Covid isn’t over.

Those getting COVID, this time, only have short term effects. Usually good after about three days.

I swear to God, if there'll be another lockdown I'll give up on humanity.

Given the choice between another lockdown or a repeat of last time when they delayed and pretended it would be fine rather than make the tough but correct decision, I'll take another lockdown please. 

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

To this day the experts are debating whether lockdowns were worth the social and economic cost. Remember poverty also kills people and we may be on the verge of extremely difficult economic times. The cost in terms of life years may yet prove to be greater from lockdown. Especially if you look at life years as opposed to lives, where life years takes into account the number of years left someone probably had to live when they died of covid / poverty.

you see Covid primarily killed the old, but poverty from lockdown will primarily kill the young who other wise would have long lives ahead of them.

yes

Up here in Scotland there is an independent public inquiry into Scotland's response to, and the impact of, the COVID-19 pandemic, and to learn lessons for the future.

The Inquiry has a web page asking Scots to share their own experience of the pandemic.

https://lbh.covid19inquiry.scot/embeds/projects/22570/survey-tools/24638

Is there a similar request for people to share their own experience of the pandemic in England?

My experience was totally different I think what  made me feel unsafe was being indoors all the time and feeling increasingly disconnected from the world around me. I’ve had Covid several times. Once before being vaccinated and a couple of times after. I was asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic every time. statistically Covid was a much much greater risk to the immunocompromised and the elderly. statistically if you look at the death rates those under 40 in good health had very little to worry about in spite of the horror stories of relatively young men dying in ICU it wasn’t born out by the statistics.

I was well aware of this even before the lockdown and so I was always more worried by the lockdown than The illness.

I just don't agree that lockdown is even the biggest factor in a lot of those things. Poverty including homelessness and people relying on food banks was increasing for years before covid. The death of the high street and smaller businesses was also an ongoing trend before. I'm not saying covid didn't make things worse, but if the pandemic never happened there would still be shocking levels of poverty. It's very difficult to pinpoint how much different things are responsible because covid came 10 years into an atrocious government and around the same time as the self-inflicted gunshot wound of brexit. 

And a lot of the damage was made much worse by the repeated half measures. If we weren't pulling nonsense like putting off a lockdown under the delusion that we can just ignore a pandemic and have a normal Christmas, we would've been able to get past the worst and start recovering much faster. 

Personally, the massive problems I had in that period were much more due to having to live in a place and time where nothing felt safe for a very long time. An effectively handled pandemic strategy (including lockdowns when advised by the scientific advisors) would've allowed us to get past that faster with fewer lives lost, less suffering and less of our health service buckling under the strain. 

There’s a really big difference between dropping  GDP and poverty, a real poverty that affects the poorest of the poor. The poverty that makes people homeless. The poverty that makes people worry about whether or not they can turn the gas on or afford to visit the dentist. The property that has people running back-and-forth from the benefits office worrying about being sanctioned till they are sick with stress. 

A lot of people lost their jobs in the lockdown because the business as they worked for had to close. A lot of those businesses never came back. After the lockdown lifted there was a big surge as the service industry recovered but it never recovered to previous levels. Go up and down your High Street in your find empty Cafes, Closed cinemas, shut up little shop units. Places that used to be open before lockdown. Lockdown may not have been the only factor with online shopping and Netflix pushing The decline of the High Street but it’s certainly accelerated the process significantly.

fewer jobs for unskilled labourers hits the poor square and hard much more than the middle classes.

A lot of expansion in the service sector has been in supermarkets, The only things allowed to stay open during Lockdown, and I would argue in many ways stacking shelves  is probably even worse than waiting tables.

then there is the mental health issues. The social poverty if you will. for me personally lockdown cost me a lot of my support networks. people decided to cut me loose because I was too stressed or for whatever reason they may have had in their heads; maybe because they were too stressed. and I found after Covid I’d lost a lot of friends. i’m sure a lot of people had similar experiences and guess what those people are now working without the same emotional and social support networks they used to have; guess what that’s going to lead to; more mental health issues more physical health issues because of the mental health issues, it will shorten lifespan and health span. And again it’s those who already had tenuous social network that will be most badly affected.

people who left lock down with smaller but still reasonably sized social networks will have  found it a lot easier to build them back up again than people who already had very small social networks and then had none after lockdown.

and if you have mental health issues you are at higher risk of getting involved in substance abuse, becoming alienate it from your family, experiencing a breakdown of personal relationships and marriages, things that can lead to becoming financially hard up or even homeless.

it’s a cursed negative feedback loop where everything about lockdown feeds into tends to exacerbate and make worse  all of the other things. which is why for some people lockdown will have knocked them into this kind of cyclic issue where they have problems that cause more problems that caused more problems that aren’t going away even though lockdown ended a long time ago because they’re caught in a negative cycle that’s feeding itself now.

you mark my words in 30 years time will be looking back and listening to the stories of homeless old drug addicts or inmates of mental institutions and hearing about how lockdown was the point at which their lives got derailed.

