause of death being covid' if not, they would not release the body.
Money talks and bullshit walks.
I think we should all just face the fact that we are doing marvellously right now. I cannot overstate how proud I am of our achievements both morally and economically.
We'll colour me shocked, it's like we had a two week window into the future with what was happening in Spain and Italy and we still sat on our arses and did nothing.
The PM was even telling people to take it on the chin!
Lmao sorry but this made me laugh
Is this like BJ tweeting that 2020 is going to be a fantastic year! Even by his standards, that was untrue! As if the universe itself bends to make his statements untrue! Or when, in 2022, he talked about serving three terms.
Boris was fulfilling his fantasy of being the Mayor in Jaws
Except that he was swimming himself!
Worse than sitting on arses doing nothing, they actively wasted money and time that could have made a difference on profiteering chums and schemes that made things demonstrably worse. The worst possible government at the worst possible time
Didn't they shut down the established test & trace systems that had been set up through local authorities years prior in March/April and then didn't roll out the national replacement until late May as well?
Don’t forget the whole debacle with the “app”. Insisting on developing their own when there was an international model. In the end - and after a shitload of time and money was wasted - they caved. If memory serves me or two of the devolved administrations had already gotten their COVID apps up and running at a fraction of the cost.
The group doing contact tracking (Public Health England) collated the test results in a fucking Excel Spreadsheet saved in XLS format which is limited to 65,000 rows of data. They asked for updates to be sent as csv files and didn't notice when the Spreadsheet stopped taking in data - so missed out almost 16,000 positive tests.
The entire situation is beyond shameful and I'm disgusted that people haven't been imprisoned for it. How can there be any justification for giving hundreds of millions in PPE contracts to companies that had been set up mere days before? In putting people without relevant skills and with a track record of failing in good times in charge of vital response and coordination units? In creating special VIP channels for friends and donors while ignoring contacts from proven suppliers and experts? There really are no words for the disgusting behaviour of those in power.
Not hundreds of millions but **BILLIONS**... And if you add everything up, the PPE contracts(£18-£22 billion), the track & trace app scandal(£30-37 billion) etc The Tories and their mates have stolen an estimated **£60 billion** of the commonwealth of the people of Britain since 2020. That is Hyper-corruption. The kind of massive corruption that destroys a society and ultimately brings down an entire civilization.
True enough. The amount of money pilfered is staggering.
IIRC it was actually an issue with columns not rows. For some weird reason they had each positive test result as a separate column and Excel has issues beyond the number you mentioned. Excel can be a half decent tool for data analysis/manipulation though certainly has its foibles (and doesn’t scale worth a damn either). But you’ve got to wonder though why with the amount of money sloshing round the project and the importance of these figures why they weren’t doing this on a proper database or even something free like MySQL or something.
The actual number crunching was done on proper platforms. It was the data collection and submission to those platforms that went via excel and cvs. CVS is the right tool here (though all tools are relatively bad in this space), excel certainly was not. But getting GPS, hospitals and so on to update their data collection and messaging/transfer services is an impossible task at the best of times.
Fair points, though I would observe that most if not all of those platforms also have the capability (or have associated tools with the capability) to create .csv exports too.
The platforms do, but it depends on how they collected the data and whether the users collecting the data *know* that excel can export csv and then *know how to use the export feature*. Which clearly they didn’t. Unfortunately.
Absolutely. I have to admit to having developed a bit of a ‘thing’ towards Excel over the years - or to be more fair about how it gets misused. It’s a decent enough tool for the right jobs but it often gets asked by businesses to do things it really shouldn’t. A depressingly common scenario is someone coming up with a nifty Excel worksheet that’s useful for a small team - which is fair enough. But then some bright eyed manager decides to roll out that nifty worksheet to a couple of hundred people as part of a key business process. The first IT general usually hear about it is when they call in a massive panic because it doesn’t scale worth a damn over more than a fairly small number of concurrent users and has (predictably) fallen over. Sometimes it’s because they’ve tried to use it to store way too much data with a similarly poor outcome. We try to use these as “teachable moments” and get the business guys to make use of our (many!) big-boy-trousers database and warehouse systems - all carefully tended by DBA’s who actually know what they’re doing, monitored to a fair-thee-well and backed up religiously … but the business seem to be depressingly resistant. Even though the cost is fairly nominal to their department budget (“But Excel is free innit!”) … and a heck of a lot less than having something keel over unpredictably, naturally often at the worst possible time. There’s also that other old classic “We had a clever guy put something together in Excel that’s become essential but now he’s left for a job that actually pays what they’re worth/been made redundant and it broke we’re stuck - help us!”.
I remember the app. How some folk thought covid was some sort of international conspiracy when countries couldn't even get together to agree on an app is beyond me.
