UK Covid death toll

[baggy1]

Have we even lockdown properly? When the arguments on here were raging about going back to normal I was wondering if I was living in the same country.

Before the poop has hit the fan again we allowed;

most shops to be open 
pubs to be open through the summer 
schools open since September with no testing  
Uni’s open 
Colleges open 

I completely understand the damage lockdowns do to the lives of people but because we seem reluctant to really lockdown down say for a month or two at critical times we seem to have fudged our approach and it’s left us with one of the worst hit economies in the Western world and one of the highest death rates in the world.

Basicly all that's happened is the schools have shut, makes me laugh when he says must stay at home only go to work if can't work from home well fugg me only a very small percentage of the workforce can work from home the rest of us still  have to travel to work there by potentially spreading the virus, sorry but until they curb the mass  movement of the populace the infection rate will not drop significantly should have been a lockdown like the summer or maybe harsher.

It's impossible for me to WFH, and I'm classed as an essential worker so I'll still be travelling, but I get your point. I'll be interested to see how many people are on the road tomorrow.

Yep I'm a key worker too I travel from wednesbury to Coventry eveyday to work and the traffic isn't far off pre covid levels most days along the M6 and A45.

Its a tough decision to tell companies to shut down. People's livelihood is at risk. Which is something that could have a far longer impact than what covid could.

The problem is that we haven't managed the spread as it has gone on and waiting until the hospitals are full have meant we will be locked down for longer. 

Until we have a vaccine in place we need to keep the numbers down as best we can and that will involve stopping transmission somehow, test and trace has failed massively which only leaves lockdown. If we'd have locked down in Sept / Oct the the rise started happening then we would have had two benefits - we would have kept the numbers lower therefore less people to spread it around leading to a lower long term figure, and secondly we might have been able to stop this new variant before it got going.

The government have failed massively because they got stuck between the scientists asking for a lockdown / firebreak (call it what you will) and the libertarians saying lockdowns are an affront to their freedoms, so they tried to go half way and failed on both counts. They needed to choose a side early and stick with it and the consequences. A lockdown in Oct could have kept the numbers in hospital down to 10k, we now need to lockdown for 6-8 weeks just to get back to 10k as we go into the worst period for deaths each year.