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.
Not so much Love Thy Neighbour as Grass They Neighbour and local Facebook groups became the preserve of curtain twitchers and snitchers.
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
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.
Read what he said, more closely
I did. I read it again. It is fine. Regardless of the source of COVID that advice all still makes sense. COVID isn't the only thing we need to worry about and he mentioned others. All those precautions make sense regardless. Those having the argument of whether it is Lab or Wet market are so paranoid about being right they misse the point that both are a threat and precautions should be taken.
The observations were sound and for once the discussion was very civilised so his abuse was uncalled for. Not that you did of course so my complaint was not against you and to be fair the abuse was mild compared to normal, but today has been such a polite day for a change.
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.
I think Liberal Democrats live in a fantasy inside their own heads.
Sometimes they like to try and apply it to the real world, but that's why we try and keep them out of office.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
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.
Not so much Love Thy Neighbour as Grass They Neighbour and local Facebook groups became the preserve of curtain twitchers and snitchers.
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
Neighbours basically became PCSOs.
I think a lot of people simply enjoy telling tales on others, especially if they suspect they might be having fun they are not.
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.
Read what he said, more closely
I did. I read it again. It is fine. Regardless of the source of COVID that advice all still makes sense. COVID isn't the only thing we need to worry about and he mentioned others. All those precautions make sense regardless. Those having the argument of whether it is Lab or Wet market are so paranoid about being right they misse the point that both are a threat and precautions should be taken.
The observations were sound and for once the discussion was very civilised so his abuse was uncalled for. Not that you did of course so my complaint was not against you and to be fair the abuse was mild compared to normal, but today has been such a polite day for a change.
Indeed it has been civilised and quite refreshing
And on that happy note I must drag my sorry lurgy-ridden ass to the shops. Later
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.
The mask slips; it's very clear to all of us now what sort of poster you are.
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.
Not so much Love Thy Neighbour as Grass They Neighbour and local Facebook groups became the preserve of curtain twitchers and snitchers.
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
Neighbours basically became PCSOs.
I think a lot of people simply enjoy telling tales on others, especially if they suspect they might be having fun they are not.
If the UK was 1930s Germany, there would be no shortage of volunteers for the Gestapo.
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.
Not so much Love Thy Neighbour as Grass They Neighbour and local Facebook groups became the preserve of curtain twitchers and snitchers.
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
Neighbours basically became PCSOs.
I think a lot of people simply enjoy telling tales on others, especially if they suspect they might be having fun they are not.
You’re absolutely right and Covid just emboldened these people.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
I'd go for the GFC - I think Brexit, Trump, and the rise of right-wing populism can be tracked back to it. The idea the ordinary working man bailed out the bankers, none of whom were punished for helping cause the crisis, and has been worse off since has fuelled populism.
I don't think it's that simple, but it is typical of centrists who seek an economic explanation for everything- because that is how they see the world.
And what's wrong with that? says this unashamed centrist.
You can see the world entirely from this perspective, if you wish, but it's an insufficient answer to what drives people's politics.
In a vague attempt to reduce misinformation, I note that the US Government has not concluded that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak. The US Government has avoided offering a conclusion on the origins of COVID-19. The National Intelligence Council's report -- I think this is the most recent version: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf -- offers a split view, but sides more with a zoonotic event than a lab leak.
The US legislature concluded that COVID-19 came from a lab leak. That report was written by the Republican majority on a committee; the Democrats issued a minority report disagreeing with it. That Republican majority included the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene of "Jewish space lasers" fame. Their report is bare-faced lies from the start. It says the FDA denigrated ivermectin, that masks don't work and questions vaccine safety. It's pure MAGA conspiracy theories. It is a sad reminder of what we may see over the next 4 years of a Trump Presidency.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
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.
In a vague attempt to reduce misinformation, I note that the US Government has not concluded that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak. The US Government has avoided offering a conclusion on the origins of COVID-19. The National Intelligence Council's report -- I think this is the most recent version: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf -- offers a split view, but sides more with a zoonotic event than a lab leak.
The US legislature concluded that COVID-19 came from a lab leak. That report was written by the Republican majority on a committee; the Democrats issued a minority report disagreeing with it. That Republican majority included the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene of "Jewish space lasers" fame. Their report is bare-faced lies from the start. It says the FDA denigrated ivermectin, that masks don't work and questions vaccine safety. It's pure MAGA conspiracy theories. It is a sad reminder of what we may see over the next 4 years of a Trump Presidency.
@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
Travelling abroad. Very simplified: Green ok, Amber restrictions, Red no.
For most people Amber was impossible because of the restrictions, but if you could isolate on return you could do it with lots of admin and tests. I had no commitments so could isolate and took the gamble on anywhere going red.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
Yeah, it's bollocks though!