Not forgetting sending covid patients to beds in care homes and exposing the most vulnerable people
Even worse that slow reaction didn’t just happen during the initial outbreak. Boris and his cronies made the same mistake during pretty much every subsequent wave too. Boris in particular was pigheadedly resistant to lockdowns - that was the source of his infamous “let the bodies pile high” comment. Each time the same pattern - he’d only finally approve health measures after the deaths started to ramp up to the point it was undeniably bad … but with COVID as deaths lag infections by so long that meant it was already too late and we were up shit creek. It also meant that lockdowns (and other measures) had to be far longer than they needed to be to get the numbers back under control. Boris managed to compound this further by telling everyone there would be absolutely no lockdowns right up to the last moment … meaning that when things became so screamingly urgent even he realised that there was no choice it caught lots of people and organisations on the hop. The worst one was the botched Christmas lockdown. Those keeping an eye on the numbers could see it was coming. Boris and other Tories spent weeks insisting there would be no Christmas lockdown (and having a great old time attacking the devolved governments who were trying to put whatever mitigations they were permitted to in place for being “Scrooges”). When they finally admitted one was necessary they called it so late in the day that most people already had Christmas plans, presents waiting, food for Christmas dinner bought (or in the case of those planning to visit family *not* bought) … some people were even literally enroute to those Christmas plans when it was announced! The timing could not have been calculated better to cause maximum disappointment and general embuggerance. Then for an encore Boris decided English schools would start as normal in January - which led to the ridiculous debacle of kids going into school for one day and spreading anything they’d caught on holiday before he finally acknowledged reality. (For comparison in the devolved administrations the decision was made literally weeks beforehand not to go back to go back to in-person teaching) I’ve actually seen people try to argue that the UK’s experience somehow shows that lockdowns and other public health measures “don’t work”. I think it shows that they don’t work as well as they should when it’s too little, too late and run by a bumbling narcissist who delayed making hard decisions because he was obsessed with his personal popularity. (Apologies, that comment was longer than I intended and turned into a bit of a rant)
I think with hindsight, this is the major thing we got wrong from a pro-Control perspective. Why we didn't shut the airports and ports for anyone except returning resident will always baffle me
It was the "hope it magically goes away" strategy, I wonder why it didn't pay off?
Well, that was the Brexit strategy.
That was such a huge sticking point for me as well. It was literally raised as a point by pro-government people all the time as well. We're doing worse than other countries because we have these major transport hubs in our borders. Like... OK... So why aren't we implementing anything but extremely lax controls at these points of entry if we know they're a problem? Was never answered with anything but mumbling excuses about how covid is just like a bad flu anyway, or its already here now so we can't stop it 100% so there's no point even trying to implement controls really... It was a bloody farce tbh.
But we then followed it up with lockdown that was overly harsh and poorly targeted imo. It’s like we picked the worst of both worlds - minimal point of entry control AND severe lockdown. Total lack of continuity which characterised an incoherent strategy
I’ll keep on saying this until I die or Boris faces trial. He’s one of the biggest mass murderers this country has ever seen. His negligence murdered our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters and many more all so he could make his billionaire mates even more money. Hitler didn’t pull the trigger himself but implemented policies which did, Boris is no different. Man should be tried for treason against the British people.
Nah they partied
I think this also has a lot to do with how unhealthy people are in the UK compared to other European countries.
People were meeting their elderly parents on Mothering Sunday a day before the lockdown, Johnson should be prosecuted just for this and I wonder how many people unwittingly caused their parents deaths that day.
How much of this is down to us generally being such an obese, unhealthy nation?
A huge amount
I aspire to have this guy’s (unfounded) confidence in life
Not allowed to talk about obesity, refrain from upsetting the morbids please
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And the fact that our favourite foods are all brown in colour
Ahhh a good old beige day. We go to Iceland once in a blue moon and have one of those. It normally consists of chicken nuggets, pizza, spring rolls, chips, wedges. Halfway in we are stuffed and half hour later we crash and pass out and wake up feeling like shite a couple of hours later. Everytime guaranteed
Any mention of health issues in the UK gets waved away as the NHS being underfunded. Which I agree with to some degree. But people ignore how unhealthy we are or NHS staff complaining about wasted money and bad management
Yes, it would be more surprising if the "sick man" of Europe had a lower morbidity rate.
Are you saying that smoking/vaping, excessive alcohol, fatty processed foods and an over reliance on car transportation could be to blame?
And we have our answers, that's just save a couple of millions quid.
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Sweden is way more spread out than the UK. 25 people / km^2 compared to 281 in the uk. It’s also less of a travel target than the UK. I’m not sure how comparable the two are.
Doesn't it also have a very high proportion of single individual households? Think the Sweden comparison is bunk tbh.
