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Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom. This time of year will always remind me of those eerie first couple of weeks of lockdown. The cherry blossom trees, in all their Spring glory, standing lonely in the usually heaving central park at lunch time. Driving down the main motorway in and out of my city and not seeing a single other car at 5pm rush-hour on a weekday. The ease which unfounded terror was spread through the population during those weeks was eye-opening. The unquestioning acquiescence of all my fellow citizens made me realise for the first time just how subject to the whims of authority this society was and just how fragile and precious was my own freedom.
For the first couple of weeks, as the virus’s spread through Europe was meticulously tracked and broadcast, as carefully curated images of overwhelmed hospitals and rows of coffins were plastered across our screens, although I was already vehemently arguing against any imposed restrictions, I still retained some sympathy for the scared and frightened masses. But as the early data coming out of Italy and other places started to emerge and was so evidently at odds with the fearmongering propaganda all around me, my sympathy quickly gave way first to bewilderment and then slowly to anger.
As The Science™ took deeper hold and lockdown for two weeks to flatten the curve turned into lockdown for the summer turned into second lockdown turned into third lockdown and still the people clamoured for more restrictions and railed angrily against even the mildest suggestion that maybe we should ease up on the tyranny. Any moment now, I thought, surely any moment now the people will break and rise up against this imprisonment. All their lives they’ve been told that they live in a free democracy and now they’re happy to be essentially locked inside their homes, told they can’t visit friends and family, told they can’t touch or hug their family members, even if they’re dying, while with their own eyes they should be able to see that the virus for which all this suffering is supposed to be in honour of is so much less potent than they were told, while with their own eyes they should be able to see the hypocrisy of being ordered that grandparents are not to hold or even visit their new-born grandchildren while thousands marched shoulder to shoulder in the streets in celebration protest of the death of a criminal in a land 4,000 miles away. But no, the people never rose up. As Orwell, who understood the crowd better than any, once observed “Nowadays there is no mob, only a flock” and so it proved as my cowed peers meekly submitted to every curtailment of their freedom.
I will always remember lying in an empty field, reading a book in the warm sunshine and being buzzed by a police helicopter for being outdoors while not undertaking my mandated single-allotted daily exercise. I will always remember being told by the police to move on while sat in the deserted central park. I will always remember the multiple other times I was interrogated by the police for not cowering at home like a good citizen. I will always remember the fear in the eyes of my brother’s girlfriend as she shied away from anybody who got within two metres of her. I will always remember the depths of persuasion I had to employ to convince two of my friends to come and spend a night in the countryside with me during summer 2020, and the lies they had to tell their mothers to even be allowed out (and back in) their homes. I will always remember my work colleague who got suspended for hugging another colleague. I will always remember being kept apart from my partner in a foreign country due to closed borders. I will always remember being told by my own parents that I was not welcome in their house.
Today, the 23rd of March, marks six years since Boris Johnson implemented the first Covid Lockdown in the United Kingdom and life has returned to normal. The traffic is heavy and the parks are busy again. The Black Mirror-esque dystopian future that we got a horrifying glimpse of has faded away. Even the predictable economic and public-health consequences of lockdown have somewhat smoothed out. Covid came up in conversation the other day and my dad glibly remarked, “Covid? That’s ancient history now!” The world has moved on but, for me, the memory of Covid lockdowns still dominates my outlook. There is still a deep rage within me at the brutal illustration of the state’s power to strip away my freedom, cheered on wholeheartedly by the electorate. There is still a disbelieving resentment at how readily the populace succumbed to government control and willingly followed directives that just six months previous they would have loudly decried as inhumane. The hypocrisy of lockdown policies was responsible for a violent swing in my own politics, from casual left-wing socialist to hard libertarian, but most of all the lockdowns destroyed my faith in my fellow humans. The stark demonstration of just how easily manufactured-fear convinced the country to follow ridiculous commands replaced my underlying faith & trust in humanity with a smouldering disdain. The betrayal of even my own family, as they chose to follow the orders of tyrants and closed the door on their own child, drove a dagger into my heart.
I remember the lockdowns and I’m still angry.
Are you incapable of seeing the other perspective? 20 to 36 million people died of COVID. I remember hospitals and the healthcare system being utterly overwhelmed in the early days of the pandemic. The vast majority of the world’s governments established lockdowns because something had to be done, we didn’t have vaccines or effective antivirals, and there was a real fear of running out of ventilators.
