“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
I can easily grasp the horror of being trapped in your mind.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
Though even if that translated to voteshares she still wouldn't be Chancellor, Merz and Scholz would do a deal to resume a CDU and SPD grand coalition government after 4 years of the CDU in opposition.
Voteshare wise the same poll has the CDU/CSU 12% ahead of the AfD still with the SDP 4% behind the AfD in third
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
I can easily grasp the horror of being trapped in your mind.
The 2008 financial crash certainly left a legacy of loss of trust in financial institutions which has spread to other institutions since other scandals since. It also has seen largely stagnant wages since which has further spread populism across the West, exacerbated by rising inflation as a legacy of the Ukraine war and the Covid lockdowns. 9/11, the peak of jihadi terrorism, then further spread suspicion of immigration and intervention in foreign wars.
Of course not all banks were bailed out, the US administration let Lehmans go bust for example in 2008 after Brown and Darling blocked an immediate rescue by Barclays without full due diligence first. The play Lehmans is well worth seeing and in its final weeks
With hindsight, letting Lehmans fail might have triggered the GFC from a little local difficulty with subprime mortgages.
To an extent but one big bank had to be allowed to fail pour encourager les autres and as Lehmans had the most debt it drew the short straw. We could also have allowed Northern Rock to go under here too as it was the worst affected UK bank but letting it go would have been too damaging for the North East economy especially, as letting RBS go would have hit Scotland's economy even harder
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
Lockdown1 pre vaccine was a no-brainer (and should have happened earlier) but perhaps the later ones could have been avoided or managed differently. The schools, as you say, and some of the more micro measures on behaviour.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I largely agree, but I do think we suffer from hindsight and so underestimate the acute and fairly unprecedented uncertainty that was felt at that time.
At the centre of that uncertainty I think it is easy to forget the very real belief (whether accurate or not) that hospitals could have been overwhelmed, and how quickly that could have happened had we not reduced the R number.
However bad lockdown was, it pales into insignificance against the darkness that would have been the social breakdown had eg sick kids had to die at home because hospitals were overwhelmed.
(There is a parallel for me in how close we were to economic breakdown during the 2008 financial crisis.)
It is so easy, given this didn't happen, to underestimate the chance that it could have done and, more so, the need to err on the side of caution when we didn't know how possible this was at the time.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
The debate is dominated by a false dichotomy. It shouldn't be a question of "Covid wasn't that deadly we shouldn't have locked down" vs "we could have saved lots more lives with a longer lockdown".
The question is, what smarter measures could we have used that would have reduced transmission without lockdown? What did Japan do differently? Why didn't we encourage people to socialise outside more? Why didn't Britain, as an island nation, use quarantine to keep the virus out?
My worst-case scenario fear is that we have learnt all the wrong lessons from the Covid pandemic and so when the next flu pandemic hits, the response to that will be bungled, and a generation of children will suffer huge casualties.
One thing I will say about Covid and lockdowns which is a weird “positive” - it’s an unexpected human unifier. Coz the entire world went through it. Not sure anything is comparable
So whenever I travel the planet I always ask people “how was your Covid” and from Japan to France to America to Colombia to Chile to Thailand I always get vivid, intense stories which are often oddly similar. And the proportions are roughly the same everywhere - 60-80% hated it and had a terrible time; a large minority enjoyed it
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
For the hundredth time:
It's not just the children. It's the staff as well.
Generally, teachers are on average younger and fitter than the population as a whole (because of the high attrition rates due to shockingly poor central management) but if just 10% are ill, or shielding, you're stuffed because there's no slack in the system.
It could have been worked round, but nobody in authority even grasped the issue never mind tried to deal with it.
This is one of the many problems the DfE didn't understand because they're all so stupid and ignorant. And we knew that before, but it was displayed with absolutely pitiless clarity in the pandemic.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
The health service is there to help the public. The government conned us into thinking the public is there to serve the NHS, that idea still pervades today and is hugely harmful to our national debate.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Ditto for me. It is sort of why I posted in reply to Nick that it probably wasn't like that for people in flats with no gardens.
Both my son, his girlfriend (Romanian so couldn't go home) and my daughter came home to us from Uni and my wife was sent home to work. So I had to get the house set up for 4 online zooms simultaneously. We had plenty of room for everyone and a big garden so plenty of space. I also volunteered as a covid helper (taking shopping to old people, manning vaccination centres, that sort of stuff).
When we could travel but under restrictions (Green/Amber/Red) I travelled under Amber because isolating on return wasn't an issue for me, because I didn't have work to go to. I went to Portugal for a long trip and then cycled in France. Travel was easy because for nearly everyone it was too restrictive.
So for me it was fine, even fun, but I appreciated for many it was hell.
@Leon did you travel under Amber conditions? Presumably with your life style you could.
PS The government clearly hadn't gone to the full extent to what it could have gone to and might be necessary if we have a pandemic with a higher mortality rate as we never had to to use the the Nightingale hospitals and they certainly didn't use all the potential medical staff that they could have called on because my wife and the other Doctors in the company (pharma) she worked at all volunteered and were told they should stay in their current roles. I am assuming the assimilation of loads of Doctors who have been outside of the front line for sometime was considered too much of a distraction at that point. I'm guessing if it got more desperate they would have been taken on.
My last bottle of Calon Segur 2006 to while away the afternoon. It feels like a very old fashioned sort of wine now, but it and I aren't going to seek the limelight through posts on the glam sites such as PB.
The 2021 Claret I bought for Christmas day (one of the Rothschild family's more minor efforts, from a supermarket) is a refreshingly old-fashioned lunchtime-appropriate 12.5%.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
I liked some aspects and disliked others. Couple of big positive memories:
Early 1st lockdown, breaking the rules to go into central London. Iconic places, usually crammed, now pretty much just me. That was - literally - a once in a lifetime experience. It was surreal.
Summer 2020 when restrictions were lifted temporarily. Hot sunny day, walked to a local pub and had a pint of lager, sat outside, my first 'social' drink for months. Amazing feeling.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
For the hundredth time:
It's not just the children. It's the staff as well.
Generally, teachers are on average younger and fitter than the population as a whole (because of the high attrition rates due to shockingly poor central management) but if just 10% are ill, or shielding, you're stuffed because there's no slack in the system.
It could have been worked round, but nobody in authority even grasped the issue never mind tried to deal with it.
This is one of the many problems the DfE didn't understand because they're all so stupid and ignorant. And we knew that before, but it was displayed with absolutely pitiless clarity in the pandemic.
Yes, we've heard this ever since - if only we'd let it rip the kids would have stayed in school and everything would have been fine.
Basic problem - too many teachers would have been sick. Which makes the school unable to open. Which sends the kids home.
The "just keep working" scenario makes out that Covid then is what Covid is now. But it wasn't back then...
One thing I will say about Covid and lockdowns which is a weird “positive” - it’s an unexpected human unifier. Coz the entire world went through it. Not sure anything is comparable
So whenever I travel the planet I always ask people “how was your Covid” and from Japan to France to America to Colombia to Chile to Thailand I always get vivid, intense stories which are often oddly similar. And the proportions are roughly the same everywhere - 60-80% hated it and had a terrible time; a large minority enjoyed it
I also found the attitude of young people quite inspiring. They proved themselves the very opposite of the "shallow selfish youth of today" parody. They made big sacrifices to fight something that was far more of a threat to older people than to them and there was precious little moaning about it.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
For the hundredth time:
It's not just the children. It's the staff as well.
Generally, teachers are on average younger and fitter than the population as a whole (because of the high attrition rates due to shockingly poor central management) but if just 10% are ill, or shielding, you're stuffed because there's no slack in the system.
It could have been worked round, but nobody in authority even grasped the issue never mind tried to deal with it.
This is one of the many problems the DfE didn't understand because they're all so stupid and ignorant. And we knew that before, but it was displayed with absolutely pitiless clarity in the pandemic.
That’s a nasty thing to say.
I’ve worked with stupid and ignorant people - to compare them to the DfE is an atrocious slur.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
For the hundredth time:
It's not just the children. It's the staff as well.
Generally, teachers are on average younger and fitter than the population as a whole (because of the high attrition rates due to shockingly poor central management) but if just 10% are ill, or shielding, you're stuffed because there's no slack in the system.
It could have been worked round, but nobody in authority even grasped the issue never mind tried to deal with it.
This is one of the many problems the DfE didn't understand because they're all so stupid and ignorant. And we knew that before, but it was displayed with absolutely pitiless clarity in the pandemic.
Not quite true.
We had several periods where certain year groups, or certain categories of child, we're allowed back in.
In large part this was to reduce transmission in school, but it also accounted for teacher absence (whether through COVID isolation or long-term shielding).
I'd say a schools plan for a future pandemic isn't that hard: 1. Prioritise open schools over just about any other place where people group together. 2. Within schools, prioritise key year groups and key students who are always in, then have others in on a rolling basis, according to capacity of teaching staff at the time.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
Although I am with you on this element of the covid debate (the depression caused by lockdown), I am sure there is a good reason for the example you gave there. A fair percentage probably thought:
'Bugger it, I have gone through that dreaded lockdown and still nearly died. I might as well have been out enjoying myself.'
That of course is understandable but not rational.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
I think we can be reasonably relaxed about any odd types in Germany. They'll go for the French first.
It will be the Poles first, in a pincer movement with the Russians.
Well maybe you're right. I think we can all agree Belgium isn't a place to move to just now though.
