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

I was furloughed & DH was working & I mentioned that he used his daily walk to go & buy his newspaper. Obviously a daily newspaper is not essential & not worth killing people for.

And I remember all the arguments about masks. I realise that some people have been sexually assaulted & strangled & I'm not trying to downplay that. But all of these people seem to have been on Mumsnet using that trauma as a reason not to wear a mask.

@PyongyangKipperbang blimey - sounds like they needed my majestic delivery more than I did -!! I’m a person who likes my space so even though it’s only me and H at home these days I felt really claustrophobic in a 24/7 situation - I’m sure I’m not the only one who food shopped possibly a bit more than strictly necessary - I think you have to do what keeps you sane in these kinds of situations

DH and his Army colleagues found it hilarious that people thought they had enough soldiers to manage this! Especially with all the other stuff the government kept giving them to do...

Not a thread.. but I got called “pompous” by someone when I said she really shouldn’t be having parties!!!!! I also got told to wear a mask in a garden centre by security (this was after lockdown etc). His face when I told him I couldn’t wear one due to a previous SA that involved a hand over my mouth as it caused severe flashbacks etc. He looked so shocked and he pushed my trolley into the farm shop part and gave me flowers as I left!!!!!

There was a lot of utter batshit madness, and yet I am glad people took it seriously. The threat was unknown, and at the beginning there was no vaccine. I got covid in the first wave, and was very ill. It felt like drowning. Here we are in 2025, and I still cannot breathe properly, and have no idea if my lungs will ever recover.

I recall management in my NHS hospital telling us off for sitting outside, on our breaks, closer than 2m to each other, in a small area, because of ‘how it looked’. Well, guess what, 20 mins later, there’d be 8 of us in a 7x3m2 room for 12 hours. I got sainted and slammed on here for that!

They may very well be. I agree that there's no space now for a pandemic that both scares people enough to voluntarily restrict their movements but doesn't scare them enough to mean society might stop running properly. And at least some of this is because of the policy decisions during covid, plus also Partygate.

However, with something as bad as a 10% mortality rate with under 10s, assuming also fairly transmissible, we'd be completely buggered regardless. There might not even be rules in that situation, much less the infrastructure to educate people about them. And that would be true even if we'd never had covid 19. I actually don't even worry about this myself. It's in asteroid hitting Earth territory. Just fuck all that could be done.

So I agree with you we were actually pretty lucky. There's no guarantee any future pandemic would hit the Goldilocks spot, or that we could rely on so many of the basic blocks of society to continue functioning.

The combo of whimpering cowardice and rank aggression in the same poster happened a lot.

The bizarre lie that people in care homes matter more than everyone else.

Never knew if her posts were serious.. they'd start off okayish bit bonkers then would on about getting the army in so people wouldn't leave their houses 🤣 and would do food drop offs once a week or something. Then came bit hmm maybe this is a wind up haha.

I don't think there was much wrong with closing public playgrounds for a bit until more was known about COVID. Public playgrounds are total germ fests. Kids aren't known for being careful about hygiene in shared spaces, they wipe their snot and saliva on their hands and then touch the play equipment. And the next kid comes along and puts their hand in the snot, then sticks their finger up their own nose a few minutes later. They line up to use the slide and climbing frame and cough into each other's faces. There'll always be an element of parents who would let their obviously sick child visit a playground, who wouldn't make sure they stood a few steps away from other kids, and who wouldn't bother anti bac'ing or washing their hands when they got home.

Playground equipment doesn't get cleaned. And kids come from all over the place to use the same playground in some city parks so yes, viruses which survive on surfaces are going to spread.

It was a shame that they were closed for a while but it wasn't hysterical to have shut them. They're not the same as playgrounds in a nursery where kids were in bubbles, and staff could clean the equipment regularly.

What I still find mind-boggling was the sheer lack of common sense applied to things. Someone upthread listed a load of things which they thought were batshit but amongst the genuinely batshit ones were a couple of things which were just sensible. eg it IS quite a good idea to minimise contact with other members of the family if you have ANY infectious disease, IF YOU CAN and the ill person is happy about that. If you don't have a spare room or sofa bed etc then there's not much you can do. It's generally unpleasant to share a bed with a sick partner anyway as they're often awake a lot sweating and coughing and it's disruptive to the other person's sleep.

Don’t know about dropping dead but a lot of research about long Covid suggested that ultra fit people could be more badly affected. There were marathon runners and professional sports people who suffered badly from it.
Anecdotally at our trust one of our OH docs was fascinated that many of the folk on long term sick with long Covid were very fit prior.
Hoped it wasn’t going to be that kind of thread tbh.

So many posters on here were adamant they'd had it even before the original patient zero, it was like the demographic of users was some kind of weird statistical anomaly

Under a different name I was berated for daring to question the daft people washing thier shopping, stripping off in their garages after going out and accusing people breathing on them of spreading COVID

I remember one thread about touching gates whilst on walks that was so crazy it actually made me think twice about whether I was wrong 😁

@StartingAgainFGS it’s interesting you say that - one of our friends was on tour with their band and he was struck down at sound check around 20th Feb - couldn’t breathe etc - hadn’t been ill, wasn’t asthmatic but obviously had been playing in indoor venues for a few weeks most days. He was hospitalised for 3 weeks and the doctors were completely baffled , on reflection there was a very good chance it was an early case of Covid

I took my DCs for porridge in the park every Friday morning. Not a soul around but I hadn't read you weren't allowed to sit down and eat.
I did read the "sitting on a bench to eat" threads and ignored them, but I only realised it had been the regulations when they were reintroduced.

I will now admit I said fuck it to the rules May 2020. Dad (93, deaf and nearly blind with a host of different conditions) had been admitted to hospital in April after collapsing with an infection that was more likely to kill him than covid because his GP wouldn't give him a face to face appointment and misdiagnosed him over the phone. He was in hospital for 3 weeks with no visitors and mum's alzheimer's meant she couldn't understand why she couldn't visit her husband who had a less than 50% chance of surviving. I went up when he came home and he hugged me so tight and sobbed that he thought he'd never see me again and I thought bugger covid I'm coming round. Right decision, he was in and out of hospital several times always with no visitors and died at the beginning of 2022. Mum couldn't have coped without regular visits.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/3883549-I-have-found-the-solution-to-lockdown

The famous (infamous?!) espresso martini thread. It ran for days....

The statistics speak for themselves. I assume you know fuck all about statistics.

Well alcohol is. In a population of millions, there'll be thousands who are chemically dependent on alcohol to the extent that forced, sudden detox is dangerous. And the last thing anyone needed was a load of them turning up fitting to urgent care.

But so are kid's shoes!

Someone on here (not N&J) claimed that 12 teachers in one school died from it. 🙄

I posted in a thread, one that was trying to argue against tight restrictions, an example that my neighbour who had a newborn (who screamed ALL night, we were in a detached house they were about 20 feet away and could still hear it with windows shut, and I mean all night) was suffering from PND and couldn’t get any scrap of support from GP, health visitor or midwife. If it wasn’t for the fact her mum came around every day to take the baby for a few hours and give neighbour a break from the screaming, it would probably be disastrous with, at best, my neighbour having a complete nervous breakdown.

I was told to call the police. I said I never would I’m not that type of person and this was an exceptional case. I was called a cunt for “enabling deaths”

My neighbour still talks about how her mum basically saved her life that summer and suffers from PTSD because of lockdown. I mean was it REALLY worth people like my neighbour and her baby being collateral damage?

Who were probably marathon runners. It was always the previously, mega healthy marathon runners dropping dead in the streets.