Most people, sadly, don't have the balls to put their hand up, apologise, and admit they got it badly wrong, and their own behaviour played a part.
“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.
The Inquiry is focused on process. I suggest it is offering useful insights on process and is not a whitewash.
In terms of preparing for the next pandemic, there is an extensive scientific literature on this. I offered some research papers upthread looking at lessons learned from COVID-19.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
Yeah, it's bollocks though!
Most people, sadly, don't have the balls to put their hand up, apologise, and admit they got it badly wrong, and their own behaviour played a part.
Yes, I’m being sarcastic it is bollocks and a few posters owe William an apology
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
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
People don't seem to understand that the nightingale hospitals were to isolate vast numbers of dying people, had things been only marginally worse than they actually were. Thats why they were basically to be staffed by the army. I don't know why we persist in the pretence that they were "hospitals" in the normal sense of the word, staffed by medical professionals.
I forget so many details about Covid. And I am sure that’s because my mind WANTS to forget them. It’s a blur of pain, horror and sadness that I am not inclined to revisit
I sometimes think of this very acute article from early in the Pando
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
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.
If the Danish stuck minorities in concentration camps to work as slave labourers, and executed dissidents, there might be a point to that comparison.
@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
Travelling abroad. Very simplified: Green ok, Amber restrictions, Red no.
For most people Amber was impossible because of the restrictions, but if you could isolate on return you could do it with lots of admin and tests. I had no commitments so could isolate and took the gamble on anywhere going red.
I went on holiday even though it wasnt allowed in my tier. But the airport didnt check anyway. Had conversations when away which suggested they didnt really check if you isolated on return so never bothered isolating on return and just left the phone landline off the hook when i was out.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
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
People don't seem to understand that the nightingale hospitals were to isolate vast numbers of dying people, had things been only marginally worse than they actually were. Thats why they were basically to be staffed by the army. I don't know why we persist in the pretence that they were "hospitals" in the normal sense of the word, staffed by medical professionals.
I forget so many details about Covid. And I am sure that’s because my mind WANTS to forget them. It’s a blur of pain, horror and sadness that I am not inclined to revisit
I sometimes think of this very acute article from early in the Pando
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
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.
A government training the public into groupthink over a particular view of the essentially contested notion of liberty is not one of your finer ideas, LuckyGuy.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
MaxPB, where have I ever said such things about lockdowns?
Lockdowns are a last resort. Of course, sometimes, you need the last resort, but I wish we could have been locked down much less. If we could re-run history, I believe we could have avoided most of the locking down with better responses earlier. It would have been relatively easy for the country to have spent less time in lockdown with some fairly minor changes to government decisions. (But I recognise it's easy to say such things in hindsight!)
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
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.
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.
A government training the public into groupthink over a particular view of the essentially contested notion of liberty is not one of your finer ideas, LuckyGuy.
You seem to be strongly in favour of the public having been trained to depend on a dysfunctional state for everything as they have over the last 30 odd years, so I'm surprised that you find the very disinterested notion of them being trained to be more independent to be so troubling. Broadly speaking that is why we educate people at all.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
Fully agree. Ludicrous policy. Furlough was also ridiculously generous at 80% of earnings which gave many people an excuse to pretend to be frightened of the virus one they took full advantage of.
In all this dsicussion: why did the Tories close down the vaccine institute they opened with such fanfare?
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
Of course, other than for those shielding, there never was a "lockdown". People could go for a walk, bike ride or whatever, and visit the shops, every single day.
The stupidest bit of the rules was when we had tiers. So pubs shut in Leeds but open in York, resulting in trainloads of folk heading to York to go on the lash. And spread Covid.
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.
My theory of “If Sealion Barked” in 1940
1/3rd of the population would have resisted to the end
1/3of the population would not have noticed the German invasion. Unless the football was cancelled
1/3rd would have queued up for an armband and a clipboard, to be made BlokFuhrer.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
232000 deaths for any reason within 28 days of a positive test. Not so sure we can trust that statistic. Ive heard the true number of covid deaths were 10% of that. Still im sure you sacrificed a lot in lockdown and have to justify it in your own mind.
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.
My theory of “If Sealion Barked” in 1940
1/3rd of the population would have resisted to the end
1/3of the population would not have noticed the German invasion. Unless the football was cancelled
1/3rd would have queued up for an armband and a clipboard, to be made BlokFuhrer.
Er, Block Warden. It was Blockleiter or informally Blockwart in the original German.
@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
Hard to find a finer summary of the stupidity of much of the government's response.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
I never received the slightest bullying for my position
- That Trump was consistently a bit ahead, according to the polls - That Harris was a suboptimal, but not insane or evil, candidate. - That the result was too close to call, but with an edge to Trump.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
I don't disagree that that would have been the right decision under the circumstances. I just don't think you're thinking through the realities.
