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

Don't regret starting this! We need threads like this, because we must never forget the insane regime which the government foisted upon us, which made people lose their minds; so that next time the idea of lockdown is floated, we can all scream NO NO NO!!!! If we are not careful, the horror of lockdown will be lost in a rhetoric "actually, it wasn't that bad", which is not true at all.

Well surgeons and NHS workers are another good reason why the only a few minutes in a shop was total nonsense. But yes, there was a lot of invocation of NHS workers to justify stupid takes and, as this thread has shown, that phenomenon is still not over.

So is our Savers. Its fucking awful

You would have people counter with 'oh but surgeons wear a mask for hours' etc.
Surgeons don't move around much, and are in air conditioned theatres. They are not walking around The Range in the peak of summer (my local Range is a fucking sweatbox in the summer).

I bet they are the same posters who are now moaning about obesity

I had relatives working for the NHS too, and not even they would have agreed with some of the nonsense rule-following that has been posted about here; the siblings who couldn’t be together for a school photo for example, despite living in the same house 🙄

It wasn’t the fact that there were rules to try and keep the virus from spreading that we’re retrospectively complaining about, it’s how some of them were either completely inconsistent, or rigidly adhered to with no common sense. That’s what I remember mostly about the anti-dementor threads; that they were a safe place to discuss the questionable logic without being accused of wanting granny dead.

I was very “good” throughout the whole thing. I always wore a mask, followed one way systems, got myself and the children tested if anyone started coughing, kept bored and miserable young kids confined to our 2 bedroom flat for 10 days if a school bubble burst, and knackered my back trying to carry home a week’s worth of groceries. But on the day the pubs opened (July 4th I think?) we walked past a heaving mass of drunk people crowding the pavement outside a bar and one delightful chap pissing against the window of the cafe next door, only to reach the small playground down the street and find the gates still padlocked and the swings chained up, I definitely wondered why the fuck we were all bothering.

The privilege was off the scale!

See also, telling people they only needed to wear a mask for a short time in a shop and it's not that hard. Clearly giving no thought whatsoever to the possibility that a person who actually works in a shop might be on MN.

That is just a choice behaviour. People can and are arseholes at times. There isn't anything making that happen apart from their own free will.

Oh yes, with ominous warnings about what was to come. Lots of "you will see soon enough" claptrap. None of it happened

Crazy and funny - there was an excellent one from a poster advising everyone of a detailed technique she’d developed for using 4 disposable latex gloves to go into the supermarket without touching anything. There was an intricate protocol for disposing of each on at certain stages in the process and using a clean one to take a ‘dirty’ one off.

Crazy, but not remotely funny - the threads blaming Sarah Everard for what happened to her because she was technically breaching lockdown regulations.

"All your being asked to do is sit on your sofas" used to be a favourite pious lines 🙄🙄🙄.

I didn't know about the butter one but I definitely remember the thread where someone was told to put cheese in their coffee (it's all dairy innit!).

@saltinesandcoffeecups don't forget that there were loads of posters who didn't claim to have every member of their family working on frontline NHS...theirs all worked in top secret high up governmental positions instead. And they always had confidential top secret information that the government was going to keep us under lockdown until at least 2042. You heard it here first!

Nah it’s been more lighthearted and funny than most!

And has brought up some truly funny memories. (Like hedge dad!)

This! The amount of people baking bread in their enormous kitchen of their fancy two up/two down with children playing in a garden the size of a football pitch berating others with 'how hard is it to stay indoors!?' Erm...

I think that was inevitable.
The people who were pro-mask are never going to agree with the people who were anti-mask. Etc. Etc.

There's a lot of unresolved conflict over the pandemic.

Just stop… My DH was a paramedic assigned to the Covid ambulance. He thought it was ridiculous too.

@mumofoneAlonebutokay these type of posts were all over MN at the time. Someone would ask an innocuous question or express an opinion (it didn’t even have to be related to Covid in any way) and every family member of an NHS front line Covid ward would crawl out of the woodwork.

The rules around giving birth as well were absolutely nonsensical and at times downright cruel. I gave birth in 2022 and covid restrictions were still in place in hospital. I had to take a covid test before giving birth and was told if I was positive, my husband who was covid free would not be permitted to attend the birth of his child, but my mum or best friend from a seperate household could be called in to attend. Thankfully I didn't have covid but I still don't understand the rationale behind this.

I didn't have to wear a mask in labour or when I was wheeled through to theatre, but had one stuck on me shortly after giving birth as I was wheeled through the 2 min journey to recovery.

Maybe for most? But I still believe there were plenty who always had a deeply vicious/disturbed streak and the pandemic allowed them to give it free reign.

Wouldn’t say that if you were a doctor like DH working on a Covid ward fighting to keep patients alive and failing daily.

Unfortunately it also affected him hugely and will never forget what he saw.

Nope… that line doesn’t work anymore 🤣

It sounded ridiculous then too. 🤪

Sounds ridiculous now but at the time no one knew - it was a new virus with large numbers being admitted to hospitals who had insufficient beds and ventilators.

I think what really scared me was how people believed “the science” which when held up to the light of day made absolutely no sense.

Examples:

• The PP who went to the baby class and only the leaders were able to sing
• Don’t wear masks>wear masks>masks protect you from them>masks protect them from you … (don’t even get me started on the bacteria and grunge growing inside the average mask that was just rolled up up and shoved in a purse or car glove box 🤢)
• Don’t go to the doctor to avoid an illness you have a 99% + survival rate from to get that illness diagnosed that you have 50% survival rate from
• stand 6’/2m apart (like where did that come from?)
• Every masking rule…
• Gyms- didn’t have to wear a mask while exercising but did walking between machines. Apparently you couldn’t spread or catch Covid while you are on the elliptical machine but walking to the free weights …woah watch out Typhoid Mary.
• ‘flying… Half my Covid flights were mask free because of the great and powerful air exchange on airplanes then suddenly we needed a mask to keep us safe, right up until the airplanes air exchange was good enough again to protect us🤨

Of course when someone would point out the flaws in these rules they’d be shouted down with “tRUstThEScIENcE!1”. The mind boggles

Not exposed - caused. Their brains were not ill and just waiting to click. Mental health issues are a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Such as this.