The Poles read history. Which is why they will have the largest army in Europe, fairly soon.
And they are making sure the weapons are not beholden to European suppliers - much to the horror of some politicians in Europe.
The next step is their investment in pouring larger solid fuel rockets. Which they are starting on, with South Korean help.
Meanwhile, the glow lessens in the cooling ponds in the Ukraine. In the warm darkness, The New Gods murmur in their long sleep.
If I was a Pole I'd be doing as you say. Er, not because you should be the leader of the Poles though.
If there was a nation that I'd have long liked to have liked but not been able to do so it'd be Russia. In hindsight I can't imagine why I tried.
I’ve got Polish ancestry. Some remote relatives were at Katyn (the literal one - not general term for the distributed mass murder).
The interest thing, to me, is the emphasis across the political spectrum, from far left to right, on being friends with the immediate neighbours.
Even the nuttier irredentists, in Poland, have latched on to the idea that The Nation is The People. The actual land is not as important. So they are quite prepared to keep (and defend) the current borders.
There are a few strays - but they are a slack handful.
The thinking is that Russia, historically, could only attack Eastern Europe when it was divided. So unite Poland with its neighbours, and form a defensive coalition.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
The health service is there to help the public. The government conned us into thinking the public is there to serve the NHS, that idea still pervades today and is hugely harmful to our national debate.
What is your view on hospitals potentially being overwhelmed? Do you think it never would have happened? And do you think the government knew that at the time? Or do you think there was a (perceived) risk of it happening, but we should have ignored that risk? Or something else?
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
One thing I will say about Covid and lockdowns which is a weird “positive” - it’s an unexpected human unifier. Coz the entire world went through it. Not sure anything is comparable
So whenever I travel the planet I always ask people “how was your Covid” and from Japan to France to America to Colombia to Chile to Thailand I always get vivid, intense stories which are often oddly similar. And the proportions are roughly the same everywhere - 60-80% hated it and had a terrible time; a large minority enjoyed it
I also found the attitude of young people quite inspiring. They proved themselves the very opposite of the "shallow selfish youth of today" parody. They made big sacrifices to fight something that was far more of a threat to older people than to them and there was precious little moaning about it.
They really did. Especially students starting at uni as Covid reigned. They basically had their university experience destroyed by the lockdowns. I still get angered by the fact universities didn’t refund their fees
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
The 2008 financial crash certainly left a legacy of loss of trust in financial institutions which has spread to other institutions since other scandals since. It also has seen largely stagnant wages since which has further spread populism across the West, exacerbated by rising inflation as a legacy of the Ukraine war and the Covid lockdowns. 9/11, the peak of jihadi terrorism, then further spread suspicion of immigration and intervention in foreign wars.
Of course not all banks were bailed out, the US administration let Lehmans go bust for example in 2008 after Brown and Darling blocked an immediate rescue by Barclays without full due diligence first. The play Lehmans is well worth seeing and in its final weeks
With hindsight, letting Lehmans fail might have triggered the GFC from a little local difficulty with subprime mortgages.
To an extent but one big bank had to be allowed to fail pour encourager les autres and as Lehmans had the most debt it drew the short straw. We could also have allowed Northern Rock to go under here too as it was the worst affected UK bank but letting it go would have been too damaging for the North East economy especially, as letting RBS go would have hit Scotland's economy even harder
The problem underlying the GFC – and why Lehman's failure was catastrophic – was that no-one knew who owed what to whom, which bank was exposed to which other bank, and so the whole system seized up. If only the banks had been confident the Federal Reserve would save them, there would have been no real counterparty risk so trading could continue.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
I'd quite like to go Stonehenge at some quiet hour and just be there on my own. I'm not sure it's possible. Whereas I have been to the Palatine hill (and the small museum there) and been entirely without another person anywhere near.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Ditto for me. It is sort of why I posted in reply to Nick that it probably wasn't like that for people in flats with no gardens.
Both my son, his girlfriend (Romanian so couldn't go home) and my daughter came home to us from Uni and my wife was sent home to work. So I had to get the house set up for 4 online zooms simultaneously. We had plenty of room for everyone and a big garden so plenty of space. I also volunteered as a covid helper (taking shopping to old people, manning vaccination centres, that sort of stuff).
When we could travel but under restrictions (Green/Amber/Red) I travelled under Amber because isolating on return wasn't an issue for me, because I didn't have work to go to. I went to Portugal for a long trip and then cycled in France. Travel was easy because for nearly everyone it was too restrictive.
So for me it was fine, even fun, but I appreciated for many it was hell.
@Leon did you travel under Amber conditions? Presumably with your life style you could.
PS The government clearly hadn't gone to the full extent to what it could have gone to and might be necessary if we have a pandemic with a higher mortality rate as we never had to to use the the Nightingale hospitals and they certainly didn't use all the potential medical staff that they could have called on because my wife and the other Doctors in the company (pharma) she worked at all volunteered and were told they should stay in their current roles. I am assuming the assimilation of loads of Doctors who have been outside of the front line for sometime was considered too much of a distraction at that point. I'm guessing if it got more desperate they would have been taken on.
I was living in a huge ground floor flat (preparing to move to a house). Had lots of friends locally, and was able to use the common areas at the back. The internals included a long corridor that made you feel you were *travelling* from one room to the next. Also, being the ground floor of an Edwardian mansion block, the walls were incredibly thick - privacy between the rooms was excellent.
I had full WFH setup anyway, with 1Gb symmetrical fibre. My job (and my wife’s) were run with international, distributed teams, anyway.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
For the hundredth time:
It's not just the children. It's the staff as well.
Generally, teachers are on average younger and fitter than the population as a whole (because of the high attrition rates due to shockingly poor central management) but if just 10% are ill, or shielding, you're stuffed because there's no slack in the system.
It could have been worked round, but nobody in authority even grasped the issue never mind tried to deal with it.
This is one of the many problems the DfE didn't understand because they're all so stupid and ignorant. And we knew that before, but it was displayed with absolutely pitiless clarity in the pandemic.
Yes, we've heard this ever since - if only we'd let it rip the kids would have stayed in school and everything would have been fine.
Basic problem - too many teachers would have been sick. Which makes the school unable to open. Which sends the kids home.
The "just keep working" scenario makes out that Covid then is what Covid is now. But it wasn't back then...
What about if teachers had been exempt from isolation? First time I got COVID I was genuinely ill, but every time since I could have stayed in school and worked through it.
The absence rate needn't have been that high if we'd treated it like winter colds in schools, which everyone just ignores.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
This was quite a civilised chat everyone was having so why did you do that? So rude.
It is not even as if he said anything that wasn't obviously true either, other than the balance of what level of spending is one willing to commit to such efforts compared to other spending needs or willingness to pay.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
The 2008 financial crash certainly left a legacy of loss of trust in financial institutions which has spread to other institutions since other scandals since. It also has seen largely stagnant wages since which has further spread populism across the West, exacerbated by rising inflation as a legacy of the Ukraine war and the Covid lockdowns. 9/11, the peak of jihadi terrorism, then further spread suspicion of immigration and intervention in foreign wars.
Of course not all banks were bailed out, the US administration let Lehmans go bust for example in 2008 after Brown and Darling blocked an immediate rescue by Barclays without full due diligence first. The play Lehmans is well worth seeing and in its final weeks
With hindsight, letting Lehmans fail might have triggered the GFC from a little local difficulty with subprime mortgages.
To an extent but one big bank had to be allowed to fail pour encourager les autres and as Lehmans had the most debt it drew the short straw. We could also have allowed Northern Rock to go under here too as it was the worst affected UK bank but letting it go would have been too damaging for the North East economy especially, as letting RBS go would have hit Scotland's economy even harder
The problem underlying the GFC – and why Lehman's failure was catastrophic – was that no-one knew who owed what to whom, which bank was exposed to which other bank, and so the whole system seized up. If only the banks had been confident the Federal Reserve would save them, there would have been no real counterparty risk so trading could continue.
I recall a manger at Citi running round the floor screaming “Anyone know our exposure to fucking Lehmans?”
A colleague had the answer - he’d created a summary spreadsheet when things started looking fun. Unlike the floors if clown show around us. His spreadsheet ended up at the board, so we heard….
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
This was quite a civilised chat everyone was having so why did you do that? So rude.
It is not even as if he said anything that wasn't obviously true either, other than the balance of what level of spending is one willing to commit to such efforts compared to other spending needs or willingness to pay.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
SPI-B (the behaviour subcommittee of SAGE) advised the Government to drop the heavy-handed policing, but I think it was the sort of thing that the Tories were drawn to.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
That comment reveals rather more about your perspective than it does about @bondegezou's.
You may disagree, but to call it a parody is to highlight the blinkers of certainty that are the bane of effective public policy.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
Johnson was from the end of politics where, if you want something enough and argue for it eloquently enough, it will happen. The sort of thing that underpins Debate Soc, or oped columns.
Sometimes that works, but there are bits of brute reality where nature, arithmetic or the other side looks at that and laughs. A pandemic is one of those. (I suspect that the balance between taxation and spending and the risks of powering your economy by burning stuff are a couple of others.)
I'm pretty confident that the attempts to avoid restrictions (especially Operation Save Christmas 2020) were an important factor in the length and dismalness of the restrictions of the first half of 2021.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
I'd quite like to go Stonehenge at some quiet hour and just be there on my own. I'm not sure it's possible. Whereas I have been to the Palatine hill (and the small museum there) and been entirely without another person anywhere near.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
Yes, a descent into self-parodying lunacy
It really isn't.