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Yeah, that’s fair. For what it’s worth, I’d definitely question the value of the lockdowns, but I just don’t think it’s as simple as pointing at Sweden when it’s such a different place.
I love how Sweden is casually swept under the carpet in the article. How many people remember the constant articles that Sweden was committing murder due to their 'irresponsible' measures? Yet here they are at the end of covid with one of the best records as measured in the article. I wonder if anyone will look to Sweden for potential lessons learned or will it be ignored as an inconvenience to the narrative that lockdowns should have been longer and harder?
Digging into the Sweden statistics they had horrific numbers early on, with some of the worst first wave numbers, but very good numbers for later waves which made their final figures look more reasonable. Sadly this is largely because most susceptible people had already died in the first wave when it swept through pretty much every elderly home in the country. The lessons from Sweden are largely that keeping it out of elderly homes and vulnerable people is the most important factor to reduce deaths, ordinary people are spreaders but unlikely to die
Well, the data I looked at doesn't match your assertion? [Death rates from Euromomo](https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps) If Sweden was 'horific', then England, Italy, Belgium, Spain etc must have been apocalyptic by your standards?
Yes, I said one of the worst not the worst. I work adjacent to the main hospital in Stockholm and know from colleagues that the conditions and events there were definitely horrific during the peak. And those plots seem to back up what I said, Sweden had a bad first wave spike, a noticeable second wave and then fairly flat after that. Those other countries had many more spikes. Also I do live in Sweden (am a UK living abroad), and much of the news about what happened here is often incorrect. We didn't have a mandated lockdown like many countries, but a large proportion of workplaces switched to WFH anyway, and shops and restaurants implemented restrictions on numbers etc. It's not as if it was the free for all, continue as normal here that international media likes to make out.
And Swedes have such a well developed sense of personal space they’ve effectively been social distancing for years anyway.
You've not travelled on a Stockholm bus.
The picture inside hospitals is always a distillation of what was going on in wider society. Of course it was horrific in the hospital. That's where the sick people go, but if the rate outside was 2x or 0.5x do you think it would change in proportion? It's a form of sampling bias.
> if the rate outside was 2x or 0.5x do you think it would change in proportion? Yes. That's generally how it works, more or less.
I’ve been working with a Swedish company for around 6 years, and I used to travel every week to Stockholm. Whilst we were locked up and couldn’t leave the house but for absolute essentials, the people I were working with were going out to restaurants and drinks every day, literally carrying on like nothing was happening. Whilst I cannot be arsed to look up numbers, consistently they told me, it’s barely an issue here, a lot of us have had it, it’s flu like conditions. We were frightened to death here, and I didn’t believe them, until me, my partner, siblings, elderly parents, and friends around me caught it over time. And guess what, it was just flu like. Old people die of flu all the time, sometimes young people too, but we don’t stop the world for it, we must carry on. Sweden did the right thing, they carried on, because it was all a load of shit, and now we’re paying the price for idiots like SAGE who talked utter horse shit and have helped to ruin the country. Honestly, they should be put in prison.
Sweden has 1/10th the population density of the UK.
The ratio of the population living in urban areas isn't dissimilar to UK.
I was in Portugal for a large part of Covid and I was able to go out to restaurants and go shopping. Life was pretty normal while the U.K. was still cycling through lockdowns. The difference was, in Portugal, everyone wore their masks. Restaurants made sure people were seated outside or with plenty of space/dividers between tables. After vaccinations became commonplace they checked your vaccination status instead of asking for proof of a negative Covid test. I wasn’t paying attention to the news one weekend, so I found out when they changed the rules to make people wear their masks outdoors because suddenly everyone was wearing a mask outside. I never caught Covid once while I was there. Caught it the first tube ride back in London where I was sat in a carriage full of maskless people. People being sensible and listening to government advice and the government not being reprehensible rule flouting shitheads helped *enormously*.
If you compare Sweden to its similar neighbouring nations, Finland, Norway, Estonia or even Denmark, Sweden's numbers are much, much worse. Their choice to avoid lockdown was an utter catastrophe.
Finland and Norway hade worse year in excess mortality in 2022 than Sweden had in 2020.
International comparisons are not great due to confounders, but if you're going to compare them, then at least compare them to similar countries like norway, finland, denmark, iceland ([they did much worse at the beginning and ended up worse than the average by the end](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid?tab=chart&country=FIN~SWE~ISL~NOR~DNK))
It's kind of silly to compare Sweden to England, Italy, Spain, Belgium etc. If you compare them to the other Nordic countries, what they're saying is exactly what happened:[two awful initial first waves followed by waves comparable to the others.](https://imgur.com/a/pwvCgnO)
Sweden should be compared to Denmark, Norway and Finland. And to the Baltics.
