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

I was just thinking about it over the Easter weekend as I was tucking into my hot cross bun, remembering the thread where people buying bread and milk were ok but if they’d added hot cross buns to their basket then they were murderers. One poster kept saying how much it had genuinely upset her that people were still planning on buying hot cross buns - maybe even trying some different flavours!

I remember someone who wanted to know if she was being unreasonable to ask her neighbours to agree to a garden rota so that everyone wasn't outdoors at the same time because either side of the fences was less than 2m apart.

My friend lived in Doncaster and travelled to Sheffield to work (he was an essential worker) he got pulled over twice on the parkway by the police asking him where he was going

I posted that I was driving 3 miles to a quiet wood to walk the dog where I didn’t see people rather than do pavement walks in my busy village and people went crazy. No common sense that actually my plan meant seeing less people.

I remember a thread where OP was worried about "Covid bubbles" being blown into her garden from the kids next door.

We used to get this on our town fb page like the person posting was obviously the only person who had a proper valid reason for being out 🙄

I can understand that ,hospitals are cess pits of infection, but this woman had one for walks in the open air!

Don't be ashamed, it had good intentions in fairness! I didn't like the clapping and banging though and refused to take part, but I remember walking to the shop one day, forgetting it was 'that' time and as I walked towards some houses with people clapping an older man was walking past the end of their gate with his shopping, and the woman really aggressively screamed at him..

WELL FCKNG CLAP THEN!!!!! IT'S FOR THE NHS!!!!

He almost dropped his shopping in fright! Then he hurried off, I remember thinking at the time how crazy it had gotten.

Cucumber and beach might have been me under other user names, unless this was a common theme in covid times.

DC has ARFID and due to the anxiety of lockdown reached a stage where they'd only eat Birds Eye Chicken Dippers and cucumber slices, nothing else. Our online shop subbed the BE Dippers for Turkey Dinosaurs and they are very much Not The Same Thing, cucumber didn't turn up at all. I went to two different shops, got the nuggets in one (and bought three bags of them like a "selfish hoarder") then got cucumber in the other (bought two of those as well). Got slated for it on here.

Took DC to the beach one afternoon too. We live within walking distance of it, ten minute stroll away, but DC goes through phases of can't walk-wont walk so I drove there. We needed fresh air and I needed him to run before one or the other of us ended up doing a little murder. Got slated for that too. I was selfish, would infect people, if I crashed the car then I'd be using valuable NHS resources blah blah blah.

I remember people being rabid about the "ONE HOUR OF EXERCISE PER DAY!" even though it was never actually a rule. Where I live is rural, even now I can go out and walk for several hours and not see a single person but I was called selfish for doing this during lockdown.

I remember a lot of kick off too about people wanting to holiday in tourist areas and people who actually live there pointing out that public toilets, holiday parks/hotels, play parks, facilities, etc weren't actually open again and the infrastructure for tourism hasn't resumed yet so it would be hugely damaging to suddenly have a massive influx. Lots of people telling residents they were selfish for trying to hoard these lovely areas for themselves.

Referring to people as covidiots for being... normal.

I worked for the NHS at the time, and the main bus company put on a free bus just for NHS staff.
I used to catch the bus at 6.30am, and I was the only one on the bus for a couple of months, until the bus company realised this well meaning gesture wasn't working and stopped it.
I am not fond of peopling, and that 10 minute early morning bus journey was bliss!

The “I went out and saw other people out aren’t they awful” brigade were rife, here and on all the school whatsapp chats. My favourite was someone complaining that they’d seen lots of other people at the park, then when someone called them out they said they had to go out because “they’d caught a mouse in a trap at home and had to release it” which was so oddly bizarre and specific it must’ve been true but ultimately everyone obviously thought their reason for being outside was fine even if no one else’s was!

I worked in retail and we got reported to head office for sitting next to each other on break, photos and all. It obviously didn’t occur to whoever reported us that we were spending more time with colleagues than family and working in close proximity to each other. Also had people shout at us for not making customers follow the arrows on the shop floor, MN also liked said arrows and agreed we should enforce it but for what we got paid we couldn’t care less. Made a note to self to get into an industry that was furloughed for the next pandemic.

The woman who had an air filter unit attached to her toddlers pushchair.

The maddest thing I read on here was no one should have a BBQ as COVID affected the lungs and the fumes from said BBQ would kill someone.

I also remember starting a thread because my DP needed to post a parcel and our nearest PO was closed, but the one in town was open, so he tried to get a bus. We were both frazzled as my DM was dying from cancer in our front room, so when the bus driver interrogated DP as to whether his journey was "essential" enough - it was, it was a business parcel because I was trying to keep my shop afloat with online sales via eBay so I was somewhat obligated to send the damn thing in a timely manner - DP, after a prolonged debate with said driver, got a taxi instead because, in his words, when he rang me apoplectic, he wasn't going to be held responsible for his actions otherwise.

Boy, did I get a pasting for that one. It didn't happen, apparently. Of course it wasn't an essential journey. I don't think it went as far as LTB but it came close as I recall. It was very 😳

I had to do a Mumsnet hiatus when someone started arguing bread and milk weren’t essentials.

Various threads of "I've just been to the park and there were loads of people there. Why won't people stay home"

And stock responses to "I need to go out to do x y or z" of "the virus doesn't care".

The mass hysteria was understandable. It was a direct consequence of the government making a deeply cynical decision to deliberately weaponise fear in order to control the population.

While this may have worked at the time, the problem with lying to people is that they have long memories and if there is another, possibly worse, pandemic in our lifetimes they won’t swallow the lies next time.

To be fair it was very unclear in the first iteration rules whether driving / travelling to get to the yard to look after your horse or other animal was allowed, it very much wasn't one of the stated exceptions (nor was walking your dog either IIRC but you could usually cover that off in the 30 mins allowed exercise). I have a horse and all us owners on the yard were genuinely really concerned we were going to get pulled over by the police and made to explain ourselves for being outside our houses not for work or an emergency, we carried scrappy little handwritten letters from the yard owner around in our cars saying our horse's welfare meant we had to feed them etc (did we really think that would have cut it if we did encounter an over-zealous policeman 😂) but what about riding, was that a for fun leisure activity or necessary exercise, it seems mad now but looking back it really did feel like a minefield. As it happens I decided to give mine an extended field holiday and not ride until the summer of 20 (more so because I didn't want to fall and break a leg or a collar bone and clog up A&E and by lockdown 2 it became much clearer that so long as you were being sensible you weren't going to get into trouble but it did all feel very confusing and scary in those early days!

I can remember when people were posting about 'the virus in China' before it reached here and they were getting piled on because they were overreacting and scaremongering. The virus would never reach here. Stockpiling is ridiculous. I would never go along with a lockdown. Stop all these posts about something that will never happen.