The nature of exponential growth (as I'm sure you know) is that the day the hospitals get overwhelmed you get more patients than ever before with covid. A week later (if it doubles in a week) you get double the number of patients turning up. With increasing numbers every day in between.
For your scenario to be possible you have to have a physical mechanism to (a) keep covid patients out and (b) to let other patients in to hospitals. On what basis do you do this at the door? Or do you wait until triage? How do you triage that number of patients to find the dying child in the middle of it all?
And let's be generous and say you solve that problem. Next problem: your hospital is full of covid patients who, by dint of being in hospital, may well die if they are removed. How, specifically. do you go about removing them in order to create space for your dying child? And how do you do this without resorting to violence? How many patients do you think will voluntarily remove themselves from a hospital bed because of new guidelines?
And how do you do all this on the timescales we're talking about?
I really don't think you have thought this through.
Of course, other than for those shielding, there never was a "lockdown". People could go for a walk, bike ride or whatever, and visit the shops, every single day.
The stupidest bit of the rules was when we had tiers. So pubs shut in Leeds but open in York, resulting in trainloads of folk heading to York to go on the lash. And spread Covid.
Oh yes i forgot my 1 hour of daily allowed exercise. How generous of them.
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 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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
In the road not taken would those unhealthy people have taken the level of risk to get infected or would they have chosen to avoid other people until they got vaccinated? You can't really say what it would have been because we didn't do it. Lockdowns have scared a generation of kids and young people, led people to suicide and we're still dealing with the consequences.
We should never have had the second and third lockdowns, we should have stopped furlough after the first unlockdown and not brought it back ever again and clawed it back from people with higher incomes after COVID with marginally higher tax rates for a few years (FFS I got the furlough money for almost 5 months).
I look back on that period and despair and the worst part is that it will be people like you that advocate for it again next time around, whatever your protestations are today. To save the NHS.
In all this dsicussion: why did the Tories close down the vaccine institute they opened with such fanfare?
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
Here's another example near me: the Leamington Spa covid megalab:
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
232000 deaths for any reason within 28 days of a positive test. Not so sure we can trust that statistic. Ive heard the true number of covid deaths were 10% of that. Still im sure you sacrificed a lot in lockdown and have to justify it in your own mind.
The idea that the true number of deaths were 10% of that is a debunked conspiracy theory.
In all this dsicussion: why did the Tories close down the vaccine institute they opened with such fanfare?
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
It was closed down for the same reason that the dashboard team was quickly shut down - it represented an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government.
Likewise the mass testing system - one person actually wrote that its *success* was an insult to Proper Process.
These are the headwinds that Starmer & Co. Is encountering now.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
In all this dsicussion: why did the Tories close down the vaccine institute they opened with such fanfare?
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
It was closed down for the same reason that the dashboard team was quickly shut down - it represented an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government.
Likewise the mass testing system - one person actually wrote that its *success* was an insult to Proper Process.
These are the headwinds that Starmer & Co. Is encountering now.
That’s bonkers, Malmesbury. It was closed down so they could cut spending. Now on Earth was the vaccine institute “an intolerable threat to interest groups in the permanent system of government”?
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
And a proportion of our population would be loving every minute of it. Theres a reason the uk had the longest lockdowns in the world.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
I don't disagree that that would have been the right decision under the circumstances. I just don't think you're thinking through the realities.
The nature of exponential growth (as I'm sure you know) is that the day the hospitals get overwhelmed you get more patients than ever before with covid. A week later (if it doubles in a week) you get double the number of patients turning up. With increasing numbers every day in between.
For your scenario to be possible you have to have a physical mechanism to (a) keep covid patients out and (b) to let other patients in to hospitals. On what basis do you do this at the door? Or do you wait until triage? How do you triage that number of patients to find the dying child in the middle of it all?
And let's be generous and say you solve that problem. Next problem: your hospital is full of covid patients who, by dint of being in hospital, may well die if they are removed. How, specifically. do you go about removing them in order to create space for your dying child? And how do you do this without resorting to violence? How many patients do you think will voluntarily remove themselves from a hospital bed because of new guidelines?
And how do you do all this on the timescales we're talking about?
I really don't think you have thought this through.
But that's the point I'm making, the hospital doesn't accept COVID patients except for serious cases in under 18s. You get COVID you get an instruction pack on how to best treat yourself at home, you get serious COVID you get a bible/koran/torah etc... unless you're under 18. You don't get admitted to hospital, you don't pass go. It's a resource limited environment and the pandemic places literally unlimited demand on the system. We chose to reduce demand by severely restricting people's freedoms, I'd choose to limit supply and let people make their own lifestyle changes to avoid catching it the disease.