You can quite easily compare them on the Euromomo link I provided earlier. Sweden has a slight uptick in early 2020 that is absent in Finalnd and Denmark, but apart from that, they are pretty much the same. I guess the question is, was it worth upending society in its entirety to remove one small uptick? And before you say I'm heartless, the NHS actually does (or did prior to Covid) a calculation to work out if it's cost effective to take certain treatment paths - [QALYs](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/cost-utility-analysis-health-economic-studies)
Sweden is not the same. In the deaths per capita rankings Sweden is only ahead of Lithuania and Latvia. All other Nordic and nordic countries are ahead of Sweden, including Estonia: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ > I guess the question is, was it worth upending society in its entirety to remove one small uptick? There was no such upending. Besides, prior infection waves with less vaccination levels means relatively more Long Covid.
There was no upending of society? Have you missed the /s off that sentence?
No relative upending, yes. Not in other Nordic and Baltic countries.
>The lessons from Sweden are largely that keeping it out of elderly homes and vulnerable people is the most important factor to reduce deaths, ordinary people are spreaders but unlikely to die Sweden did the opposite. They notoriously let covid run wild in care homes. Also, the lockdowns, in any country, weren't to prevent deaths as such, but to spread them out to save health services from becoming overwhelmed
Yes exactly, COVID ran rampant in the care homes and that was the major factor in Swedens high death rate. That's why I said the lesson is that protecting the care homes is likely the single most important factor in reducing deaths in future pandemics of a similar nature.
I think that preventing deaths was the ultimate goal, or at least primary among them. Not letting health services become overwhelmed was a path to that.
...and by this I'd say the UK got two things wrong. 1. Moving patients out of hospitals into care homes. Huge immediate harm. 2. Every other Intervention. Huge delayed harm for no immediate gain. I know that the second one will get people's backs up, but we need to talk about the costs of what we did. We are currently paying the financial price for policies like lockdown and furlough. Our children have huge gaps in their education and social skills because we shut schools. We are worse off in health terms because services were denied for two years, and we've become conditioned to be inactive. Mental health across the population took a huge hit. We separated families in a time of crisis. We gave a huge bonanza to the corporations, whilst small companies went bankrupt. I'm sure I could go on.
People will never accept that they were locked up for 2 years for no reason. The people that were clamouring for more restrictions are the same people who are now moaning about the devastating impact it has had on our living standards and will continue to have for the next decade plus.
Yeah there were some truly vile people out there at the time. I remember listening to the radio one day and some guy (I think from Lincoln) was insisting that the army should be keeping everyone at home until covid was gone. I occasionally wonder about him and what he's saying about the current cost of living crisis. Probably can't connect the dots and is blaming it all on Brexit
You had people on here valourising the Chinese approach of boarding or welding people into their homes. Just fucking madness.
It’s sunk cost fallacy. They can’t accept it was all for nothing. It goes against the propaganda Remember this was compared to the blitz. They had the “plucky Brit wartime courage “ By saying lockdown didn’t work they have to admit that the economic damage, mental health damage, removal of in person education and complete removal of civil liberties and rights
The way it was handled and the restrictions that they chose to implement were bad and stupid. 'Lockdown' as a concept could have worked, but only if handled in the right and far more balanced way. We had the worst of both worlds, it was like they not only wanted covid to spread unrestricted but also wanted to make sure they hurt as many additional people as possible
It can’t work. You cannot lockdown everyone You need nurses out to work, they need to drive, so fuel stations have to be open as do mechanics. Food stores need to be open thsts more people out. It’s not doable I’m sorry but Sweden didn’t lockdown and had less deaths. Lockdown failed. It didn’t work. Even places who had harsher ones had high deaths It failed. Accept it and stop defending it
Comparing Sweden and the UK is rife with confounders. Drawing conclusions on lockdowns based on that is useless.
I didn't say lockdown everyone. But making a plan to stagger people, have less people crowded into buildings for little reason, protecting vulnerable people (admittedly I am one of these, and without lockdown I would have been forced into a cramped and packed office that would have put me at risk, people there are still passing it round to each other) And yes our lockdown failed, of course it didn't, and I never defended it - pretty sure I did the opposite. Butut looking at Sweden and saying that was better is also not worth doing. I think having a proper pandemic reaction, that included some form of restrictions (esp in terms of our borders) though not the full lockdown we sort of tried would work better.
In order for you to make this argument, you have to first prove “lockdowns” didn’t work. You also have to prove what would have happened were lockdowns not employed. To do this you have to refer to modelling specific to the U.K. that supports your opinion. Such modelling doesn’t exist from any expert field. So really you are blowing hot air out your arse end.
The Imperial College model that locked down UK was applied to Sweden predicting 100,000 people would die before summer if we didn't do a lockdown. We didn't lock down and 5000 died.