Look at it this way: Say you are right (*) and the virus escaped from a lab. Throughout history, pandemics have occurred naturally, and I think even you could agree that a wet market is, virologically speaking, a bloody daft idea. So it's a good idea to discourage wet markets and bush meat *as well* as improving controls for labs. Even if you are right about Covid; as the next pandemic *might* come from such a place.
Now say you are wrong (**) and it came from the wet market. In which case, you would agree that discouraging wet markets and bush meat is a brilliant idea. But that doesn't mean that we don't improve controls for labs, as that's also a very concerning vector. And whilst, in this scenario, Covid was not caused by a lab leak, the next pandemic might be.
In both cases, it's a blooming good idea to improve surveillance systems.
You're so keen to be correct, that you're willing to ignore an obvious threat vector.
DO BOTH
(*) I know you are so modest that you never will...
(**) I know you are such an honest chap you will freely admit to being wrong, when it occurs for the first time at the heat death of the universe.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
I'd quite like to go Stonehenge at some quiet hour and just be there on my own. I'm not sure it's possible. Whereas I have been to the Palatine hill (and the small museum there) and been entirely without another person anywhere near.
2am tomorrow morning, I reckon you'd be okay.
It's not open though. Last time I visited you need to buy a cuddly toy and be cooped up with people making steam-powered Luxembourgers look dynamic.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
I'd quite like to go Stonehenge at some quiet hour and just be there on my own. I'm not sure it's possible. Whereas I have been to the Palatine hill (and the small museum there) and been entirely without another person anywhere near.
2am tomorrow morning, I reckon you'd be okay.
It's not open though. Last time I visited you need to buy a cuddly toy and be cooped up with people making steam-powered Luxembourgers look dynamic.
Embrace your inner anarchist and hop over the fence. It'll make the experience even better.
ETA: abject apologies for not acknowledging your delightful simile: steam-powered Luxembourgers is excellent. Thank you.
Simile? Metaphor? Analogy? I never can get those clear in my mind.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
I'd quite like to go Stonehenge at some quiet hour and just be there on my own. I'm not sure it's possible. Whereas I have been to the Palatine hill (and the small museum there) and been entirely without another person anywhere near.
I have a passionate and almost irrational hatred of what EH have done to Stonehenge and its environs. It's an absolute Disneyfication that sucks out any spirituality from the place.
Compare and contrast with nearby Avebury, which is sublime.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
I appreciate the discussion.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
I too appreciate the discussion. I think a lot of us have buried the trauma of Covid, filing it under “too depressing” - as I implied earlier
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
I'd quite like to go Stonehenge at some quiet hour and just be there on my own. I'm not sure it's possible. Whereas I have been to the Palatine hill (and the small museum there) and been entirely without another person anywhere near.
2am tomorrow morning, I reckon you'd be okay.
It's not open though. Last time I visited you need to buy a cuddly toy and be cooped up with people making steam-powered Luxembourgers look dynamic.
Embrace your inner anarchist and hop over the fence. It'll make the experience even better.
You're one of those progressive types aren't you!?
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
I don’t think we do. Those in control either don't care or actively want to flog things off.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
Yes, a descent into self-parodying lunacy
It really isn't.
Look at it this way: Say you are right (*) and the virus escaped from a lab. Throughout history, pandemics have occurred naturally, and I think even you could agree that a wet market is, virologically speaking, a bloody daft idea. So it's a good idea to discourage wet markets and bush meat *as well* as improving controls for labs. Even if you are right about Covid; as the next pandemic *might* come from such a place.
Now say you are wrong (**) and it came from the wet market. In which case, you would agree that discouraging wet markets and bush meat is a brilliant idea. But that doesn't mean that we don't improve controls for labs, as that's also a very concerning vector. And whilst, in this scenario, Covid was not caused by a lab leak, the next pandemic might be.
In both cases, it's a blooming good idea to improve surveillance systems.
You're so keen to be correct, that you're willing to ignore an obvious threat vector.
DO BOTH
(*) I know you are so modest that you never will...
(**) I know you are such an honest chap you will freely admit to being wrong, when it occurs for the first time at the heat death of the universe.
This argument is so stale I can’t be arsed any more. 90% of the world has now concluded it came from the lab (including the US government). 10% of people will always believe it came from the wet market because they find the opposite explanation too painful to accept - for various reasons
They’re not gonna be persuaded. It’s now a religious tenet. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses on whom I politely close the door
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
I’ve no doubt the NHS came under strain, I don’t dispute @Foxy’s account on that score - he was there. And yet, the Nightingale hospitals - they never got used. And the strain the NHS suffered must be measured against the long term damage lockdowns have done, to minds, lives, economies
Perhaps it is too complex a question for anyone to solve. But my sense is that the 2nd and 3rd lockdowns were a terrible if understandable error, and we should have found a better way to shield the vulnerable
The nightingale hospitals - who did they envision would be staffing them?
It's a few years behind us now, but let's be honest about the alternative choice we had - let it run riot and kill an awful lot of people who survived it. People are pack animals when it comes down to it. The alternative choice purports that we would have been able to persuade people to keep going to work as people dropped dead around them. Which we all know is cobblers.
Anyway, its only relevant with regards to how we could choose to respond to the next one. The joy of our linear corporeal existence is that we don't get to go back and change our minds.
But other countries did take very different approaches. And some countries with much less severe lockdowns did no worse than us
It’s a thorny question, and not one our inquiry had really addressed - unless I’ve missed it
As said upthread, we need a meta-analysis of all the Covid responses around the world, then we need to ask DeepMind which was best
Basically, the countries that did best were where the people trusted the government, irrespective of the actual measures taken.
COVID is such a strange piece of recent history now. I think it probably is the single most significant event just in simple terms of how directly that impacted everyone's lives.
For me, my dad died in hospital in February 2020 of an unrelated illness. I remember vividly, on his last night at his deathbed vigil, watching the news - it was still in Asia only at that point, and me wondering when it would be in Britain. By the time of his funeral it was bad in Italy. His funeral must have been one of the very last "normal" funerals before COVID lockdown came. Weirdly I remember being glad we got to have a proper funeral and not one of the truly awful ones mandated by lockdown.
Three of the most depressing things about COVID - or at least those over and above everything else everyone has mentioned already.
One - the god awful government briefings, which got very old very quickly, particularly (in Scotland) Sturgeon's daily one. I'm sure they were supposed to help, to try and show (a) that someone was in charge and (b) that the government understood the sacrifices people were making, but at some point they just became a tedious litany of statistics that made you want to scream listening to them. I remember my mum complaining bitterly about some of the UK Govt ones with Whitty and Vallance, a lot of the time them saying things like "this graph clearly shows X" and my mum just being completely bemused because, probably like most of the population, if you don't spend a lot of time looking at complex graphs they mean nothing to you. Some of the communications of those briefings was abominable.
Two - the whole "tiering" thing. That was just a complete waste of time. In the end it came down to opening up or locking down. Trying to pretend there was some middle ground, where some normality could be maintained and some things had to be sacrificed, never really worked.
Three - the constant discussion about R number reproductive rates, generally rendered entirely moot because every few months the latest variant hade a much higher R than the previous one.
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
China has no interest in sending troops abroad to get involved in foreign wars far from the homeland, it will provide support to nations economically to align with its interests but that is it.
So the US will still likely lead on foreign global intervention longer term, even with phases of isolationism as under Trump
It will use its considerable economic strength to impose its will. That is what we in the West are attempting to do with Russia. China will be bigger and united in purpose unlike the West.
I am a liberal democrat who accepts, indeed welcomes, multiculturism as an expression of freedom of belief and culture and a source of innovation and stimulation.
The Chinese, and some on PB, do not accept multiculturism, seeing it as divisive and not under control. So China has adopted the Danish model and stamps out differences to protect the one China culture. We condemn this as an affront on human rights. But we need to avoid hypocricy here.
China is coming. The clash with populism will be interesting, as will the use of advanced AI and smartphones as the omniscient, omnipotent controlling entity. We live in such interesting times! I hope to live for another 20 years (I'll be 102) to see how it all turns out.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
How naive can you be? Surely recent experience can show you that your first paragraph conflicts hugely with your second?
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
Yes, a descent into self-parodying lunacy
It really isn't.
Look at it this way: Say you are right (*) and the virus escaped from a lab. Throughout history, pandemics have occurred naturally, and I think even you could agree that a wet market is, virologically speaking, a bloody daft idea. So it's a good idea to discourage wet markets and bush meat *as well* as improving controls for labs. Even if you are right about Covid; as the next pandemic *might* come from such a place.
Now say you are wrong (**) and it came from the wet market. In which case, you would agree that discouraging wet markets and bush meat is a brilliant idea. But that doesn't mean that we don't improve controls for labs, as that's also a very concerning vector. And whilst, in this scenario, Covid was not caused by a lab leak, the next pandemic might be.
In both cases, it's a blooming good idea to improve surveillance systems.
You're so keen to be correct, that you're willing to ignore an obvious threat vector.
DO BOTH
(*) I know you are so modest that you never will...
(**) I know you are such an honest chap you will freely admit to being wrong, when it occurs for the first time at the heat death of the universe.