I'm also talking about lockdowns 2 and 3, I understand that the first one was probably unavoidable. The second and third were an act of deep self harm for the nation and we did it to "save the NHS" well fuck that, the NHS is there to serve us, we're not there to serve the NHS.
The YouGov question is without meaning and ambiguous. You need to know 'significant in what way and for whom'. Medical? Fiscal?Political? Military? Personal?
For me personally? the UK? the world on average? the ordinary Uighur in the street? The children of Gaza?
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
232000 deaths for any reason within 28 days of a positive test. Not so sure we can trust that statistic. Ive heard the true number of covid deaths were 10% of that. Still im sure you sacrificed a lot in lockdown and have to justify it in your own mind.
The idea that the true number of deaths were 10% of that is a debunked conspiracy theory.
Ah "conspiracy theory" bingo. I heard that a lot in 2020. Still you should be proud of the sacrifice you made.
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.
A government training the public into groupthink over a particular view of the essentially contested notion of liberty is not one of your finer ideas, LuckyGuy.
You seem to be strongly in favour of the public having been trained to depend on a dysfunctional state for everything as they have over the last 30 odd years, so I'm surprised that you find the very disinterested notion of them being trained to be more independent to be so troubling. Broadly speaking that is why we educate people at all.
I'm not aware that I am particularly in favour of the public relying on the state.
I am, though, in favour of contesting what liberty looks and feels like, and who gets to experience it. I am also strongly in favour of trusting people to decide what their own liberty looks like, rather than them being 'trained' by a particular flavour of government.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
Fully agree. Ludicrous policy. Furlough was also ridiculously generous at 80% of earnings which gave many people an excuse to pretend to be frightened of the virus one they took full advantage of.
I agree re furlough (it also went on far too long). For a good many people the sheer level of disposable income they had must have increased substantially, because there were limited options with which to spend it. That in turn I think helped fuel the crazy house price boom and inflation.
I have some sympathy with the treasury, because they needed to get support in place quickly and a sledgehammer approach was probably the only real option open to them. But I think (with all the benefit of hindsight) support should have been tapered down over time, once more targeted support to help those genuinely struggling could be put in place.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
And a proportion of our population would be loving every minute of it. Theres a reason the uk had the longest lockdowns in the world.
The longest COVID-19 lockdown was in the Australian state of Victoria. There were also long lockdowns in Buenos Aries and Manila, and in Canada and Malaysia.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
232000 deaths for any reason within 28 days of a positive test. Not so sure we can trust that statistic. Ive heard the true number of covid deaths were 10% of that. Still im sure you sacrificed a lot in lockdown and have to justify it in your own mind.
The idea that the true number of deaths were 10% of that is a debunked conspiracy theory.
Ah "conspiracy theory" bingo. I heard that a lot in 2020. Still you should be proud of the sacrifice you made.
I am not surprised that you hear “conspiracy theory” a lot in response to what you say.
There’s the famous saying, “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.” Perhaps that could be adapted into something about conspiracy theories.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
Were those deaths 'with covid' or total deaths?
Shh, the commissar doesn't like it when the stats are picked apart and the narrative that we didn't lockdown long enough or hard enough is challenged, how will he justify another one next time without the "MILLIONS OF PEOPLE DIED! ARE YOU IN FAVOUR OF DEATH?" nonsense when in fact very few healthy people actually died of COVID.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
I don't disagree that that would have been the right decision under the circumstances. I just don't think you're thinking through the realities.
The nature of exponential growth (as I'm sure you know) is that the day the hospitals get overwhelmed you get more patients than ever before with covid. A week later (if it doubles in a week) you get double the number of patients turning up. With increasing numbers every day in between.
For your scenario to be possible you have to have a physical mechanism to (a) keep covid patients out and (b) to let other patients in to hospitals. On what basis do you do this at the door? Or do you wait until triage? How do you triage that number of patients to find the dying child in the middle of it all?
And let's be generous and say you solve that problem. Next problem: your hospital is full of covid patients who, by dint of being in hospital, may well die if they are removed. How, specifically. do you go about removing them in order to create space for your dying child? And how do you do this without resorting to violence? How many patients do you think will voluntarily remove themselves from a hospital bed because of new guidelines?
And how do you do all this on the timescales we're talking about?
I really don't think you have thought this through.
But that's the point I'm making, the hospital doesn't accept COVID patients except for serious cases in under 18s. You get COVID you get an instruction pack on how to best treat yourself at home, you get serious COVID you get a bible/koran/torah etc... unless you're under 18. You don't get admitted to hospital, you don't pass go. It's a resource limited environment and the pandemic places literally unlimited demand on the system. We chose to reduce demand by severely restricting people's freedoms, I'd choose to limit supply and let people make their own lifestyle changes to avoid catching it the disease.