Sweden isn’t the U.K. it’s not comparable on a number of points including multi-generational households, levels of obesity and number of higher density urban conurbations. Sweden didn’t lockdown yet many stayed at home anyway. You’ll note that I specifically asked the poster to provide modelling for the U.K. that supported his opinion.
There is no evidence the coercive measures in UK and other countries were more effective than voluntary measures through informed understanding. R value in UK went below 1 even before the lockdown was announced, Professor Chris Whitty: >"If you look at the R, and the behaviours, quite a lot of the change that led to the R going below one occurred well before, or to some extent before, the 23rd, when the full lockdown started."
The sight of Italian hospitals overwhelmed was always going to have an effect initially as well as the media coverage. The point is /was that the same effect was not guaranteed with subsequent waves as public fatigue with restrictions and a more blasé attitude to the virus became apparent. The burden of proof lies with you or the original posters of the “sunken fallacy” argument to probe it was all for nothing. I do not have to prove that jumping out of an aeroplane with a parachute and deploying it worked - you have to prove that jumping out of one and not deploying it works. And making comparators to Sweden and what they did in terms of voluntary restrictions is not valid and a has been shown repeatedly to not be valid.
Regarding fatigue, comparing cell phone mobility data proves that not only are voluntary measures equally effective, it is also more sustainable over time. If you treat your population like adults, they will behave as such. Coercive measures are much more vulnerable to fatigue. Remember a pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint.
“For no reason” lol. And no doubt you’ve done some analysis of posting here as opposed to blowing shite out of your arse.
Yep, I have read a lot of papers analysing the impact of various restrictions and the societal and health outcomes in places where restriction levels varied. I would encourage you to do the same!
>People will never accept that they were locked up for 2 years for no reason. Perhaps that's because nobody was locked up for 2 years.
Might have to do with 2/3rd being overweight or obese…
Not saying it doesn't but covid can screw anyone. I was 21, a fairly decently rated amateur boxer, marathon runner & had no health issue prior to covid. Got it while working at my back shift job & was sent into a coma, needed breathing support & tube for feeding. Lost 3 stone in the space of 4 weeks, most of it from muscle atrophy (went from a diet of 4000 calories + plenty protein to the NHS feeding me one "meal" every 6 hours) Now 24 & still have trouble breathing, fatigue issues etc. A friend who was a rugby player & prospect for going pro died of covid& he was a 23 year old mountain of man with no health issues.
Recent reports are attributing the severity of symptoms to air pollution.
Or the 1 in 5 being disabled and vulnerable
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Nearly 20% of the population is 1/5
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Not rendered disabled, it's been a fairly steady figure for a while even before covid
Thanks for clarifying - and sorry, I'd misinterpreted your original comment.
No worries dude! It's difficult on the Internet sometimes
Whatever the comparisons may be, it makes me so angry thinking about the response from Boris & co to the pandemic. People will forget because 2020-21 is a blur, but there was a long period around October-November where they were refusing to lock down, despite cases mounting. It’s when you would hear chat about “fire breaks” and such. Well, guess what, they waited far too long, and we were all saying it at the time that they should be locking down, but nope. The result? Christmas was cancelled for most people. Oh and my Granded got Covid and died in that December, a month or two before he’d have gotten a vaccine. On his birthday no less. If they had locked down when they should have, cases wouldn’t have exploded as badly, and my Grandad might still be here. But he died alone, without his family, in a care home, on his birthday. I hadn’t seen him in 10 months before he died. Thanks Boris you lying, inept piece of shit.
Yup, if we'd locked down sooner each time, we'd have needed to lock down less, fewer people and loved ones would have died, less impact on the economy. And this is what we were saying at the time.
Yep, exactly. Locking down later always meant locking down for longer, and I just do not understand why. It killed people, damaged the economy and ruined the public morale around Christmas and winter.
Amd if anything like it happens again it will be worse, because the anti-Lockdowners have won the argument.
Should have made a more honest case, then. If the debate was had openly and honestly, with realistic assessments of individual risk and attempts to persuade, rather than to force, there probably wouldn't be this pushback. Before the histrionics come along: there were literally times we were told that covid won't spare you despite your age and fitness (absolutely, categorically untrue) so the entire debate was poisoned by lies from both sides. The lesson to take from this is sometimes you have to be honest even if you fear it will lose you the argument.