This argument is so stale I can’t be arsed any more. 90% of the world has now concluded it came from the lab (including the US government). 10% of people will always believe it came from the wet market because they find the opposite explanation too painful to accept - for various reasons
They’re not gonna be persuaded. It’s now a religious tenet. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses on whom I politely close the door
We have more fruitful things to discuss
By the same argument, you are not going to be persuaded either. It's a religious tenet for you.
But look at what I wrote: even if you are right, then what I wrote makes sense. Whether you are right or wrong is irrelevant to what we should be doing to protect ourselves from another pandemic.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
It will be very interesting to see what investment comes from the very high level delegation going to China In January.
Phillip Hammond has been very bullish about embracing the opportunity whilst being a step ahead in terms of the risk.
He makes one very valid point that you can have very frank discussions in private but the Chinese hate leaks.
A good lesson for this Labour Government who MSM hate, that they stop taking the usual Press Corps on any significant overseas trips. If they are going to leak and lie and just ask irrelevant questions, treat them like the mushrooms they are... Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit.
Hammond believes big scope to get Chinese Electric Vehicles built in UK, similar to Japanese in the past, of course if they were Chinese brands and not Tesla, so much the better.
Better still if Rachel could return with a 200m donation from the Chinese Communist Party for Labour.
Don't fuck with us Musk!
Labour turning itself into the local branch of the Communist Party of China would be suboptimal for this country.
It would be far less suboptimal than having Musk and Trump dictating to us.
Far less.
While I despise Trump with every fibre of my being, I have to agree with @Sean_F and @MaxPB that Xi is a whole lot worse. Trump is a violent and unstable criminal and a clear cut risk to our security, but hasn't the intellect or the patience to be controlling in the way Xi is or the intention of being a mass murderer. That's partly why I think Vance, De Santis and Ramaswamy are actually in many ways more dangerous than he is.
I am not so sure about Musk. I think he has all the attributes of Xi - the greed, ruthlessness, erratic embrace of conspiracy theories, utter narcissism, the hatred of minorities and above all the same control freakery - but fortunately for various reasons is never likely to get the same level of power, even though as it is he's got far too much.
It is inevitable that China will replace the US as the global superpower in the next decade or two. Just compare economic size, growth rates and long term strategic intent.
A stable world is in China's interests in order to support its international trade and political expansion. So it will become the world's policeman. China is already reining in Putin. The last thing China wants is WWW3.
Fast forward twenty years and the UK may value its "special relationship" with China more than with the US.
China has no interest in sending troops abroad to get involved in foreign wars far from the homeland, it will provide support to nations economically to align with its interests but that is it.
So the US will still likely lead on foreign global intervention longer term, even with phases of isolationism as under Trump
It will use its considerable economic strength to impose its will. That is what we in the West are attempting to do with Russia. China will be bigger and united in purpose unlike the West.
I am a liberal democrat who accepts, indeed welcomes, multiculturism as an expression of freedom of belief and culture and a source of innovation and stimulation.
The Chinese, and some on PB, do not accept multiculturism, seeing it as divisive and not under control. So China has adopted the Danish model and stamps out differences to protect the one China culture. We condemn this as an affront on human rights. But we need to avoid hypocricy here.
China is coming. The clash with populism will be interesting, as will the use of advanced AI and smartphones as the omniscient, omnipotent controlling entity. We live in such interesting times! I hope to live for another 20 years (I'll be 102) to see how it all turns out.
China is restrictive on immigration and on other cultural expression in the nation, especially other faiths and particularly Islam.
That also means it will limit its outreach abroad beyond the economic sphere, it doesn't want to move beyond the one culture of Chinese communism it can control within its borders
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
The debate is dominated by a false dichotomy. It shouldn't be a question of "Covid wasn't that deadly we shouldn't have locked down" vs "we could have saved lots more lives with a longer lockdown".
The question is, what smarter measures could we have used that would have reduced transmission without lockdown? What did Japan do differently? Why didn't we encourage people to socialise outside more? Why didn't Britain, as an island nation, use quarantine to keep the virus out?
My worst-case scenario fear is that we have learnt all the wrong lessons from the Covid pandemic and so when the next flu pandemic hits, the response to that will be bungled, and a generation of children will suffer huge casualties.
There are a few major factors that led the ROK, Taiwan, and Singapore to cope well during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the three countries have commonly experienced pandemics in the past. [...] Therefore, the resilient public health systems and public cooperation in all three countries have helped limit the spread of COVID-19.
Second, the three countries have developed advanced ICT infrastructure and digital technology [...]
Third, all three countries share significant components of the 3Ts (Test, Trace, and Treatment) [...]
Lastly, the citizens of ROK, Taiwan, and Singapore followed the social distancing guidelines issued by their governments, thus lowering the rate of community infections. The three countries share the same cultural roots of Confucianism, which indicates culture as a driver of relatively successful responses to the pandemic in Asian countries compared to the West. Confucianism emphasizes one’s duties to family and society over individual rights, which has resulted in public acceptance of a great degree of governmental control or surveillance.23 For example, mask wearing imposed by authorities and patient tracing based on collected personal information were accepted by the public without strong objection in these three countries.
The three countries’ cases provided significant lessons indicating that the containment and mitigation strategies [...] have been effective in flattening the epidemic curves. [...] ROK has neither imposed a draconian lock-down nor stringent border control as a response to the pandemic, whereas Singapore opted for the opposite with two circuit breakers and strong border control. Taiwan never had to go into lockdown until the outbreak of the COVID-19 variant in May 2021, but focused on early and strict border controls [...]
In this study, we discussed the effective responses of ROK, Taiwan, and Singapore to COVID-19 through three different perspectives–governance, health, and social distancing. Most of all, these countries took appropriate initial countermeasures to control the spread of COVID-19. However, various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the early stage of the pandemic were criticized due to the enormous socio-economic losses. Therefore, a suitable combination of NPIs with less disruptive and costly measures is essential for countries to forecast the effectiveness of future interventions.28 The pre-COVID-19 preparation based on previous experiences equipped the three aforementioned jurisdictions with resilient public health systems and advanced ICT infrastructure. Public acceptance based on the Confucian culture helped authorities to swiftly implement control and prevention measures. Nevertheless, the three countries still have to improve in terms of vaccination as well as inequality [...] to be better prepared for any future pandemic.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
How naive can you be? Surely recent experience can show you that your first paragraph conflicts hugely with your second?
Not at all as the more its parcels market grows the more profit it makes and the higher its shares, though he will likely effectively abandon the regular letters market for RM apart from highly priced first class stamped letters
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
That's one model- capitalism done right, so to speak.
The other is: 1 Sell and lease back all the assets 2 Load up the business with a pile of debt 3 Extract as much cash as you can in dividends over five years or so 4 Walk away when it all falls down.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
That's one model- capitalism done right, so to speak.
The other is: 1 Sell and lease back all the assets 2 Load up the business with a pile of debt 3 Extract as much cash as you can in dividends over five years or so 4 Walk away when it all falls down.
There are precedents for the second model.
The first model is also harder to do than the second. Sadly.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
Yes, a descent into self-parodying lunacy
It really isn't.
Look at it this way: Say you are right (*) and the virus escaped from a lab. Throughout history, pandemics have occurred naturally, and I think even you could agree that a wet market is, virologically speaking, a bloody daft idea. So it's a good idea to discourage wet markets and bush meat *as well* as improving controls for labs. Even if you are right about Covid; as the next pandemic *might* come from such a place.
Now say you are wrong (**) and it came from the wet market. In which case, you would agree that discouraging wet markets and bush meat is a brilliant idea. But that doesn't mean that we don't improve controls for labs, as that's also a very concerning vector. And whilst, in this scenario, Covid was not caused by a lab leak, the next pandemic might be.
In both cases, it's a blooming good idea to improve surveillance systems.
You're so keen to be correct, that you're willing to ignore an obvious threat vector.
DO BOTH
(*) I know you are so modest that you never will...
(**) I know you are such an honest chap you will freely admit to being wrong, when it occurs for the first time at the heat death of the universe.
This argument is so stale I can’t be arsed any more. 90% of the world has now concluded it came from the lab (including the US government). 10% of people will always believe it came from the wet market because they find the opposite explanation too painful to accept - for various reasons
They’re not gonna be persuaded. It’s now a religious tenet. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses on whom I politely close the door
We have more fruitful things to discuss
By the same argument, you are not going to be persuaded either. It's a religious tenet for you.
But look at what I wrote: even if you are right, then what I wrote makes sense. Whether you are right or wrong is irrelevant to what we should be doing to protect ourselves from another pandemic.
Honestly no I can’t be bothered. I’m 97% certain I’m right. Maybe 99.6%. But 100% is likely impossible - that’s life. Also I’ve had the debate so many times I’m bored of it myself. I shouldn’t even have raised it today I just found @bondegezou’s contortions so risible
My bad. I apologise. I shall strive not to do it again
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
That's one model- capitalism done right, so to speak.
The other is: 1 Sell and lease back all the assets 2 Load up the business with a pile of debt 3 Extract as much cash as you can in dividends over five years or so 4 Walk away when it all falls down.
There are precedents for the second model.
The first model is also harder to do than the second. Sadly.
This one will come back to haunt Labour in four or five years time.
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
How naive can you be? Surely recent experience can show you that your first paragraph conflicts hugely with your second?
Not at all the more its parcels market grows the more profit it makes and the higher its shares, though he will likely effectively abandon the regular letters market for RM apart from highly priced first class stamped letters
Okay to give you just one example before my phone dies: Royal Mail badly needs to invest in the sort of technology that it's competitors use. But that will take a few years to get a return.