I'm also talking about lockdowns 2 and 3, I understand that the first one was probably unavoidable. The second and third were an act of deep self harm for the nation and we did it to "save the NHS" well fuck that, the NHS is there to serve us, we're not there to serve the NHS.
Ah okay I think we have been arguing at cross purposes, then. Sorry if I missed that. I had lockdown 1 in my mind.
With a few nuances, I basically agree that we shouldn't have had lockdowns 2 and 3. It would have required a far more competent government to far more quickly learn the lessons from lockdown 1, but should have happened.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Even scarier: a horrendous midwit woke centro-fascist like @bondegezou was actually on a SAGE sub committee. We really are governed by the worst of humanity - the dismal middlebrow purse lipped authoritarian morons who shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important than a village library
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
Worse than SAGE was those utter morons on Independent Sage. The whole concept of independent SAGE was nonsense. We’re independent because Cummings is telling Sage what to do.
They kept going for about a year after the pandemic ended, spouting utter nonsense until the bitter end.
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...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Although, you and Leon are currently dishing out lots of virulent and unnecessary abuse to a poster you don't happen to agree with on Covid.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
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...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
Fuck masks and fuck lockdown. I see those sad people who still wear masks out in public and I wonder whether their brains are now just addled forever.
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...
For me, the second, and especially the third lockdown were the most frustrating of all. I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary. But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over." And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
We still have three tall, boxy filters in every classroom as a legacy from 2020. Haven't been turned on in years, they're just gathering dust. Perhaps they'll still work when bird flu hits?
“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.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
None. You are the establishment, I'm just calling that out to people so they know what you represent.
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.
I think Liberal Democrats live in a fantasy inside their own heads.
Sometimes they like to try and apply it to the real world, but that's why we try and keep them out of office.
Compared to post-2015, the Coalition was a model of sensible government.
“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.
Oh, come off it. If Boris had tried that he would have been absolutely crucified by the media, and you know it.
I agree that some of the media were overly keen on OTT policing too. However, I suggest the Johnson and Hancock private messages revealed by the COVID-19 Inquiry clearly show that they felt that harsh punishments were the way to go.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
232000 deaths for any reason within 28 days of a positive test. Not so sure we can trust that statistic. Ive heard the true number of covid deaths were 10% of that. Still im sure you sacrificed a lot in lockdown and have to justify it in your own mind.
The idea that the true number of deaths were 10% of that is a debunked conspiracy theory.
Do we still believe that only 5,000 people in China died from Covid?
Of course, other than for those shielding, there never was a "lockdown". People could go for a walk, bike ride or whatever, and visit the shops, every single day.
The stupidest bit of the rules was when we had tiers. So pubs shut in Leeds but open in York, resulting in trainloads of folk heading to York to go on the lash. And spread Covid.
Oh yes i forgot my 1 hour of daily allowed exercise. How generous of them.
Which, for most people, had to be taken in their urban area, rather than being allowed to drive a few miles to quiet countryside.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
None. You are the establishment, I'm just calling that out to people so they know what you represent.
There are, I might suggest, politer and less polite ways of saying someone is “the establishment”. (Not that I accept that description, but did I have a formal, paid role advising the Government at the time.)
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
So, how much did you make on the betting?
the 28th closest. An amazing result.
She’s such an unimpressive human being she couldn’t even be arsed to go and speak to her supporters on election night when she lost. She went home to bed.
I put a small wager on her, when she went out to 4/1 it was worth a punt so I put a few quid in that.
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.
Lockdown was to protect the sainted NHS and, as @MaxPB says, we are now here to serve the NHS not the other way round.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
Lockdown was to protect the NHS's ability to treat people, i.e. to protect us, the population.
Yes praise be to the glory of the state, all it seeks to do is protect us from ourselves, so give up freedom and liberty and we shall all be protected, hospitals will be empty and no one shall die.
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
And a proportion of our population would be loving every minute of it. Theres a reason the uk had the longest lockdowns in the world.
In 2020 we “saved the NHS”. In 2024 we realise it’s beyond saving.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
None. You are the establishment, I'm just calling that out to people so they know what you represent.
Its rather typical of our establishment to value politeness over competence. Of course they are so damned useless appeals to politeness are the only defence they have got. Leon has it spot on. We are governed by the worst of humanity.
Wasn't the "abuse" that William received more to do with the perception that he actually supports Trump, not just posting polls good for Trump?
Maybe he did, but why should people abuse him for a political choice? It's not one I agree with but people should be free to make that choice and not be abused for it.
Um… how do I put this? How many abusive posts have you just made in this thread?
None. You are the establishment, I'm just calling that out to people so they know what you represent.
There are, I might suggest, politer and less polite ways of saying someone is “the establishment”. (Not that I accept that description, but did I have a formal, paid role advising the Government 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.
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.
