Lockdowns could have been avoided entirely, Covid inquiry finds

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/11/20/lockdowns-could-have-been-avoided-entirely-covid-inquiry/

Posted by TheTelegraph

28 comments

  3. Yes and then you’d all of cried at being cut off from the world, the economy tanking overnight at an immediate severance of all air and boat traffic.

    Remember..
    Sweden, Japan, Brazil, Iceland, Taiwan, South Korea and others, didn’t have lockdowns.

    Remember the essential shopping… Ah that good essential shopping enjoyed at Garden Centres during that fantastic summer of 2020.. the queues were fucking enormous.

    People chose to go out.

  4. Well of course. All of the excess deaths could have been avoided too, but people are fucking stupid, and endlessly selfish. Downvote me all you want, I’ll never forgive those people for what happened during that time.

  5. I was a key worker. Everyday during covid I was in the office and also covering a colleague who was “shielding” and wouldn’t work from home.

    Even at the time, anyone under retirement age should have been at work, unless they were immune compromised.

    Problem is, should a nasty government make people work and they got ill from covid, no doubt some lawyers would have been suing the ass of the government or employer.

    Oddly enough, I got covid for the first time two months ago.

  6. Eat out to spread it about. Health people didnt know about ‘Eat Out’ until the day it was announced. As with immigration stats etc Government/ Civil Service is a complete shambles.

  8. On today’s episode of see how many people don’t bother to read the actual article and just bite on that rage bait heading…..

    IF stringent restrictions had been put in place by 16th March there MIGHT have been no need for it. So two key words there that aren’t in the rage bait heading here. There’s no hope of getting stringent controls here.

  9. Surely it was better to lockdown and keep people safe rather than keeping everywhere open for the virus to spread further. In 2020 no one knew what was gonna happen and cases/deaths were rising. Remember some business leaders and bosses only saw it as a cold, they didn’t give a monkeys about the health and wellbeing of their staff, all about money.

    I understand businesses suffered and even went under, but surely being alive is more important. Nowadays it’s a left vs right issue, with many on the right now being anti-vaxxers.

    In my opinion we should’ve locked down sooner, once we starting seeing cases in Italy/France.

  10. It’s really simple. They thought they were dealing with something far worse.

    – Everyone in government [saw those scenes in Bergamo](https://www.straitstimes.com/world/coronavirus-pandemic-could-spark-unrest-among-wests-urban-poor-red-cross) of patients on beds in the hallways.
    – Covid’s initial R rate was overestimated because it had been spreading in Europe much longer than was believed, we didn’t find out until the end of 2020 that it may have been [spreading from October or November 2019](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755).
    – Testing didn’t exist and what we could do wasn’t scalable.

    So yes, the government shit themselves because having a pandemic is fine, having a pandemic where it’s their fault wasn’t.

    – The pandemic response committee had been scrapped. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/06/13/boris-johnson-scrapped-cabinet-pandemic-committee-six-months/
    – Hospitals had been underfunded because of austerity.
    – The initial response was poor.

  11. I can guarantee if we didn’t do a lockdown back then the inquiry would have said we should’ve done a lockdown. Several countries had lockdowns yet only this country had (and still has) such an issue with it

  12. Am I the only one that remembers the fucking hospitals filling up? That was the whole point of the lockdown wasn’t it? To stop the spread and to avoid an absolute catastrophe of elderly and vulnerable people dying at home with no hope.

  13. I enjoyed lockdown… Fuck off.
    I got to WFH!👍🏼

  14. Lockdown was only ever pitched on the basis it would “flatten the curve” to protect the NHS, rather than prevent deaths from covid, so I’m not convinced about this saving 23000 lives claim.

  15. I was a (small) part of the coms team around covid (training manager for agents answering phones) and was sprouting this when I first crept up in Italy. Why we didn’t take immediate, decisive action is beyond me.

    From the coal face, the writing was on the wall well before it hit critical mass in the UK.

  16. As someone who was a paramedic in London throughout the pandemic, if we hadn’t gone into lockdown the London ambulance service was close to collapse

    Scotland and Wales were having to take London’s 999 calls as it was impossible to get through , calltakers literally having to listen to people gasping for breath and dying on the phone

    Call rate shot up from around 5500 calls a day to over 12,000 . 2-3 hour waits for life threatening calls . Fast response units in central London went from an average of attending about 4 x cardiac arrests a week to 3-4 a day . We had to get police and firefighters to drive ambulances

  17. Yeah, you think? Look at Florida, no lockdown, and the people of Florida didn’t all get whipped out. Also, Sweden didn’t lock down, and still Sweden didn’t get whipped out.

  18. I liked the lockdown and the measures taken purely because it made people more aware about their own hygiene. That whole period was the least I had been ill in a long time. Alas, once it was all lifted, folk were back to coughing in their hands and rubbing their eyes like nothing happened.

  19. I still understand why we were initially told it was okay to not wear a mask when we knew it was an airborne virus (besides the giant PPE fraud scandal). Any mask will act as a filter and slow down the spread.

  20. Lockdown was great, saved so much money not having to go into work

  21. The only way this could possibly have happened is if in January all flights into the UK were stopped and only UK residents were only allowed back into the country and they had to isolate in hotels for two weeks, if you left to go out of the UK when this was in place you were denied entry back into the UK.

  22. I was living in Vietnam at the time. I remember how fast Vietnam reacted and because of it, we lived relatively normally for like a year before the delta variant managed to get in and ripped through the country.

    Basically as soon as cases started appearing in Vietnam, they grounded all flights in and out of China and closed all schools and non-essential businesses for about a month. Shops wouldn’t let you in without a mask. Gathering outside was banned.

    After about a month, things started opening up again and life returned to normal. While the west was going to shit, I was going out partying with friends.

    I remember thinking the UK was crazy at the time. You had SE Asian countries, that had previous experience with SARS, reacting quickly and keeping it mostly under control and then the UK just went into denial. The PM going on TV boasting about shaking hands with COVID patients.

  24. Downvote me to hell and I can’t believe I’m about to kinda defend BJ, but it was an unprecedented time that no country in the world was prepared for this and could have ever even imagine it happening. Every government was running around like headless chickens trying to figure what to do. With that in mind I give them a little slack. 

  25. Because pressure from the press and politicians fearing press condemnation contributed greatly.

  26. Cunts couldn’t stop themselves going outside and hiking everywhere

  28. Bring me back to lockdown, at least then I would only see conspiracy nuts on the internet

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