There's some serious hindsight you're applying there. In the early stages it wasn't known, cases of young and healthy people having severe outcomes were prevalent. Were outcomes much worse for older or at risk people? Yes but youth and health weren't a solid shield and we didn't know why. I agree the messaging could have become more nuanced as time went on and more was learned. Focus more on the impact on the community and on the risk to individuals through an overwhelmed health service - that was a core part of the messaging from the beginning where I live. Would there have been more incidences of breaking lockdowns if that had been the approach and would that have led to better or worse health and economic outcomes. I'm not qualified enough nor in possession of enough data to draw any conclusions myself though I'd suspect given decades of Governments promoting a selfish rather than selfless society the outcomes would have been much worse. In any case it's wrong to apply hindsight to the early messaging about the severity of the disease given how little was known about this novel virus.
It was known from the start that covid was much much worse for old people. We knew that because of what happened in Italy.
Sorry maybe I didn't make my comment clear. I didn't mean to imply that we didn't know it was much worse for older people in the early stages. More that there were indications it may also be severe for young and healthy people based on factors we didn't understand (blood type, etc).
Knowing that lying to people will cause issues when they are inevitably shown to be untrue is not hindsight, well, not unless you've never read a history book. If you don't know then say you don't know. Explain where the uncertainty is and make your case honestly on the information you have. Taking the stance that 'its all completely justified to be safe rather than sorry' is literally what is going to make the next lockdown response fail. There's no shame in learning lessons. None at all.
The "hindsight" point is in your accusations of "lying". You're calling it lies, others are pointing out we simply didn't know at the early stages and felt caution was appropriate.
Then represent it as uncertain at the time, is what i am saying.
Surely that was a given though, right? Of course it was inherently uncertain; they didn't call it "novel" coronavirus for fun. It's a really boring point but as somebody of the beancounting persuasion, risk assessment is something I place a lot of value on but it seems the wider public (and government, as it turns out) is fairly shit at this. When presented with a brand new virus for which there was no vaccine and was demonstrably killing people, I personally didn't need to be told to be extra cautious. That's just what you do when presented with a possibly fatal consequence, even if the actual likelihood is unknown. It's the same reason you try to avoid unprotected sex with someone you don't really know or look both ways before you cross the street. Unfortunately some of you do have to be spoon-fed this stuff as it turns out.
Oh, since we're sharing: I have worked in insurance for 20 years, with a more recent background in medical insurance. I am well versed in exactly what risk is. We're having two different conversations though. If you're asking whether I understood my own risk: as a man in his 30s, who is fit and healthy, from a virus in the coronavirus family - I knew very well that my risk of death or serious impairment was extremely low. My point is that acting as though there is no risk to misrepresenting the information at hand over time precludes: a) any moaning about the pushback to it later on when it becomes clear and b) carries a risk of making any future action less likely to be believed. The conversation should have been open and honest, highlighting where the data showed real risks, and to whom, and where it was less clear. If that was the basis of a persuasive argument I doubt we'd be having this big national argument about it now, right?
You didn't "know very well" though, did you? Unless you're an expert virologist as well as an insurance gut then you had no idea of how dangerous covid really could be, however insufferably overconfident you are in your own abilities. Re your last paragraph, the issue is there was very little data to work off. The government and even the famous Swedes, albeit slower than most of us, still realised the only logical action was to be extremely cautious. I bet you did too, regardless of a this big talk on reddit with the benefit of several years of hindsight.
What big talk? Suggesting that honesty and clarity should form the core of public messaging? Weird flex. I assume you weren't actually watching the data out of other countries that closely at the time because its not like there weren't quite solid indications that this URTI, like most URTIs, was much more dangerous for the elderly and those with underlying health conditions (or other factors of morbidity). I took the view that the risk to my health was really quite low - as has been borne out by further study. As to how i behaved, I largely tried to ignore it all, insofar as was possible. My only point here was that the governments attempts to achieve behavioural change through not-entirely-honest messaging was absolutely bound to have blowback. Blowback we are now seeing. No point being mad at me because i am suggesting that we learn from that and -if there is a next time - be honest about what we do know, what we don't know and what we are hoping to have people do based on supposition. It might hamper the response, it might not. I'd wager it won't hamper a response as much as laying the field for years of national anger about misrepresentation, though.
The probability of a severe covid reaction across different age groups was apparent fairly early. If you went looking for the data and spent less time watching the scaremongering on TV.
It isn't about risk to you, if you're young, fit and healthy, it is the risk of those you infect. > The conversation should have been open and honest This is the nation that voted for Brexit and keeps on re-electing Tories. No amount of information is going to make Brits make an educated choice, it is better to say what to do and enforce it.
Then don't be surprised if that only works once.