Not so much Love Thy Neighbour as Grass They Neighbour and local Facebook groups became the preserve of curtain twitchers and snitchers.
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
Neighbours basically became PCSOs.
I think a lot of people simply enjoy telling tales on others, especially if they suspect they might be having fun they are not.
You’re absolutely right and Covid just emboldened these people.
In one opinion poll at the time, 20% wanted nightclubs to never re-open.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
I never received the slightest bullying for my position
- That Trump was consistently a bit ahead, according to the polls - That Harris was a suboptimal, but not insane or evil, candidate. - That the result was too close to call, but with an edge to Trump.
Because that was an entirely anodyne and uncontentious point to make.
It was the posts with the analysis why Trump could or would win that copped the abuse.
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.
In my view, that scenario would have led in no short order to complete societal breakdown.
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
The decision would have been made very quickly to stop treating COVID except for serious cases in under 18s. Everyone else would have just had to live or die with it and take the necessary level of precaution to avoid catching it until they got vaccinated. Life would have continued. We sacrificed the young and healthy to protect the old and obese. The old we could have protected with isolation measures and obese, well, they made their lifestyle choice and it would have been up to them to protect themselves.
There were about 232,000 deaths in the UK during COVID-19. With your approach, that number would have been much higher. Who knows how high? Let's be conservative and say at least half a million.
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
232000 deaths for any reason within 28 days of a positive test. Not so sure we can trust that statistic. Ive heard the true number of covid deaths were 10% of that. Still im sure you sacrificed a lot in lockdown and have to justify it in your own mind.
The idea that the true number of deaths were 10% of that is a debunked conspiracy theory.
Do we still believe that only 5,000 people in China died from Covid?
I don’t think there’s any belief that we, people on PB, agree on.
Even China hasn’t claimed only 5000 deaths for a long while.
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.
I think Liberal Democrats live in a fantasy inside their own heads.
Sometimes they like to try and apply it to the real world, but that's why we try and keep them out of office.
Compared to post-2015, the Coalition was a model of sensible government.
Apart from tuition fees. IIRC Sure Start went after 2015.
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.
My theory of “If Sealion Barked” in 1940
1/3rd of the population would have resisted to the end
1/3of the population would not have noticed the German invasion. Unless the football was cancelled
1/3rd would have queued up for an armband and a clipboard, to be made BlokFuhrer.
Probably far fewer than 1/3rd.
Resisters have to hide (in small numbers) in a big population if they're to survive at all, too many and they'll simply be butchered quickly en-mass, and the UK is too developed/populated for them to hide easily.
In Wales and Scotland, and the remoter parts of Northern England, I can belief bands would have had better success.
Did the Iowa poll really have any effect on anybody?
DJT's path to victory (one of AZ or GA plus PA, WI and MI) was so well understood by that point that the only people still believing in and predicting a Kamala victory were panglossian fools self-medicating on electoral tramadol. And that lot were not going to be swayed by logic or data because their belief system was entirely a faith based construct.
The behaviour of this board on the 2024 Presidential was a fucking disgrace.
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
You’re wrong.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
There was *a ton* of wishful thinking here about the US vote, and William was frequently criticised for telling people what they did not wish to hear.
Irony is those accusing him of Hopium were the ones expressing it themselves with the hapless Harris.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
She got very close, however.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
A gallant loser is……………..a loser.
She wasn’t even close.
If we go by popular vote margin, 2024 was the 8th narrowest popular vote margin ever (although there were 3 more elections with wider popular vote margins, but the loser in the popular vote won the electoral college). It was the 28th closest in the electoral college.
So, how much did you make on the betting?
the 28th closest. An amazing result.
She’s such an unimpressive human being she couldn’t even be arsed to go and speak to her supporters on election night when she lost. She went home to bed.
I put a small wager on her, when she went out to 4/1 it was worth a punt so I put a few quid in that.
So, it was obvious to you that she was going to lose and yet you bet on her?
Presumably, as it was so obvious, you also bet on Trump and made a killing?
Comments
I used to drive into walk to pick up drawings and other paperwork and had to carry a letter from my company in case Plod stopped me. Durham Police May be utterly useless dealing with gangs of youths in ski masks causing problems every weekend in our towns but they were good during Covid.
The observations were sound and for once the discussion was very civilised so his abuse was uncalled for. Not that you did of course so my complaint was not against you and to be fair the abuse was mild compared to normal, but today has been such a polite day for a change.
Sometimes they like to try and apply it to the real world, but that's why we try and keep them out of office.
The morons clapping on their doorstep and banging pots. We still have ‘Thanks NHS’ on the local roads. Embarrassing.
I think a lot of people simply enjoy telling tales on others, especially if they suspect they might be having fun they are not.