Alternatively they could use the sort of employment model their competitors use and extract short term profit, and therefore share price.
Which do you think they are likely to do under their new ownership?
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I can’t find the guy I’m talking about right now. But there seems to be a whole genre of them. Here’s another
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Unfortunately, it won't.
The lesson I drew from it is that our population is quite supine and likes State authoritarianism. And, worse, would happily collaborate with an occupying power if it ever came down to it.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I would like the public inquiry to ask some very searching questions about lockdown 3. Why was it enacted? What was the justification? Was cost/benefit done etc etc. The vulnerable had been jabbed. Some twice iirc.
I doubt the whitewash inquiry will dig deep on this.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
In some regions it went on WAY longer than that. Much of Lancashire (to give one example) had people locked down though all the back end of 2020 as well.
It was grim. However the people who took the biggest hit from the pandemic were those who died or nearly died from Covid. Without the lockdowns there would have been a lot more of them.
And yet I know people who nearly died of Covid who think the lockdowns were catastrophic
But the alternative was worse. That's how it is sometimes. Bad thing vs worse thing. I can think of several examples of this. Bet we all can.
Over time I’ve come to reappraise the whole lockdown situation.
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
It would, because it's much easier for the police to go for soft (largely middle-class and compliant) targets than the tough ones.
A "detection" of the former counts just the same in the stats as one of the latter.
I lived alone at the time of lockdown. Looking back I do think it was challenging and definitely strained me. It made work all-encompassing as a distraction, and I certainly found myself eating/drinking more and being more sedentary.
I agree with others on here that while the first lockdown was a challenge and I don’t look back on it with any joy, I felt more comfortable with it. The subsequent ones, tier system etc I found incredibly depressing and they really affected my mood, after having started to come out of lockdown and see everyone again to be plunged back into it (it felt) again and again was grim (as was following the news media who seemed to be screaming for it every single week).
I have no desire to go through it again.
No-one wants another lockdown. So, how do we avoid getting into that sort of situation again? A key problem in the UK is that the Conservatives transferred public health to local councils and then local council funding was slashed under austerity. We need much better funding for local public health teams, and pandemic preparedness more generally. We need healthcare surge capacity. We made huge breakthroughs with vaccine development during COVID-19. We need to build on that success and ensure we maintain good vaccine development and production facilities in the UK. We also need to encourage vaccinations and counter vaccine misinformation. We need to be more supportive of mask usage.
Globally, we need to do more to discourage wet markets and bushmeat. We need to improve surveillance systems. One way of doing that is more foreign aid to improve health services in central Africa, from where HIV, Zika, ebola and mpox have come.
Yes, those bloody wet markets. Gotta clamp down on those
Virologists manufacturing brand new and horribly dangerous viruses for no good reason in hideously unsafe conditions? All good. Keep at it. Aim for a lethality rate of 59% next time
👍
His "what we need to do" is like a parody. It's really quite extraordinary.
Yes, a descent into self-parodying lunacy
It really isn't.
Look at it this way: Say you are right (*) and the virus escaped from a lab. Throughout history, pandemics have occurred naturally, and I think even you could agree that a wet market is, virologically speaking, a bloody daft idea. So it's a good idea to discourage wet markets and bush meat *as well* as improving controls for labs. Even if you are right about Covid; as the next pandemic *might* come from such a place.
Now say you are wrong (**) and it came from the wet market. In which case, you would agree that discouraging wet markets and bush meat is a brilliant idea. But that doesn't mean that we don't improve controls for labs, as that's also a very concerning vector. And whilst, in this scenario, Covid was not caused by a lab leak, the next pandemic might be.
In both cases, it's a blooming good idea to improve surveillance systems.
You're so keen to be correct, that you're willing to ignore an obvious threat vector.
DO BOTH
(*) I know you are so modest that you never will...
(**) I know you are such an honest chap you will freely admit to being wrong, when it occurs for the first time at the heat death of the universe.
This argument is so stale I can’t be arsed any more. 90% of the world has now concluded it came from the lab (including the US government). 10% of people will always believe it came from the wet market because they find the opposite explanation too painful to accept - for various reasons
They’re not gonna be persuaded. It’s now a religious tenet. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses on whom I politely close the door
We have more fruitful things to discuss
By the same argument, you are not going to be persuaded either. It's a religious tenet for you.
But look at what I wrote: even if you are right, then what I wrote makes sense. Whether you are right or wrong is irrelevant to what we should be doing to protect ourselves from another pandemic.
Honestly no I can’t be bothered. I’m 97% certain I’m right. Maybe 99.6%. But 100% is likely impossible - that’s life. Also I’ve had the debate so many times I’m bored of it myself. I shouldn’t even have raised it today I just found @bondegezou’s contortions so risible
My bad. I apologise. I shall strive not to do it again
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I can’t find the guy I’m talking about right now. But there seems to be a whole genre of them. Here’s another
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
Selling England by the pound. Once again the government opens the door for British assets to flow abroad.
He also has plenty of money to put into the business and help it further shift from letters to the growing parcels business
Which of the following two do you think he will do? 1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or 2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
He wants to make money from it and make it more profitable and have a higher share price than he bought it for.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
That's one model- capitalism done right, so to speak.
The other is: 1 Sell and lease back all the assets 2 Load up the business with a pile of debt 3 Extract as much cash as you can in dividends over five years or so 4 Walk away when it all falls down.
There are precedents for the second model.
And we appear to lack legal or other structures to encourage the more effective model and discourage the others.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
Lockdown 1 was surreal. Beautiful weather, everyone pulling together to do this thing, no vaccine and no masks mandate.
By the time we got to lockdown 3 I was living in one of the Covid hotspots, the local hospitals literally drowning in seriously ill patients. Weather was awful, local pox rate was awful, like a geiger counter clicking away out the window.
There's this wonderful revisionist history where all the subsequent lockdowns were pointless. And yet at the time we had Covid tearing its way through not sufficiently jabbed people and killing them in sufficient numbers to put the health service on the brink of collapse...
The health service is there to help the public. The government conned us into thinking the public is there to serve the NHS, that idea still pervades today and is hugely harmful to our national debate.
What is your view on hospitals potentially being overwhelmed? Do you think it never would have happened? And do you think the government knew that at the time? Or do you think there was a (perceived) risk of it happening, but we should have ignored that risk? Or something else?
They get overwhelmed and the doctors are given priorities based on government guidelines on who to treat. That's the reality of a resource limited healthcare system, we can't put lives on indefinite hold because medical resource can't keep up to pandemic demand.
OMG Terence predicted it all. “Everything will get weirder and weirder until we hit the event horizon of infinite weirdness”
Superb
1998: TERENCE MCKENNA PREDICTS THE CURRENT “WEIRDNESS.” Terence McKenna’s famous novelty theory posits that the universe evolves toward increasing complexity, culminating in a ‘singularity,’ where consciousness and interconnectedness peak, transforming the human experience.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I would like the public inquiry to ask some very searching questions about lockdown 3. Why was it enacted? What was the justification? Was cost/benefit done etc etc. The vulnerable had been jabbed. Some twice iirc.
I doubt the whitewash inquiry will dig deep on this.
I presume a "whitewash inquiry" is one that comes to a different conclusion than the one you want?
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
Unfortunately, it won't.
The lesson I drew from it is that our population is quite supine and likes State authoritarianism. And, worse, would happily collaborate with an occupying power if it ever came down to it.
Yep.
It's not just a liberty respecting Government we need - they will in turn have to train people back into loving their own liberties too. Long way back, but we can do it.
@leon did you see my question earlier. Did you travel under Amber restrictions? Most people couldn't because of the isolation restrictions on return. I could and it was a pleasure because I wad one of the fortunate few who could without it being too restrictive on my life. Empty ferries, empty airports and planes, no queues anywhere, just some boring forms and tests. I assume you were in the same position. Did you take advantage of it?
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I can’t find the guy I’m talking about right now. But there seems to be a whole genre of them. Here’s another
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
My great-granddad lived for about 90 years, in the 1870-1960 style timeframe (I forget the exact years).
Look at all the technological change he lived through. Lifestyles at the end of his life had changed massively in broad ways from when he was born. Taking just technology, and not social change:
*) The phone *) Radio *) TV *) Cars / road transport *) The nuclear age *) Flight *) Space travel + countless more.
We're seeing vast change in detail; but for everyday life, my granddad lived through far more revolutionary change than I will.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I can’t find the guy I’m talking about right now. But there seems to be a whole genre of them. Here’s another
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
My great-granddad lived for about 90 years, in the 1870-1960 style timeframe (I forget the exact years).
Look at all the technological change he lived through. Lifestyles at the end of his life had changed massively in broad ways from when he was born. Taking just technology, and not social change:
*) The phone *) Radio *) TV *) Cars / road transport *) The nuclear age *) Flight *) Space travel + countless more.
We're seeing vast change in detail; but for everyday life, my granddad lived through far more revolutionary change than I will.
Wrong. You are about to experience change greater than anything humanity has encountered before
Lockdown 1 for me was ace. Lovely weather, saved loads of money not going out, worked from home so ripped the remainder of my DVD collection to MP4s for my strap on hard drives and I got into home brewing starting my journey to become the competent brewer and wine maker I am today and I got back into sourdough as I could not get any yeast.
Lockdown 2 and 3 were more tedious but by then I was only half following the rules.
