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

I really thought there'd be some sort of horror afterwards at what "we" let them do. More outrage that such inhumane behaviour was just accepted.

DH was admitted to hospital by ambulance and we didn't see him again for 3 months. During that time he was told, alone and by telephone that his cancer was terminal. He never met his oncologist because the doctor was shielding. He'd call me in the middle of the night crying in pain and I couldn't speak to anyone to find out what was going on, and because his death wasn't imminent, I wasn't allowed to visit.

He eventually came home to die, unrecogniable from the man who'd left and had 3 months where he wasn't allowed to see anyone, although by that point I took the view that anyone who was willing to visit was helping with care and therefore, it was allowed, but many people still felt they shouldn't.

In what world did "we" not only allow it to happen, but so many seemed to relish it.

We did that.

We were hugely cautious - DS1 has multiple medical vulnerabilities and I have 2 auto immune conditions that I knew about at the time and a further third that was diagnosed later.

I don't regret for a second the multiple precautions we took. It made me feel slightly more in control and slightly less fearful. Maybe some of it was OTT, but truth is, we will never know. I know people who died. I was scared.

Ps this wasn’t a thread. Just a response i made on a similar thread to this one. About covid craziness.

Oh god, really?

1 year after lockdowns when everyone, who wanted to be was vaccinated and Covid was really not a thing, I needed to go to the dr (nothing vaguely related to Covid) and a friend was insistent that i needed to do a Covid test as otherwise I would probably kill the dr and any other patients. She had been at a festival the night before and had no fears of killing anyone. I said that Covid caused more deaths through hospital treatments and appointments that were cancelled. She still insisted that ‘it is a simple test that will prevent you killing someone. She is an ex friend.

One of my neighbours used to bang on my door at clapping time.
Everyone was out with pots and pans, beeping car horns. Someone on my local FB group had a massive brass instrument they got out every Thursday.
I remember when it started.... NHS staff on my feed posting videos of the hospital car parks.. so proud to feel supported. About a year later, they were begging people to stop.
Performative nonsense.
I still see a few very faded posters in people's windows... thanking the NHS.

I will forever be bitter that my daughter missed her final fortnight of year 6 at school because 1 child tested positive in the class. At the same time England were in the euros football final and the crowds on the tv were huge. It was such a shame for the children

I think I would have been as enraged as you.

You have a great way of writing though.

Not me but I witness someone trying to argue that being a teacher was exactly the same as being a medic in terms of risk and their sacrifice to the public. In fact, she argued teachers were worse off than nurses because “nurses chose it”

They were fucking bonkers, along with Zebra lady!

"THOSE OF YOU SITTING ON A BENCH EATING CRISPS - YOU ARE THE PROBLEM."

Some charmer telling me that if my business couldn't survive for x number of months with no money coming in at all then it deserved to go under anyway. And I shouldn't begrudge it because people were DYING.

The pile on to the exhausted woman living in a flat with the autistic kid who wanted to just take him to the beach for a run around. It was truly disgusting.

The Awfully Clever pandemic and vaccine experts who told me I must be stupid for believing the Astra Zenecca researcher who was on the Today programme when they said that by Easter 2021 things would be back to relative normality because of the vaccine. Because as everyone knows, vaccines aren't designed to stop people getting ill. (That's funny because that's what we had always been taught about vaccines). It was pure gaslighting.

Fair enough.

Though I definitely remember plenty of talk of “variants” and mutations. We got lucky; I think, rather than it was always obvious we’d be fine.

And because of it people will be utterly impossible next time.

Remember NannyandJohn?

I remember it being discussed on a thread whether it was ok to strap your toddler into a buggy or high chair in front of the TV for a few hours while you did a work call in another room. I think a toddler had already drowned due to a parent being distracted wfh (though I can't remember the details) so this was viewed as potentially being a safer option.

One poor woman on here had to strap her toddler twins into their double buggy while she dealt with a highly sensitive client call (I think she was a social worker). The poor children cried their eyes out on and off for 90 mins.

The very people who were most pro lockdown told her they didn't know why she posted that because it was 'nothing to be proud of' 🤯

The clapping was the most stupid thing I've ever seen. People banging saucepans together on their doorsteps, miles away from any NHS worker or hospital? I lost it at one point as someone close to me was treated very very badly by the NHS (not to do with COVID) and shouted out 'Fuck the NHS!'

I can't believe I yelled it on my own doorstep while my neighbours clapped and looked at me in horror...

Weird times.

The app was mad. I never installed it.
I knew someone who was being constantly told to self isolate because the people at the bus stop outside his flat were testing positive.

The thing that stood out most for me was the number of doom-merchants proclaiming that this was 'The New Normal' and that we'd never again live in the kind of world that we had Pre Covid and everyone just had to Accept That.

The implication was definitely that we'd spend the rest of our lives not being able to fly anywhere, or amble in haphazard fashion around a supermarket, or have parties and so on.

Strange times (and, dare I say it, even stranger people.)

My DH caught the swine flu way back. He was travelling for work shaking a lot of hands and flying. He got ill on the long flight home. Noone else here had it. He was SO ill, for so long. It was a bit like covid, felt good for a while then ill again. I remember he tried to go to our local GP (through the back door) and they had their full hazmat suits on. And they had no proper tests and were very confused how to handle it.

We’d started stockpiling in January
so didn’t actually need much but did do the odd click and collect from Aldi

All of which we cleaned before putting away with watered down disinfectant / bleach type mix

We also didn’t touch our post for a while either as the postman could have been contaminated

Dh and I never got Covid so no long covid to worry about…… 🤓
Unfortunately the kids did from school though

I think a lot of people did wierd stuff during Covid, they just don’t admit it now 😉…

Ah mate, I'm so sorry x That's heartbreaking x sending a hug x

The maddest one I remember was a cafe worker who was in a minimum wage job with no savings, being told by another poster to take out a bank loan so she could quarantine at home for two weeks (with no income) as cafe worker had received an alert from the app that told people if they'd been in the vicinity of someone who had tested positive for covid.

Absolute hysteria when you look back on it all.

A 'next time' will be a totally different situation though.

Covid was fortuitous (in a very odd way) in that mortality was not very high for the healthy, working age population. And that was clear from the data from the very start, despite the scary news reporting. So it was reasonable enough to expect essential workers to get out and work to keep the country functioning.

But imagine a disease with a 20% chance of mortality. That's a totally different situation. People are not trotting out everyday to maintain your internet or deliver your shopping. So we'd be coping with societal breakdown on top of a pandemic.

Right! People seem to think it was just 2020..

My sister died in January 2022, and due to the stupid covid rules I missed seeing her as we could only visit one at a time by appointment and only one person per day. There was 7 of us who wanted to see her.

My appt was Friday 22nd January at 10am, my sister died at just gone midnight that day. And then, when we rushed to the hospital when being told she was taking her last breath they wouldn't let us through the door until we had scrubbed and put on masks etc and so missed her passing by 2 minutes. Me, and her children could have held her hands, instead she died alone.

Meanwhile, folk were lamenting the loss of furlough!

When all us preppers got our arses handed to us repeatedly for causing the cleared out shelves. The fact we had everything in, because we're yanno prepared for shit like that and rarely needed to go to the supermarket during COVID at all didn't register.