And on that happy note I must drag my sorry lurgy-ridden ass to the shops. Later
Poster after poster (including the deputy editor) weighed in to bully or harass anyone posting a pro-Trump poll or counterfactual, and several gave up as a consequence of it.
That denied us valuable information and insights that led to many people losing a lot of money.
The US legislature concluded that COVID-19 came from a lab leak. That report was written by the Republican majority on a committee; the Democrats issued a minority report disagreeing with it. That Republican majority included the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene of "Jewish space lasers" fame. Their report is bare-faced lies from the start. It says the FDA denigrated ivermectin, that masks don't work and questions vaccine safety. It's pure MAGA conspiracy theories. It is a sad reminder of what we may see over the next 4 years of a Trump Presidency.
The peer-reviewed scientific literature, meanwhile, is very largely of the conclusion that COVID-19 came from the wet market in Wuhan. There was this key paper in Cell in September: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2 Meanwhile, this editorial, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2305081 , echoes some of the points @JosiasJessop had made upthread.
I made the same point as you earlier, especially with regard to Willianglenn posting polls favouring Trump and the pile ons he received, and was told most firmly that this was not the case and the commentary was even handed.
So it must be true,
For most people Amber was impossible because of the restrictions, but if you could isolate on return you could do it with lots of admin and tests. I had no commitments so could isolate and took the gamble on anywhere going red.
Most people, sadly, don't have the balls to put their hand up, apologise, and admit they got it badly wrong, and their own behaviour played a part.
In terms of preparing for the next pandemic, there is an extensive scientific literature on this. I offered some research papers upthread looking at lessons learned from COVID-19.
Yes, agreed about the US!
United: "Hold my beer..."
What's scary is that you really think you're right and we're wrong. You'd never have let anyone out of lockdown if you'd had your way. I'm sure we'd still be persisting with all that social distancing nonsense and the rest of it even now to "save the NHS".
Lockdown, as it was, generated really difficult questions as to who to prioritise (young v old, for example).
Now imagine the scenario that you take your kid to hospital with a life-threatening illness/injury only to be told: 'sorry, we are closed'. Not by an authoritative, kindly doctor (which would be bad enough) but most likely by a hand-written sign on the door, which won't open.
Now imagine you're one of a crowd of similarly panicked Dads. What do you do? You get violent, quite quickly.
The speed at which hospitals would have been overwhelmed by an exponentially growing illness would have precluded any government guidelines over who to treat, or any organisation within the hospital. It would have become feral.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I'm glad we didn't have to find out.
Out of darkness, shall come light.
Lockdowns are a last resort. Of course, sometimes, you need the last resort, but I wish we could have been locked down much less. If we could re-run history, I believe we could have avoided most of the locking down with better responses earlier. It would have been relatively easy for the country to have spent less time in lockdown with some fairly minor changes to government decisions. (But I recognise it's easy to say such things in hindsight!)
I'm not convinced that leaving half a million plus people to die in great suffering in their homes would have been acceptable to the public.
Harris was a terrible candidate whose many flaws were exposed during the primaries prior to the 2020 election. She was not going to miraculously become a winner in a few weeks.
Either it was useless, in which case it was a huge waste of money for the sake of a photo op in hi-vis, or it was useful prep for the next pandemic, in which case a decent insurance policy for the future was chucked in the bin.
Though I suspect its real value would be something like the 1930s model of the Royal Ordnance Factories, or for that matter GCHQ at the same time - space and equipment allocated and cadres identified for mass production. [Edit]: In sofar as that is possible. But even making the inquiry would be valuable.
If it was so obvious that Trump would win, I presume you made a killing betting on that outcome. How much did you win?
The stupidest bit of the rules was when we had tiers. So pubs shut in Leeds but open in York, resulting in trainloads of folk heading to York to go on the lash. And spread Covid.
1/3rd of the population would have resisted to the end
1/3of the population would not have noticed the German invasion. Unless the football was cancelled
1/3rd would have queued up for an armband and a clipboard, to be made BlokFuhrer.
- That Trump was consistently a bit ahead, according to the polls
- That Harris was a suboptimal, but not insane or evil, candidate.
- That the result was too close to call, but with an edge to Trump.
The nature of exponential growth (as I'm sure you know) is that the day the hospitals get overwhelmed you get more patients than ever before with covid. A week later (if it doubles in a week) you get double the number of patients turning up. With increasing numbers every day in between.
For your scenario to be possible you have to have a physical mechanism to (a) keep covid patients out and (b) to let other patients in to hospitals. On what basis do you do this at the door? Or do you wait until triage? How do you triage that number of patients to find the dying child in the middle of it all?
And let's be generous and say you solve that problem. Next problem: your hospital is full of covid patients who, by dint of being in hospital, may well die if they are removed. How, specifically. do you go about removing them in order to create space for your dying child? And how do you do this without resorting to violence? How many patients do you think will voluntarily remove themselves from a hospital bed because of new guidelines?