The only question is how many and will it outweigh the number of lives and the number of years of life saved by the lockdown itself.

There’s a really big difference between dropping  GDP and poverty, a real poverty that affects the poorest of the poor. The poverty that makes people homeless. The poverty that makes people worry about whether or not they can turn the gas on or afford to visit the dentist. The property that has people running back-and-forth from the benefits office worrying about being sanctioned till they are sick with stress. 

A lot of people lost their jobs in the lockdown because the business as they worked for had to close. A lot of those businesses never came back. After the lockdown lifted there was a big surge as the service industry recovered but it never recovered to previous levels. Go up and down your High Street in your find empty Cafes, Closed cinemas, shut up little shop units. Places that used to be open before lockdown. Lockdown may not have been the only factor with online shopping and Netflix pushing The decline of the High Street but it’s certainly accelerated the process significantly.

fewer jobs for unskilled labourers hits the poor square and hard much more than the middle classes.

A lot of expansion in the service sector has been in supermarkets, The only things allowed to stay open during Lockdown, and I would argue in many ways stacking shelves  is probably even worse than waiting tables.

then there is the mental health issues. The social poverty if you will. for me personally lockdown cost me a lot of my support networks. people decided to cut me loose because I was too stressed or for whatever reason they may have had in their heads; maybe because they were too stressed. and I found after Covid I’d lost a lot of friends. i’m sure a lot of people had similar experiences and guess what those people are now working without the same emotional and social support networks they used to have; guess what that’s going to lead to; more mental health issues more physical health issues because of the mental health issues, it will shorten lifespan and health span. And again it’s those who already had tenuous social network that will be most badly affected.

people who left lock down with smaller but still reasonably sized social networks will have  found it a lot easier to build them back up again than people who already had very small social networks and then had none after lockdown.

and if you have mental health issues you are at higher risk of getting involved in substance abuse, becoming alienate it from your family, experiencing a breakdown of personal relationships and marriages, things that can lead to becoming financially hard up or even homeless.

it’s a cursed negative feedback loop where everything about lockdown feeds into tends to exacerbate and make worse  all of the other things. which is why for some people lockdown will have knocked them into this kind of cyclic issue where they have problems that cause more problems that caused more problems that aren’t going away even though lockdown ended a long time ago because they’re caught in a negative cycle that’s feeding itself now.

you mark my words in 30 years time will be looking back and listening to the stories of homeless old drug addicts or inmates of mental institutions and hearing about how lockdown was the point at which their lives got derailed.

The only question is how many and will it outweigh the number of lives and the number of years of life saved by the lockdown itself.

yes

Up here in Scotland there is an independent public inquiry into Scotland's response to, and the impact of, the COVID-19 pandemic, and to learn lessons for the future.

The Inquiry has a web page asking Scots to share their own experience of the pandemic.

https://lbh.covid19inquiry.scot/embeds/projects/22570/survey-tools/24638

Is there a similar request for people to share their own experience of the pandemic in England?

My experience was totally different I think what  made me feel unsafe was being indoors all the time and feeling increasingly disconnected from the world around me. I’ve had Covid several times. Once before being vaccinated and a couple of times after. I was asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic every time. statistically Covid was a much much greater risk to the immunocompromised and the elderly. statistically if you look at the death rates those under 40 in good health had very little to worry about in spite of the horror stories of relatively young men dying in ICU it wasn’t born out by the statistics.

I was well aware of this even before the lockdown and so I was always more worried by the lockdown than The illness.

I just don't agree that lockdown is even the biggest factor in a lot of those things. Poverty including homelessness and people relying on food banks was increasing for years before covid. The death of the high street and smaller businesses was also an ongoing trend before. I'm not saying covid didn't make things worse, but if the pandemic never happened there would still be shocking levels of poverty. It's very difficult to pinpoint how much different things are responsible because covid came 10 years into an atrocious government and around the same time as the self-inflicted gunshot wound of brexit. 

And a lot of the damage was made much worse by the repeated half measures. If we weren't pulling nonsense like putting off a lockdown under the delusion that we can just ignore a pandemic and have a normal Christmas, we would've been able to get past the worst and start recovering much faster. 

Personally, the massive problems I had in that period were much more due to having to live in a place and time where nothing felt safe for a very long time. An effectively handled pandemic strategy (including lockdowns when advised by the scientific advisors) would've allowed us to get past that faster with fewer lives lost, less suffering and less of our health service buckling under the strain.