Most people accepted the fact that staying at home was a very small sacrifice compared to all the lives that could be saved, directly or indirectly. Quarantine has been an effective measure to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks for nearly a thousand years (and before modern medicine, the only available tool). Covid era lockdowns are nothing compared to historical ones, when you could be summarily executed for crossing the wrong boundary. And now you have the ability to work, to talk to all your friends and family across the world, and endless entertainment.
Wow. Are you incapable of just admitting you were wrong and apologize?
It is honestly incredible how wrong so many you were and how much damage it caused. And instead of any of you ever admitting you were wrong, you just make up nonsense as to why, if you think about it, you weren't really wrong and also even if you were it's totally understandable and also it was probably inevitable anyway and it's not as bad as burning down entire towns with all the people in it in 1348 so stop being a baby.
Not a single thing in this comment is accurate. No, 36 million people didn't die from COVID and if you seriously believe that do you think without the totalitarian response it would have been worse? The diagnosis and testing and classification were knowingly bad and they did it because it gave them horrendously exaggerated numbers which they wanted. And no, hospitals were not overwhelmed in the early days. Hospital admissions and emergency room admissions were DOWN. World governments had plans for this exact event which they tossed out the window to launch on worldwide experiments and they all cowardly crowded along since being wrong when everyone is wrong is the least dangerous path. Lockdowns and quarantines are not the same thing. Ventilators were killing people and having fewer of them requiring judicious use would have been far better. We had effective treatments early on and they were suppressed for reasons we're all left to speculate about. The covid injections cause more harm than it abates. The lockdowns didn't stop after 2 weeks to flatten the curve, they continued long after even the propaganda couldn't convincingly lie about it.
Never take complaints or arguments from covid zealots about human rights or laws seriously because they've already demonstrated the very low bar at which they will toss all that out the window. And they will do it again.
This comment reminds me of why arguments about lockdowns became so difficult, because the public forum was so often being poisoned with nonsense.
I think lockdowns are the greatest crime inflicted upon modern humanity outside of war. I strongly believe that those who supported and facilitated them should be at the very least imprisoned, if not far worse.
Nonetheless, I would never make a ridiculous claim to support my position like admissions being down, or ventilators killing more people, or vaccines being worse than the disease. Covid obviously was a pandemic. It, like the similar pandemics of the 50s and 60s, had a fatality rate of 0.1 - 0.3, and made a huge number of people very ill.
Lockdowns were a disaster not because Covid was all fake, but because the costs vastly outweighed the benefits. You don't need to lie or believe ridiculous things to understand that.
However, as soon as you start arguing about lockdowns, you are immediately lumped in with the 5G nutters, the anti-vaxxers, the china hoaxers, and so on. It was incredibly difficult to talk about it with normal people because, no matter how correct you are, being supported by masses of conspiracy nuts is an extremely difficult barrier to overcome.
This is pretty close to COVID being fake. The costs were deliberately overblown (faked) in order to justify the intervention. It's manufacturing consent, and it's clear if you have eyes to see.
This is also deliberate as part of the same manufacturing of consent. This is how the demos is led around. This is how you condition people to hate, by providing approved targets and encouraging marginalization.
I suppose I understand this, but I don't care, and I can't see how anyone with any integrity can care so much about the opinions of others. The weirdos were right, and that made the respectable people uncomfortable. That's what integrity means, that's what it's for. If your rubric stops at "what other people will think" then I don't want you making decisions of any importance.
Lockdowns came in, and persisted, because ultimately the public in most countries were in favour of them.
If you want to stop them next time, then you need to get the average person on side - and for the average person, being associated with "5G causes cancer" is enough for an instant dismissal. Even today, you won't find that many people who really understand how incredibly damaging lockdowns were. You can't win a political argument just by being right
You have it backwards. People were in favor of lockdowns, because they came in and persisted.
Also on the opposing side - there's a lot more people thinking 5G causes cancer then there was before thr pandemic, because the establishment couldn't admit they were wrong. Look at any elite get-together, they've been crying about "regaining ze trust" for years now.
You're not stopping the crazies, you're literally paving the way for publically funded crystal healing.
Maybe. Status quo is a powerful thing. But at the same time, now that lockdowns have been used, it's always going to be a tool people think about whenever there is some crisis. In the UK, for example, there has been a small outbreak of meningitis cases at a University. It's not remotely hard to find people calling for lockdowns. And polling exposed a huge chunk of the population who love being petty tyrants, even today you'll find something like 25% support for closing nightclubs forever.
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