And how do you do all this on the timescales we're talking about?
I really don't think you have thought this through.
They could do with less unionised sorting office and postal delivery staff too
We should never have had the second and third lockdowns, we should have stopped furlough after the first unlockdown and not brought it back ever again and clawed it back from people with higher incomes after COVID with marginally higher tax rates for a few years (FFS I got the furlough money for almost 5 months).
I look back on that period and despair and the worst part is that it will be people like you that advocate for it again next time around, whatever your protestations are today. To save the NHS.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c042g5d3717o
Half a billion for nothing much (and dragging Rosalind Franklin's name through the mire in the process).
Likewise the mass testing system - one person actually wrote that its *success* was an insult to Proper Process.
These are the headwinds that Starmer & Co. Is encountering now.
I'm also talking about lockdowns 2 and 3, I understand that the first one was probably unavoidable. The second and third were an act of deep self harm for the nation and we did it to "save the NHS" well fuck that, the NHS is there to serve us, we're not there to serve the NHS.
For me personally? the UK? the world on average? the ordinary Uighur in the street? The children of Gaza?
I am, though, in favour of contesting what liberty looks and feels like, and who gets to experience it. I am also strongly in favour of trusting people to decide what their own liberty looks like, rather than them being 'trained' by a particular flavour of government.
I have some sympathy with the treasury, because they needed to get support in place quickly and a sledgehammer approach was probably the only real option open to them. But I think (with all the benefit of hindsight) support should have been tapered down over time, once more targeted support to help those genuinely struggling could be put in place.
And we wonder why Britain is fucked when such shrieking mediocrities have power. The apotheosis of this is Rachel Reeves as Chancellor and Sir Keir Actual Starmer as prime minister
There’s the famous saying, “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.” Perhaps that could be adapted into something about conspiracy theories.
She wasn’t even close.
With a few nuances, I basically agree that we shouldn't have had lockdowns 2 and 3. It would have required a far more competent government to far more quickly learn the lessons from lockdown 1, but should have happened.
I have no doubt that when we were in the position we were in just before they were declared, with the knowledge we had, they were necessary.
But like the old saw goes: "I wouldn't start from here."
I'd been banging on and on about "identifying the low-hanging fruit," because it was obvious and essentially uncontested that the various elements of the restrictions each had different levels of benefit (in terms of reducing spread and consequent hospitalisations) and different costs (in terms of impacts socially, mentally, and economically).
Yet the Government (and it was not unique) had continually failed to properly analyse these on the reduction phases and the minimal restriction times between them. It was as if they assumed every time that "that's it. All over."
And then they flailed around trying to reintroduce certain restrictions with minimal idea of how effective each would be, and always erred on the side of not effective enough. Which merely ensured they'd always have to step up and up all the way to the crude, damaging, painful, but ultimately effective lockdowns themselves.
Meanwhile all the evidence being collected on HEPA filters and UV air treatment methods (and the concomitant and very needed evidence to be collected on potential harms of each, and the costs of them if a big effort was made to scale up and put them in) was ignored.
And, in the meantime, those most opposed to lockdowns were insisting loudly that every possible level of restriction, such as tiers, or masking, was unnecessary and should be resisted, whilst elsewhere in the world, people like the Japanese were following that route and avoiding the hell we had to go through.
I am certain that had HEPA filters been put into schools everywhere (primary first, and then secondary) over the summer and autumn of 2020 (a massive task, but cheaper than, say, lockdowns) and in various other workplaces as possible, if FFP3 masks had been rolled out and ruthlessly promoted and supported, we'd have escaped that horrible winter lockdown.
The worst of it is that we still haven't done any of that, nearly five years later, and are as exposed as ever to the next bloody pandemic.
So, how much did you make on the betting?
They are a minority but they are there and are entitled to air their views
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50752-who-did-britons-want-to-win-the-2024-us-presidential-election
She’s such an unimpressive human being she couldn’t even be arsed to go and speak to her supporters on election night when she lost. She went home to bed.
I put a small wager on her, when she went out to 4/1 it was worth a punt so I put a few quid in that.
Kamala 226 electoral votes
It was the posts with the analysis why Trump could or would win that copped the abuse.
Even China hasn’t claimed only 5000 deaths for a long while.
There’s a good CDC paper on Chinese deaths that got to 1.4 million: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/29/10/23-0585_article
Resisters have to hide (in small numbers) in a big population if they're to survive at all, too many and they'll simply be butchered quickly en-mass, and the UK is too developed/populated for them to hide easily.
In Wales and Scotland, and the remoter parts of Northern England, I can belief bands would have had better success.
Presumably, as it was so obvious, you also bet on Trump and made a killing?