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

Yes, a friend living in France later told me their daily walks were restricted by law to half a kilometre from their homes.

I remember being in a supermarket at Easter and a woman shouted at someone else for picking up Easter eggs because they weren’t essential. But the woman had a trolley full of food so was obviously doing her weekly shop, so what was the problem adding some Easter eggs?

I remember posts on here calling for stricter lockdowns. I was like "have these people even seen the news reports from counties with strict lockdowns? How barbaric those lockdowns were. Forced evacuations too, abandoned pets left To starve. No way . The UK government may not have handles the pandemic well at all but we are a civilised country (except those idiots at number 10 with their parties)

Don't get me started on those minging cloth rags! Yuk.

Yes! You’d have threads that went: “I just fell down the stairs and landed on my shoulder, and now my shoulder really hurts” with responses like “have you tested for Covid? My cousin had shoulder pain when she had it” 😂

Exactly.

Everyone in these perfect 'other countries' was too worried about their own country and their own government's response to care about a damp little island in the North Sea.

That's what dh said. No just a probably minging normal one.

This actually did make me laugh out loud 🤣

Remember how if anyone had anything the response was "it must be covid". If you had a broken nail or a bruise from a horse treading on your foot there would be dome idiot insisting you needed to test because covid sometimes had that symptom or made bruising more likely or something.
I love to tell the tale of BIL who had his covid vaccine and within hours was in ICU fighting for his life to see if people immediately assume it was because of the vaccine or ask what happened. It's a useful idiot filter. The real reason was he had an accident doing something of Darwin Award level stupidity and nearly bled out but a scarey number of people jump straight in with assumptions.

I wouldn't join in the clapping. I would go shopping on a Thursday around teatime (when I was advised the queues were shorter), come home, shut the kitchen door behind me to muffle the sound which was about to start and get on with cooking. It always reminded me of some words attributed - probably falsely - to Shostakovich about the apparently swaggering and triumphant, but it seems ironically so, ending of his fifth symphony: 'It's as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying: "your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing". And you arise, shaken, and go shuffling off muttering: "our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing".'

If he’s wearing an N95 mask it might be.

@Sendcrisis2025 I'm so sorry you went through that.

I have two children who are disabled. One in particular has significant needs. I was called all sorts of hideous things for continuing to send my oldest child to school. I was told I'm a murderer and beyond selfish.

The reality was as a lone parent of two disabled children in a tiny two bed flat with no garden space, there was a very real risk we would not have made it through and that is exactly why schools kept the most vulnerable children in.

I didn't download the app for this reason and was told I was a monster 😀I was testing regularly for work, that apparently didn't matter....

@IcedPurple Your last point was how Boris Johnson was persuaded (by his own behavioural squad) to wear a mask, as he tried to resist this: he was shown a montage of world leaders, all wearing masks, then a picture of himself, not wearing one. “Look at all those civilised leaders in their masks!” his handlers said.

And that bloody Santa tracking app that showed Santa in a mask, and that Tesco ad that showed Santa waving a vaxpass. I’ve hardly shopped at Tesco since. I also complained about an advert showing children wearing masks while playing with toys, which had nothing to do with covid. There was no escape from the bloody mask moralising, and I still think it’s extremely questionable whether they were anything more than a placebo.

It was bemusing how many people thought the rest of the world had any fucks to spare for us.

I spent way too much time here back in the dark days of Covid.

A few of the nuttier posts include

• Suggesting that people be offered a 'financial incentive' for letting the police know if their neighbours had more than the 'permitted' number of guests over Christmas.
• Saying that you should load the car with 15 liters of milk and decant it into ice cubes to be individually defrosted and used for tea. Less 'selfish' than making multiple trips.
• Complaining about elderly people 'popping out' to the corner shop for the paper.
• The person who asked posters if it were OK to buy eye liner while waiting for her 'essential' prescription in Boots. The general consensus was that that was selfish behaviour.
• All the posts about how Britain was the 'laughing stock of the world' and everywhere else was full of civilised 'mask compliant' non selfish folks.

Dem were the days.

Does anyonelse remember an article about a tiger in a zoo in America that had covid (there was then lots of talk about could domestic cats transmitt covid), and the keepers said they were maintaining a social distance from said tiger. Covid or no covid i think keeping at least 2m away from a tiger is advisable

So many rules didn’t make sense. At one point in my home town tier shops were open and restaurants weren’t. But a neighbouring tier the restaurants were open.

i was allowed to go to the big indoor shopping centre in that tier but wasn’t allowed to eat. Made no sense to me at all that I could walk round in the same shops as people all day but not sit down for lunch for 40 mins. So we broke the rules and had lunch in Wagas 😁

Gordon Bennett, I have just read the above post and am really upset for the poster's son or daughter, it must have been awful for her or him. I'm pretty sure, had I been a child during lockdownk I'd have done pretty well no school work online and would have hated going to a cold classroom. Poor kid and far from alone.

I never once went out to clap, always forgot about it, have no idea if neighbours did as I generally sat at the back of the house in the evening. I'm appalled at the very idea of neighbours having sicj a vested interest, nosy lot.

my once happy go lucky, calm smiley primary aged child at the time struggled so badly during lockdown and online learning. Their school was great at teaching online and they kept a structured day as much as possible for all the children, but they just couldn’t cope.

After numerous emotional breakdowns during their break they were crying so badly and as I hugged them, they said I just want to kill myself. It was like someone had stabbed me. However after contacting the school about this, they made provisions to allow them to return to school with the key workers children and I cannot tell you how grateful I was as this helped so much for them to get back to school with some of their friends and their teachers.

now they are a teenager who moans about secondary school and would probably welcome a lockdown 🙄

I also remember my children refusing to come out of the house for the weekly clapping and said they would do it by the back door as they didn’t want to see our neighbours. My neighbours commented every week that they should come out to the front as that was the ‘rules’ of the clapping. Although I continued with it, it made me so uncomfortable as I always had to give a reason as to why I was on my own. Looking back, I should have stopped too but was an idiot

you couldn’t ever just pop to the shops either. If I forgot something on the shopping list I had to wait for a whole week and put it on the next list

And yet the Horizon post office scandal was well known about by Covid yet ppl still insist that computers and tech can never be wrong. My HA uses SAP and it has been a nightmare
Peoples unwavering belief that computers can never be wrong is sinister and dystopian

Some self-appointed community chief round here instructed the locals via Facebook they were to a join a rousing singalong after the weekly clap. I forget now, whether for the Queen, or Captain Tom.
Lyrics were provided for something deemed to be inspirational and uplifting.
He was told in no uncertain terms, to bog off by many, many people.

I stood on the doorstep and clapped once. Then decided it was all a load of bollocks and didn’t do it again. I didn’t care what my neighbours thought.

I never saw that . I did see one iconic shot of a man in his 60s lying dead in the street in the way to hospital in Wuhan. I think that was probably real although I don't know if it was a case of dying of Covid or with it. That said there are cardiovascular risks with covid.

Seizures as far as I know aren't a symptom of covid, so I'm not convinced about the jerking being genuine footage at all. Not of Covid anyway.