Worth remembering whatever the govt did labour demanded more. Purely for politics. Remember the Johnson Variant.
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
The problem with a society that is set up to support those aren't healthy and/or aren't in work is that it eliminates the incentives for anyone to work or be healthy.
The pandemic really brought this home to me. We had Radio Scotland discussing banning younger people from the pub so vulnerable old people could feel safe there. Parkrun was banned. No attempt was made to reduce preventable comorbidities like being fat. People were dying "with no underlying health conditions", but the photo showed them as morbidly obese.
I did not mind lockdown at all. But the entitled attitude of some of those it saved was absolutely infuriating, with a eager willingness to impose restrictions on the young while taking no personal responsibility for their health.
My gran worked it out, bless her. She realised it had probably delayed great-grandchildren by a few years.
I agree in principle, though we should acknowledge the uncertainty at the start of the pandemic, which made it unclear which groups were most at risk. I don't think that incentives to work and be healthy are eliminated, as it's obvious that being inactive and obese lowers life expectancy - you'd need to be extraordinarily unaware to ignore that. But tackling those issues in the face of an immediate crisis was challenging to impossible.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
I'm all for investing more in public health: public health professionals can encourage healthier lifestyles and then be there when a pandemic threatens.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
Lockdown was designed to protect the elderly, or, in other words, Boomers. It was just another example of boomers expecting everyone else to sacrifice themselves to protect the boomers own interests. See also NI, WASPI, lack of childrens mental health resources. We really are the most selfish, entitled generation that have ever lived.
Almost everything I have seen written about the 'bat tunnel' has been wrong. I look forward to this being wrong as well.
(That is not to defend the bat tunnel; just that the HS2 manager who started the controversy apparently got almost all his 'facts' wrong, and this has caused the debate to be rather fact-light.)
@leon did you see my question earlier. Did you travel under Amber restrictions? Most people couldn't because of the isolation restrictions on return. I could and it was a pleasure because I wad one of the fortunate few who could without it being too restrictive on my life. Empty ferries, empty airports and planes, no queues anywhere, just some boring forms and tests. I assume you were in the same position. Did you take advantage of it?
Honestly don’t even remember what “amber” was. I know I traveled as much as possible within restrictions - and sometimes beyond them. Come arrest me, officer
I do recall the Strangeness of the Tiers. Essex was bisected. On one side of the road everything shut, on the other I could happily eat oysters on Mersea island, so I did
The pandemic was the biggest event, easily. It established state control over every aspect of life for months on end and had wide public support. Dissenters were condemned and overall it was a period of great shame both for the government and for the public who didn't do enough to rebel against lockdowns and vaccine mandates. I hope if something like this ever happens again people will ignore lockdowns completely and tell the government to go as stick their vaccine mandates up their arse.
It is troubling to me how easily we acquiesced to absolutely unthinkable terms of living for something that was never particularly deadly. People said that similar measures had been used previously, sure but those pandemics had a significantly higher death rate and measures were justified. COVID had a less than 0.1% death rate for healthy adults. The demands made in our lifestyles wasn't worth it.
But lots of people aren’t healthy adults. What’s the death rate for your average PB poster? The death rate is about 0.4% for 55 year olds. I think the average PBer is older. It was 1.4% for 65 year olds.
Of course, the real tragedy is that the demands made on our lifestyles could have been avoided with better public health measures and pandemic response. Japan never needed a national lockdown because they were better at doing more targeted stuff earlier.
Lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience but most of us found ways to accommodate it. Expecting less healthy people to die to avoid it is totally unreasonable, and a step towards a society where only those who practice a healthy lifestyle and are lucky enough not to be subject to ramdom illness are considered worthy of attention.
Only a childless wealthy person living in a nice place in provincial England would say such a stupid, crass, vulgar, tone-deaf and utterly insensitive thing like “lockdown was indeed a moderate inconvenience”
You total fricking idiot
I was very lucky to have moved from Zone 3 London to the coast a few months before the panic. Still a flat with no garden, but plenty more pleasant places to go for a walk.
Central London was utterly dystopian during lockdown 3. Not helped by the fact that the winter of 20-21 was particularly bitter, long and grey. Unlike the amazing sunshine of lockdown 1
Just thinking about it makes me shudder with the memory. Awful
It's where I experienced real depression for the first time in my life.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I can’t find the guy I’m talking about right now. But there seems to be a whole genre of them. Here’s another
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
My great-granddad lived for about 90 years, in the 1870-1960 style timeframe (I forget the exact years).
Look at all the technological change he lived through. Lifestyles at the end of his life had changed massively in broad ways from when he was born. Taking just technology, and not social change:
*) The phone *) Radio *) TV *) Cars / road transport *) The nuclear age *) Flight *) Space travel + countless more.
We're seeing vast change in detail; but for everyday life, my granddad lived through far more revolutionary change than I will.
Wrong. You are about to experience change greater than anything humanity has encountered before
Think back to how life was in 1870, and how life was in 1960. Do you really think the life of the everyday man will change that much again?
I seriously doubt it. At least, not for the better.
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I can’t find the guy I’m talking about right now. But there seems to be a whole genre of them. Here’s another
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
My great-granddad lived for about 90 years, in the 1870-1960 style timeframe (I forget the exact years).
Look at all the technological change he lived through. Lifestyles at the end of his life had changed massively in broad ways from when he was born. Taking just technology, and not social change:
*) The phone *) Radio *) TV *) Cars / road transport *) The nuclear age *) Flight *) Space travel + countless more.
We're seeing vast change in detail; but for everyday life, my granddad lived through far more revolutionary change than I will.
Wrong. You are about to experience change greater than anything humanity has encountered before
Think back to how life was in 1870, and how life was in 1960. Do you really think the life of the everyday man will change that much again?
I seriously doubt it. At least, not for the better.
Yes. It’s going to change much more than any of those, and much faster
“The third pandemic lockdown in the UK began on January 6, 2021, and lasted until significant restrictions were eased on April 12, 2021, meaning it spanned approximately three months.
Here’s a timeline breakdown:
1. January 6, 2021: England entered its third lockdown due to a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the Alpha variant. Schools were closed, and people were required to stay at home except for essential reasons.
2. March 8, 2021: Schools reopened, and some restrictions began to ease as part of the government’s staged “roadmap out of lockdown.”
3. April 12, 2021: Non-essential retail, outdoor hospitality, and personal care services (like hairdressers) reopened. This marked the end of the most severe lockdown restrictions.
4. June 21, 2021: Remaining restrictions were scheduled to end, but this was delayed to July 19, 2021, due to concerns about the Delta variant.”
So in some form it went on for over SIX months. And the most severe forms (stay in your homes, no social gatherings, no pubs no nothing) went on for over three months
It had started in mid December for parts of southern England with the restrictions steadily being moved northwards.
I remember still swimming on 5th January 2021.
Unfortunately there were too many people happy to be on furlough or working from home and the government too willing to pander to them.
Interesting. I thought I was misremembering because my recollection is lockdown 3 began in December not January. So what you say explains the discrepancy
Also means that for me lockdown 3 went on - in its most brutal form - for around four months. No wonder I was suicidally deranged by the end
I didn't mind lockdown 3.
Vaccination allowed a steadily brightening prospect as did the usual steadily lengthening days.
And as I mentioned I was affected by the restrictions a few weeks later than much of the country.
Not to mention that January and February are 'stay inside' months generally.
I do think that going to work helped me as it gave a purpose and social interaction with other people.
It was lockdown 2 that aggravated me - it felt like all the hard work in lockdown 1 had been wasted because the government had pandered to people who insisted on having their week in Benidorm.
Indeed
Lockdown was the only time I’ve ever felt envious of people with “proper jobs” that allowed them to go out daily and interact and have a purpose - like you and @foxy
I was stuck indoors in my own mind going mad. People who didn’t experience that maybe cannot grasp the horror
It's strange isn't it how people can have completely different reactions to the same thing. I actually loved lockdown mostly because my other half is one of those busy bees who insists that we do something every evening and go somewhere every weekend. Enforced idleness felt like a holiday. I spent ages on Zoom chatting to relatives and friends from distant shores that I just don't bother with now we're busy again. I'm not being blind to how horrendous it was for so many people but on a personal level I can't help but look back in it fondly.
Which is fine. Some people enjoyed it. I have friends that admit they enjoyed it - usually more introvert types in nice houses who got family members over
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
Lockdown was awful in most ways. There were though opportunities - walking around a completely empty London. driving around a completely empty road system, and the overall quietude that came from all of the really ghastly people leaving for their country residences. Leaves clattered to the ground.
I remember driving through central London during lockdown 1. This is what it looked like
Peace of mind from the stachoos being safe tho'.
They didn’t feel safe. Central London felt creepy and dangerous
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
There’s a guy on Twitter who claims moments of surreality are intensifying daily and it means we’re approaching a singularity which will hit in 25-26
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
Perhaps, but I think there is probably an inverse relationship between the number of twitter accounts I follow and the proportion of time spent experiencing the surreal.
I would like the public inquiry to ask some very searching questions about lockdown 3. Why was it enacted? What was the justification? Was cost/benefit done etc etc. The vulnerable had been jabbed. Some twice iirc.
I doubt the whitewash inquiry will dig deep on this.
I presume a "whitewash inquiry" is one that comes to a different conclusion than the one you want?
No, it is one that doesn't ask searching questions, probe deeply, dig into the science and the modelling, question the right people at length and so on.