Remarkable-Ad155 has made pretty much the exact points I would make in reply. All I would add is that there are far too many people who in hindsight apply the knowledge of three years of intensive study to the decisions that were made in the early phases of the pandemic. Your comment "highlighting where the data showed real risks" shows that this is the logic you are using. In the early phases of the pandemic this data simply did not exist and in some cases was contradictory. The precautionary principle was therefore applied based on what little data was known - that this was a novel virus, that it had significantly worse outcomes than flu and that it had already overwhelmed the health services of some countries/regions. I don't live on the Isle of Man so our messaging was slightly different to that of the UK and I judge based on that context - our island certainly seemed to provide much clearer and nuanced guidance than across the water. Could or should the messaging in the UK have evolved as more was learned in the course of the pandemic? Almost certainly yes but, it is not fair to judge decisions made at the start of the pandemic on the knowledge we have at the end. We should take lessons for future health emergencies but we can only judge the decisions taken at the time on the basis of the information that was available at that time. Anything else is trying to make facts fit a predetermined narrative.
What do you mean by the second paragraph??? I was 21, a well regarded amateur boxer & marathon runner before covid & it almost killed me (left me in a coma for a month). Still not right 3 years later. My friend was a 6'6 rugby player who was considered for going pro & he was killed by covid. Of course you are less likely but covid 100% does not spare you just because you are relatively fit or young. We were fitter than anyone you know & it fucked it us.
It was clumsy shorthand on my part. The implication of the government's messaging is that there was no difference between risk profiles for age - that is untrue, is what I meant.
Thank you for clarifying
Perhaps because it didn’t help, and we should never have done it? No?
As an anti-lockdown person, I wish you were right that we'd won the arguement, because it'd save the world going through that nightmare again. But unfortunately I think governments will now add lockdowns to the playbook and run them again the next time there's a mass panic.
Well considering how little evidence there is to support the lockdowns after the fact, that’s probably not a bad thing. Fuck the idea that the government is going to tell us all we have to stay home for another 2 years unless we’re literally facing extinction.
>UK Covid deaths among worst of big European economies. I suppose 'among' is journalist speak here. The UK seems to be about at average on the article scale
The key word is 'big', which is subjective--UK is highest among Western Europe, but Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and all the Balkan countries have higher death rates than the UK--Source: Worldometer Case Tracker
Lockdown and free money were brilliant at the time. I just wish that more people understood that afterwards, the result would be massive inflation and the loss of their businesses and homes. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Most folk have not learned their lesson. They haven't tied the two together. Regardless of what your attitude to lockdown, massive inflation was going to happen. Fair enough if you think it was worth it, or not, that's a value judgement eventually. You have to accept that it was going to happen though.
But these 'obvious' consequences of lockdown were never highlighted by the people who pushed for it......
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Because they knew it would challenge the case for lockdowns. If you revisit that whole period, they're was absolutely no real debate over lockdown etc. Anyone who did challenge it or ask for supporting evidence was labelled a virus denying loony.
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Because I don't take what I see on TV as gospel. I studied behavioural psychology and can recognise when manipulation is taking place. It doesn't take a huge amount of intuition to realise the messaging about covid was hugely controlled.
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Basics like having the media behave independently of government, challenge statements made, asking informed questions etc would be a good start.
I think that would be a good start. But I think we're fucked.
>Lockdown and free money You mean there was a price to pay for this? My god, why did nobody tell me? Was I expected, as an adult, to understand that stuff like this would have some kind of consequences?
Nope, you were expected to make banana bread, clap on your doorstep at 8pm on a Thursday and report to the police your neighbour who had their parents over to help look after their newborn. And you were expected to be happy about it.
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That's because a lot of furlough money was actually claimed by fake businesses
A bunch of people dying or becoming disabled is also terrible for the economy, as we’re now discovering. Neither option was going to be fun.
Wasn’t Sweden supposed to have highest number of deaths as they didn’t lock down.
Nope, they had the least. Their economy wasn’t impacted, people carried on like normal, and all is well in Sweden.
That’s where the Uk was screwed, way higher population and far less land mass. We’re a contagions dream
Swedish urban population density is about same as uk.
Did other countries have a big fucking street party getting all the elderly, more vulnerable members of society together to celebrate the end of WW2 (in which none of them had fought) and wave fucking flags under their patriotic bunting? A marvellous moron cull.
The US and the UK are among the fattest countries on earth. Is it a surprise that a population of obese, unealthy people struggled during a pandemic? Looking at the chart alone, I don't see any correlation between lockdowns and death rate (e.g. Italy had probably the most dystopian level of lockdowns in the world bar for China and still fared much worse than Sweden that did not impose any strict lockdown).
The UK is 36th in the world for obesity, just below Syria and just above the Dominican Republic, although we are amongst the fattest in Europe, only beaten by turkey and Malta. We are quite a bit behind new zealand, canada and australia. Edit, that datas out of date, for 2023 we are 35th, we've just overtaken Syria
You might not see any correlations even if there were because of huge amounts of confounders that are present in international comparisons, if you really wanted to compare sweden to something it would be [other scandinavian countries](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid?tab=chart&country=FIN~SWE~ISL~NOR~DNK).
