Mumsnet during the beginning of the Pandemic - please tell me your stories of the maddest comments you saw

The absolute cult of personality that surrounded “Aunty Cindy” 🙄

@marmaladeandpeanutbutter many of us have bitter experience of elderly parents who were badly let down by their GPs during covid. My dad's hospital consultant wrote to his GP twice to say that die tp dad's complex co-morbidities combined with his deafness phone consults were inappropriate. The second time he wrote "I do not expect to see Mr X admitted again due to your failure to see him in person". Sorry if that offends you but some GPs were just shit.

@FedupofArsenalgame You are politically ignorant and bigoted, and know nothing about how the NHS managed during the pandemic. Your comment therefore doesn’t “wash” with me. I won’t engage with you further. I see it’s pointless.

Huh? There wasn't a lack of doctors, they were merely refusing to actually see patients in person. The same doctors are STILL at the surgery 5 years later so your comment doesn't wash I'm afraid

@FedupofArsenalgame Blane the government of the day, as they had refused to fund sufficient medical places at that time, despite the desperate need, and despite doctors being unable to recruit. And, for that matter, despite the increasing age profile of GPs making iit obvious there was a shortage.

A great example of how the easiest sacrifices are always the ones people expect others to make.

I do think there's more awareness of that now, but yeah, at the time some people had no insight into the fact that their selfishness was morally the same as that of others, just expressed through different policy preferences.

@OpalShaker
I think most of them were adjusting the rules to suit themselves, or the rules didn't adversely effect them in any way but they took the opportunity to be self-righteous assholes when it suited.

Agreed.
I had someone lay into me horribly, because I commented that we should have had a rule to allow people living alone to see someone else normally, like they did in the NZ lockdown. (This was weeks before the bubble rules were brought in). She was so viciously evil towards me, saying I obviously wanted vulnerable people like her to die, and that I must be a horrible person or I'd have had someone I could move in with for the lockdown. She was a newlywed living in marital bliss and I was someone losing my mind with the isolation. It struck me that she was a lefty type but didn't recognise her own privilege in the situation.

New Zealand and the quarantine. Spots ended up being sold on the black market and multiple people suggested we’d ’lost the right to just choose when to visit by moving away in the first place’. Someone called me a plague rat at one point, that was nice. For a good while that whole country lost its mind, they really believed that Covid could’ve been stopped if only ‘everyone did what New Zealand did’

I never did the stupid clapping, I stayed in which was of far more use to the people that had to be out and about.

Not on here but my BIL (twat) sent a massive ranting text because I had been out to the shops. Apparently I was definitely going to kill DH (medically vulnerable). He said they were only getting online shops and bleaching everything.
But then he forgot a few days later and was going on about people he had seen in the supermarket.

I still see people in masks and gloves. DH has to wear gloves in work and says it’s a real technique to not contaminate yourself with them so are pointless.

Sure, albeit I don't know that the numbers entirely complying even at the start were necessarily as high as one might think. It was just kept quiet. But what I mean is, that's not happening again unless there's a big sea change and it may be that we never get that sea change.

I don;t think that was lack of resistance.

I think it was a lot of people using a global pandemic to indulge their own shitty personalities and hateful attitudes.

I think most of them were adjusting the rules to suit themselves, or the rules didn't adversely effect them in any way but they took the opportunity to be self-righteous assholes when it suited.

There were a lot of posters who were furloughed in nice houses with nice partners and NT kids and personal gardens for whom it was as easy as 'just stay the f home' who were champing at the bit to report their elderly single neighbour for buying a newspaper every day or their friend/acquaintance who lived in a flat in that glorious weather of the first few weeks for taking her kids to the park more than once a day because 'rules!!'.

Another one for the clapping. It was in real life though. We had 3 kids under 4 and our very much residential area had taken to banging whatever metal stuff they could get their hands on as loud as they could at 8pm every evening. But it was when the actual klaxons came out that we politely suggested (on Facebook, we should have seen it coming) that perhaps this was a bit overkill and we're sure we're not the only parents of small children who weren't huge fans of insane amounts of noise at 8pm EVERY NIGHT. We got absolutely annihilated by people up in arms because they somehow thought that nurses and doctors would be safer and less exhausted if these kindly noise makers religiously upset small children.
What made it worse is that they all stopped doing it the next week. I never understood how the positive effects of klaxons on the NHS could be dropped so quickly by so many people simultaneously when they were all so committed to it.

There was one poor woman on here who had two children with a form of special needs. She was trying to get some extra help from school and one of the teachers (possibly the SENCO but not certain) said they wanted her to send in a video of them dressed in school uniform clapping for the NHS “to do their bit”. It was extremely weird.

I meant, the lack of resistance early on. Now, yes: people are still angry about Partygate. But early on, very few people resisted the government dictats and clearly absurd rules at all, and those who did were shot down in flames.

I was totally into the lockdowns. Very vulnerable DS1. i was terrified for him. I also have multiple medical conditions and I was truly scared.

But- if I were asked to do another lockdown because the government said? - This time... I think I might be putting up a middle finger.

I just don't see it. People don't trust the government or authorities enough. If any politician tried to get us to lock down now, the result would be tens of millions of people laughing. Unless it was for something with colossal mortality, in which case it would be apocalyptic. Either way, it would not involve millions of people locking down whilst others carried on working outside the home to keep the lights on.

Not to say that couldn't change in the future. It might, especially if the next pandemic is a long way away. But the status quo is, no fucking chance.

Same here. Dad ended up as an emergency admission to hospital because his GP wouldn't see him face to face and misdiagnosed a serious infection as osteoarthritis. Dad was really deaf and could hardly understand what the doctor was asking.

Well I can kind of get that as it was impossible to actually get a bloody appointment to see them. My mum has untreated heart failure as no GP would actually examine her. A quick phone call and sending SIX prescriptions of antibiotics to the chemist for a non existent chest infection doesn't cut the mustard

This is exactly what worries me: the almost complete lack of any public resistance, and that it could easily happen again, maybe about a completely different danger the government decides to terrify the public about.

Round here, people complaining about the unavailability of doctors, when there were doctors and they were working absolutely flat out.

Exactly they’re all a bit quiet after their self righteousness. It goes to show most people's just go along with whatever government propaganda is feed to them. I worked illegally during lockdown, went to the shops daily and didn’t get the vaccine, neither did my son. We didn’t get Covid but we didn’t test. I never even wore a mask and got one of those sunflower lanyards. I think most people would’ve been absolutely fine and we didn’t need this massive and expensive over reaction.

I think people need to be told what to do by either a government or religion. They like it. It keeps the masses in line. The government demonstrated this perfectly. If the same happened again the same people would fall for the same propaganda.

We were met with barrage after barrage of poor behaviour which meant each episode got quickly forgotten as we moved onto the next.
it’s the same as trump at the moment.

I recall that The Barnard Castle Affair led to some hilarious reviews on TripAdvisor. Along the lines of people driving 30 miles then couldn't see it. They had to stop reviews I think, but it brought much needed light relief to a situation where DC and those supporting him behaved despicably.

While not going as far as the attacking MPs homes, I do think we should have been visibly angrier about Barnard Castle, Partygate, the fear propaganda, and the government deliberately frightening and gaslighting the public into accepting months and months of lockdowns and school closures, and the monumental damage that went with them, which they are now trying to pretend didn’t happen.