I want answers to prepare for the next pandemic which the way the americans are going could be 2025.
Edit: As far as I can see so far it all about process - who send who which email and who read which meeting minute when.
Comments
It seems that people were shielding themselves - voluntarily locking down - anyway. I’m not sure the alternative history is such a simple binary as everyone carries on as usual and the virus runs riot.
The question is whether government mandated lockdowns, with all the associated policing, were sensible policy or not. And if so, were they done in the right way.
I would hope we never again see extended closures of schools during a pandemic that largely doesn’t affect children. That was carastrophic for a generation and could have been avoided. I’d like to think that some of the sillier early goings on, like police stopping people sitting alone on an empty beach or buzzing people driving to beauty spots with drones, wouldn’t be repeated.
(Slice of Lemon I see for the literature purists)
Voteshare wise the same poll has the CDU/CSU 12% ahead of the AfD still with the SDP 4% behind the AfD in third
It’s when these people blithely say “oh lockdown wasn’t that bad - a moderate inconvenience” - and show zero empathy for others - that’s when I blow a gasket. Lockdown was utterly miserable for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. And also grotesquely expensive for everyone
At the centre of that uncertainty I think it is easy to forget the very real belief (whether accurate or not) that hospitals could have been overwhelmed, and how quickly that could have happened had we not reduced the R number.
However bad lockdown was, it pales into insignificance against the darkness that would have been the social breakdown had eg sick kids had to die at home because hospitals were overwhelmed.
(There is a parallel for me in how close we were to economic breakdown during the 2008 financial crisis.)
It is so easy, given this didn't happen, to underestimate the chance that it could have done and, more so, the need to err on the side of caution when we didn't know how possible this was at the time.
Public health needs to balance encouragement to live a healthy lifestyle with recognition that it will only work in part. It's harder than most of us think to get the balance right.
The question is, what smarter measures could we have used that would have reduced transmission without lockdown? What did Japan do differently? Why didn't we encourage people to socialise outside more? Why didn't Britain, as an island nation, use quarantine to keep the virus out?
My worst-case scenario fear is that we have learnt all the wrong lessons from the Covid pandemic and so when the next flu pandemic hits, the response to that will be bungled, and a generation of children will suffer huge casualties.
And they are making sure the weapons are not beholden to European suppliers - much to the horror of some politicians in Europe.
The next step is their investment in pouring larger solid fuel rockets. Which they are starting on, with South Korean help.
Meanwhile, the glow lessens in the cooling ponds in the Ukraine. In the warm darkness, The New Gods murmur in their long sleep.
So whenever I travel the planet I always ask people “how was your Covid” and from Japan to France to America to Colombia to Chile to Thailand I always get vivid, intense stories which are often oddly similar. And the proportions are roughly the same everywhere - 60-80% hated it and had a terrible time; a large minority enjoyed it
It's not just the children. It's the staff as well.
Generally, teachers are on average younger and fitter than the population as a whole (because of the high attrition rates due to shockingly poor central management) but if just 10% are ill, or shielding, you're stuffed because there's no slack in the system.
It could have been worked round, but nobody in authority even grasped the issue never mind tried to deal with it.
This is one of the many problems the DfE didn't understand because they're all so stupid and ignorant. And we knew that before, but it was displayed with absolutely pitiless clarity in the pandemic.
Both my son, his girlfriend (Romanian so couldn't go home) and my daughter came home to us from Uni and my wife was sent home to work. So I had to get the house set up for 4 online zooms simultaneously. We had plenty of room for everyone and a big garden so plenty of space. I also volunteered as a covid helper (taking shopping to old people, manning vaccination centres, that sort of stuff).
When we could travel but under restrictions (Green/Amber/Red) I travelled under Amber because isolating on return wasn't an issue for me, because I didn't have work to go to. I went to Portugal for a long trip and then cycled in France. Travel was easy because for nearly everyone it was too restrictive.
So for me it was fine, even fun, but I appreciated for many it was hell.
@Leon did you travel under Amber conditions? Presumably with your life style you could.
PS The government clearly hadn't gone to the full extent to what it could have gone to and might be necessary if we have a pandemic with a higher mortality rate as we never had to to use the the Nightingale hospitals and they certainly didn't use all the potential medical staff that they could have called on because my wife and the other Doctors in the company (pharma) she worked at all volunteered and were told they should stay in their current roles. I am assuming the assimilation of loads of Doctors who have been outside of the front line for sometime was considered too much of a distraction at that point. I'm guessing if it got more desperate they would have been taken on.
Early 1st lockdown, breaking the rules to go into central London. Iconic places, usually crammed, now pretty much just me. That was - literally - a once in a lifetime experience. It was surreal.
Summer 2020 when restrictions were lifted temporarily. Hot sunny day, walked to a local pub and had a pint of lager, sat outside, my first 'social' drink for months. Amazing feeling.
I remember that I feared for others far more than for myself. My partner was scared, I was sanguine. The difference between us was huge, but I never said as much. I supported her and didn’t mock. It was perhaps my finest hour.
I’d also say that the state totally failed us. Its limits were soon overtopped by the compassion and caring of normal people.
Johnson had no clue. No focus, nothing to offer. Maybe I’m an idiot but I’d have expected Blair to have outperformed him by quite a lot. A big lot.
It was a depressing episode in British politics.
If there was a nation that I'd have long liked to have liked but not been able to do so it'd be Russia. In hindsight I can't imagine why I tried.
Basic problem - too many teachers would have been sick. Which makes the school unable to open. Which sends the kids home.
The "just keep working" scenario makes out that Covid then is what Covid is now. But it wasn't back then...
I’ve worked with stupid and ignorant people - to compare them to the DfE is an atrocious slur.
We had several periods where certain year groups, or certain categories of child, we're allowed back in.
In large part this was to reduce transmission in school, but it also accounted for teacher absence (whether through COVID isolation or long-term shielding).
I'd say a schools plan for a future pandemic isn't that hard:
1. Prioritise open schools over just about any other place where people group together.
2. Within schools, prioritise key year groups and key students who are always in, then have others in on a rolling basis, according to capacity of teaching staff at the time.
That’s probably not healthy. So it’s good to vent and share. I fucking hated most of Covid after those first few sunny weeks. Tho, like @kinabalu I also remember the euphoria of release
In particular I recall a solo trip to Athens in August 2021 when restrictions and masking were finished but travel hadn’t really resumed. Amazing hotels were cheap and I had iconic Greek ruins basically to myself and the joyous locals. Absolutely magical trip
'Bugger it, I have gone through that dreaded lockdown and still nearly died. I might as well have been out enjoying myself.'
That of course is understandable but not rational.
The interest thing, to me, is the emphasis across the political spectrum, from far left to right, on being friends with the immediate neighbours.
Even the nuttier irredentists, in Poland, have latched on to the idea that The Nation is The People. The actual land is not as important. So they are quite prepared to keep (and defend) the current borders.
There are a few strays - but they are a slack handful.
The thinking is that Russia, historically, could only attack Eastern Europe when it was divided. So unite Poland with its neighbours, and form a defensive coalition.
1) Put money into it and improve it, sacrificing present profit for future gains, or
2) Take money out of it, deteriorating the service ("enshittification") for present profit.
I'd go for option 2 myself. Why do we continue to believe, in the face of so many counter-examples, that privatisation and foreign ownership works for everything? Even Thatcher and Lawson had "golden shares"
I had full WFH setup anyway, with 1Gb symmetrical fibre. My job (and my wife’s) were run with international, distributed teams, anyway.
The absence rate needn't have been that high if we'd treated it like winter colds in schools, which everyone just ignores.
It is not even as if he said anything that wasn't obviously true either, other than the balance of what level of spending is one willing to commit to such efforts compared to other spending needs or willingness to pay.
Most of the people out and about were homeless zombies. I can vividly recall them shuffling in their sleeping bags down the Strand screaming for water because all the places they usually get water (cafes, etc) were shut
On the upside, you could park literally anywhere. I parked on the pavement on Charing X Road. No one cared
Also: surreal moments. Driving back to my rural lockdown 1 bolt hole after that weekend in London on a very empty M4, I saw a car coming the other way, apparently on fire, and trailing a vast plume of smoke, yet somehow still driving normally
Whole thing was like a nightmarish hallucination
A colleague had the answer - he’d created a summary spreadsheet when things started looking fun. Unlike the floors if clown show around us. His spreadsheet ended up at the board, so we heard….
You may disagree, but to call it a parody is to highlight the blinkers of certainty that are the bane of effective public policy.
"yes"
"That's your bed that is. You're on the front cover of bed wetters monthly"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhrD5SVo3OU
Sometimes that works, but there are bits of brute reality where nature, arithmetic or the other side looks at that and laughs. A pandemic is one of those. (I suspect that the balance between taxation and spending and the risks of powering your economy by burning stuff are a couple of others.)
I'm pretty confident that the attempts to avoid restrictions (especially Operation Save Christmas 2020) were an important factor in the length and dismalness of the restrictions of the first half of 2021.
Look at it this way: Say you are right (*) and the virus escaped from a lab. Throughout history, pandemics have occurred naturally, and I think even you could agree that a wet market is, virologically speaking, a bloody daft idea. So it's a good idea to discourage wet markets and bush meat *as well* as improving controls for labs. Even if you are right about Covid; as the next pandemic *might* come from such a place.