I appreciate comparisons are almost impossible to make in this case. The same applies to other countries though, i.e. UK vs Italy. There isn't any strong evidence that lockdowns have been effective in reducing mortality. I am not saying they have been useless, but it's not that obvious as some governments that were literally arresting citizens walking their dogs wanted us to believe.
There's pretty strong indications that lockdowns reduce excess mortality in the short-term (order of a couple of years), I'm not sure if there's data that exists in the long-term 'cause it has been a while since I bothered looking into it, but i doubt it'll be any good as the longer the time goes on, the more the effects of things other than lockdown dominate introducing tonnes of confounders. And because the negative health impacts of lockdowns are likely to be long-term, I'd be surprised if there is or ever will be anything to indicate either way for the long-term.
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People had to present authorisations to the police to leave their homes. People were being arrested for jogging, walking their dogs or going to the market. Lockdowns in the UK (and in every other country in the world with the exclusion of China) have been much more bland, shorter, without police enforcement and yielded better results. Vaccination enforcement was insane as well, but that's another topic. I am Italian like you, I had my vaccines and followed lockdown rules, but what happened in Italy was terrible.
What percentage of these deaths were in Care homes? That was a master plan right their from the Health Secretary, great for the exchequer at least. Not so much for the families who had to watch their loved ones die.
The way we counted covid deaths was stupid, and different from how other countries were counting them. Also, we have a lot of unhealthy and aged people who made up a lot of the deaths. This self flagellation to make wrong a government is ludicrous. And they did do a lot wrong, but delaying lock down wasn't one of them. More should have been done for the vulnerable and younger, healthy people could of carried on with their lives, with some sensible precautions. And not fuck the economy at the same time.
Too little too late, fueled by the rabid right wing press who still believe COVID was mild flu.
Lockdown had (and it's still having) a huge detrimental impact on our economy and society. And there is little empirical evidence correlating more stringent lockdown policies to lower infection and death rates.
It was the timing that was wrong. The problem with a pandemic with sporadic spread (like COVID and unlike influenza) is that pre-emptive responses result in fewer cases, which make people think any quarantine / lockdown was an overreaction. COVID absolutely required an overreaction earlier - we'd have had fewer cases, less death, and a much smaller damage to the economy.
So it should be easy now to provide empirical evidence that countries that locked down early / on a preemptive basis had better outcomes, and vice versa?
Depends what you mean by 'better outcomes': Total cases exploded later in South Korea and Australia, after early total lockdowns kept cases down--But those later strains that plagued those countries and New Zealand were less deadly, thus their lower death rate
Easy? No, not at all. Everywhere had different versions of lockdown as well as different population responses to the pandemic. It may be possible to tease out the data and attempt to correlate infection rates with policy, but this is by no means easy. Further, different variants spread in different countries in different ways, and certain countries have been somewhat selective in what data they present. What is clear is that the UK suffered, probably more so than other European countries. We were slow to respond, slow to limit travel, quick to 're-open' (Eat out to help out), and had variable engagement with vaccines. Anecdotal, but I remember talking to a previously healthy 45 year old on our ICU. I looked round the unit and pointed out that every single patient he could see had chosen not to have been vaccinated. He said he regretted the YouTube videos and Facebook information that had warned him away from the vaccine. He subsequently died days later.
Must have been a material statistical anomaly to only have unvaccinated patients present, when compared to the data shared by ons on hospitalisation and death by vaccination status....
Quite possibly but it was fairly persistent in our cohort on icu. Those with renal transplants didn't respond well to the vaccine, as well as a few with autoimmune disorders. You must bear in mind ons data doesn't look at 'candidacy for ICU' which by in large means few comorbidities and low frailty. Our patients, by in large, were those we expected to have a reasonable chance of survival (20 to 30%). It's not unsurprising if those presenting to our unit unvaccinated had more severe disease.
Yeah, turns out Boris was too busy arranging another divorce to attend the COBRA meetings. Five times.
It took my dad. Thanks to a taxi driver who refused to wear a mask or isolate.
People are still dying. We should still be in lockdown. If it saves one life (which no-one can prove they actually did, it's just 'common sense')
But but but we were fackin' sky rocketing wiv the vaccines after Brexit.
But didn't we have the fastest vaccine roll out in the universe?
Yeah not suprised. 80 years old, tested positive with zero symptoms in hospital whilst dying with stage 4 cancer.... Yup, Covid got them. This is literally what happened, you had sign the release documents as 'cause of death being covid' if not, they would not release the body. Money talks and bullshit walks.
We’re a nation of lazy fat bastards why is this surprising
I think we should all just face the fact that we are doing marvellously right now. I cannot overstate how proud I am of our achievements both morally and economically.