Now say you are wrong (**) and it came from the wet market. In which case, you would agree that discouraging wet markets and bush meat is a brilliant idea. But that doesn't mean that we don't improve controls for labs, as that's also a very concerning vector. And whilst, in this scenario, Covid was not caused by a lab leak, the next pandemic might be.
In both cases, it's a blooming good idea to improve surveillance systems.
You're so keen to be correct, that you're willing to ignore an obvious threat vector.
DO BOTH
(*) I know you are so modest that you never will...
(**) I know you are such an honest chap you will freely admit to being wrong, when it occurs for the first time at the heat death of the universe.
ETA: abject apologies for not acknowledging your delightful simile: steam-powered Luxembourgers is excellent. Thank you.
Simile? Metaphor? Analogy? I never can get those clear in my mind.
Compare and contrast with nearby Avebury, which is sublime.
But we need to avoid fighting the last war. COVID-19 hit the elderly hardest, like SARS had too, but the next pandemic may not be like COVID-19. Spanish flu hit the young the hardest. The over-50s tended to have more immunity to swine flu. Another flu pandemic could well do the same. Zika usually causes a trivial infection (although it can trigger Guillain–Barré syndrome), but is often devastating to a foetus if you are pregnant. We won't know who is most at risk of the next pandemic until it hits.
They’re not gonna be persuaded. It’s now a religious tenet. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses on whom I politely close the door
We have more fruitful things to discuss
I'm increasingly of the view that such surreal moments are the stuff of life.
What's the story behind it? Noone knows, perhaps not even the driver.
And, crucially, it cannot be googled.
Similarly: a hundred metres from my house there is a doorway built into a wall. The whole thing is about 2m x 3m and there is nothing surrounding it. Why is it there?
I'm sure there is a reason, probably to do with avoiding tax. But I have chosen not to try to find out what it is. I prefer the inexplicable.
I strongly suspect that, as life progresses, the privileged amongst us will increasingly value the 'spectacle'; that which cannot be easily explained, whether by friends, AI, or logic.
For me, my dad died in hospital in February 2020 of an unrelated illness. I remember vividly, on his last night at his deathbed vigil, watching the news - it was still in Asia only at that point, and me wondering when it would be in Britain. By the time of his funeral it was bad in Italy. His funeral must have been one of the very last "normal" funerals before COVID lockdown came. Weirdly I remember being glad we got to have a proper funeral and not one of the truly awful ones mandated by lockdown.
Three of the most depressing things about COVID - or at least those over and above everything else everyone has mentioned already.
One - the god awful government briefings, which got very old very quickly, particularly (in Scotland) Sturgeon's daily one. I'm sure they were supposed to help, to try and show (a) that someone was in charge and (b) that the government understood the sacrifices people were making, but at some point they just became a tedious litany of statistics that made you want to scream listening to them. I remember my mum complaining bitterly about some of the UK Govt ones with Whitty and Vallance, a lot of the time them saying things like "this graph clearly shows X" and my mum just being completely bemused because, probably like most of the population, if you don't spend a lot of time looking at complex graphs they mean nothing to you. Some of the communications of those briefings was abominable.
Two - the whole "tiering" thing. That was just a complete waste of time. In the end it came down to opening up or locking down. Trying to pretend there was some middle ground, where some normality could be maintained and some things had to be sacrificed, never really worked.
Three - the constant discussion about R number reproductive rates, generally rendered entirely moot because every few months the latest variant hade a much higher R than the previous one.
I am a liberal democrat who accepts, indeed welcomes, multiculturism as an expression of freedom of belief and culture and a source of innovation and stimulation.
The Chinese, and some on PB, do not accept multiculturism, seeing it as divisive and not under control. So China has adopted the Danish model and stamps out differences to protect the one China culture. We condemn this as an affront on human rights. But we need to avoid hypocricy here.
China is coming. The clash with populism will be interesting, as will the use of advanced AI and smartphones as the omniscient, omnipotent controlling entity.
We live in such interesting times! I hope to live for another 20 years (I'll be 102) to see how it all turns out.
That means ensuring it is a more effective parcel delivery company especially
But look at what I wrote: even if you are right, then what I wrote makes sense. Whether you are right or wrong is irrelevant to what we should be doing to protect ourselves from another pandemic.
I’m not sure what happens then. Maybe it is revealed that we’re in a simulation? I’m also not sure if he’s joking
Fun account to follow, tho
That also means it will limit its outreach abroad beyond the economic sphere, it doesn't want to move beyond the one culture of Chinese communism it can control within its borders
There are a few major factors that led the ROK, Taiwan, and Singapore to cope well during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the three countries have commonly experienced pandemics in the past. [...] Therefore, the resilient public health systems and public cooperation in all three countries have helped limit the spread of COVID-19.
Second, the three countries have developed advanced ICT infrastructure and digital technology [...]
Third, all three countries share significant components of the 3Ts (Test, Trace, and Treatment) [...]
Lastly, the citizens of ROK, Taiwan, and Singapore followed the social distancing guidelines issued by their governments, thus lowering the rate of community infections. The three countries share the same cultural roots of Confucianism, which indicates culture as a driver of relatively successful responses to the pandemic in Asian countries compared to the West. Confucianism emphasizes one’s duties to family and society over individual rights, which has resulted in public acceptance of a great degree of governmental control or surveillance.23 For example, mask wearing imposed by authorities and patient tracing based on collected personal information were accepted by the public without strong objection in these three countries.
The three countries’ cases provided significant lessons indicating that the containment and mitigation strategies [...] have been effective in flattening the epidemic curves. [...] ROK has neither imposed a draconian lock-down nor stringent border control as a response to the pandemic, whereas Singapore opted for the opposite with two circuit breakers and strong border control. Taiwan never had to go into lockdown until the outbreak of the COVID-19 variant in May 2021, but focused on early and strict border controls [...]
In this study, we discussed the effective responses of ROK, Taiwan, and Singapore to COVID-19 through three different perspectives–governance, health, and social distancing. Most of all, these countries took appropriate initial countermeasures to control the spread of COVID-19. However, various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the early stage of the pandemic were criticized due to the enormous socio-economic losses. Therefore, a suitable combination of NPIs with less disruptive and costly measures is essential for countries to forecast the effectiveness of future interventions.28 The pre-COVID-19 preparation based on previous experiences equipped the three aforementioned jurisdictions with resilient public health systems and advanced ICT infrastructure. Public acceptance based on the Confucian culture helped authorities to swiftly implement control and prevention measures. Nevertheless, the three countries still have to improve in terms of vaccination as well as inequality [...] to be better prepared for any future pandemic.
The other is:
1 Sell and lease back all the assets
2 Load up the business with a pile of debt
3 Extract as much cash as you can in dividends over five years or so
4 Walk away when it all falls down.
There are precedents for the second model.
bored of it myself. I shouldn’t even have raised it today I just found @bondegezou’s contortions so risible
My bad. I apologise. I shall strive not to do it again
Another blundering decision.
Alternatively they could use the sort of employment model their competitors use and extract short term profit, and therefore share price.
Which do you think they are likely to do under their new ownership?
“The world is becoming increasingly weird, and the pace of this process of increasing weirdness is accelerating rapidly. What once seemed unusual or extraordinary now feels almost commonplace, and the boundaries of what we consider "normal" are being pushed further every day.
This growing wave of weirdness isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding, feeding on itself, and expanding faster than we can fully comprehend.
Prepare for 2025, it will be crazier than anything we’ve seen before.”
https://x.com/dr_singularity/status/1864468540151013456?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
The lesson I drew from it is that our population is quite supine and likes State authoritarianism. And, worse, would happily collaborate with an occupying power if it ever came down to it.
I doubt the whitewash inquiry will dig deep on this.
https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1870609656940478760?s=61
A "detection" of the former counts just the same in the stats as one of the latter.
If so, do you agree with it?
Got a good feeling about it.
Superb
1998: TERENCE MCKENNA PREDICTS THE CURRENT “WEIRDNESS.”
Terence McKenna’s famous novelty theory posits that the universe evolves toward increasing complexity, culminating in a ‘singularity,’ where consciousness and interconnectedness peak, transforming the human experience.
https://x.com/davidbarbelo/status/1841170852085191006?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
It's not just a liberty respecting Government we need - they will in turn have to train people back into loving their own liberties too. Long way back, but we can do it.
Look at all the technological change he lived through. Lifestyles at the end of his life had changed massively in broad ways from when he was born. Taking just technology, and not social change:
*) The phone
*) Radio
*) TV
*) Cars / road transport
*) The nuclear age
*) Flight
*) Space travel
+ countless more.
We're seeing vast change in detail; but for everyday life, my granddad lived through far more revolutionary change than I will.
That’s it. That’s my new creed, ethos, ideology and motto
Lockdown 2 and 3 were more tedious but by then I was only half following the rules.
Worth remembering whatever the govt did labour demanded more. Purely for politics. Remember the Johnson Variant.
(That is not to defend the bat tunnel; just that the HS2 manager who started the controversy apparently got almost all his 'facts' wrong, and this has caused the debate to be rather fact-light.)
I do recall the Strangeness of the Tiers. Essex was bisected. On one side of the road everything shut, on the other I could happily eat oysters on Mersea island, so I did
It was horrible.
I seriously doubt it. At least, not for the better.
I want answers to prepare for the next pandemic which the way the americans are going could be 2025.
Edit: As far as I can see so far it all about process - who send who which email and who read which meeting minute when.