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

Of course it wasn't. And I didn't say it was. What I said was there were huge variations across the UK but the assumption by many was every NHS hospital was,on the verge of collapse and they weren't.

You can still access the weekly dashboards by area of the country online, there were huge differences in infection rates, admissions, and deaths.

Anthony Gormley springs immediately to mind seeing that photo!

In the event of another pandemic the Government of whichever party need do nothing, leave it to MN to deal with it, all the experts seem to be here!

Other parts of the country were also overwhelmed and hospitals had to transfer patients around the country. Where are you talking about?

@HazelKoala I don’t think that was the case everywhere though, I have several friends who are nurses plus 1 a doctor who were definitely up to full capacity - they had no reason to lie - where there was a big difference is very few elective OPS so a lot of the nursing staff were reallocated- my friend did say they were up to capacity but more staff because of this and some staff had much less to do because you can only use so many on several Covid wards plus ICU etc ( for which you need specialist skills)

Not on here, but I remember entering a local shop for ‘supplies’ and a man and woman had a huge row because one of them deemed the other had got too close.
Shops were eerily silent at that time so everyone heard the whole thing.
Fabulously bonkers!

ChatGPT isn’t a data source - do you have the source or the original data and how it was gathered/defined?

It is hardly surprising if a 1918 pandemic resulted in more deaths and more younger deaths. Life expectancy was shorter in the pre antibiotic, mass vaccination and public health care era and in 1918 absolute poverty was widespread. At that time Spanish flu was the “catch all” for death certs if there was any suggestion of infection. In the early stages of the pandemic there was considerable caution about putting covid as cause of death (in some cases politically driven).

To say that attempts to prevent spread of infection were not needed because insufficient people died is rather like saying that the money spent on Y2K projects was wasted because they successfully prevented widespread technical failures (an argument I’ve heard frequently over the years).

So true. And we knew this at the time.

PHE research in mid 2021 said average adult weight gain was half a stone. Most of us eventually got covid, Omicron if not before. On a population level, those few pounds extra on average could've had a real impact on how severe the impact was: we know that obese and overweight people were at greater risk. And then there's the impact on childhood obesity too.

We didn't have to do these things either. Lockdown could still have meant encouraging people to get out for exercise and fresh air. Those who needed to rest whilst out could have been reassured that the police wouldn't be able to fine or harass them for it. It could've been made clear that people in more crowded areas were able to travel further than their local parks for exercise if that's what they needed to feel safe.

That's exactly what I mean.

You do realise England exists outside of London right?

Which hospital? DH is a doctor who worked on a Covid ward in central London and they were overwhelmed and used every available space to convert to Covid wards with operating theatres becoming ICU to try and cope with the numbers of patients. They used a children’s playroom as triage.

I am so glad all that tedious nonsense is over for good.

I had many friends working in the large city hospital which was virtually empty. It was the second wave in the winter where shit hit the fan.

But in the early days there were bank staff having to be furloughed, almost nothing to do and staff taking home carrier bags full of food and other donations from well-meaning local businesses, takeaways and private citizens who assumed from the news they were all on their knees. And a lot of takeaway food that went to waste.

When they could have done with that help in the second wave, most of the public were over it and just wanting to get back to normal.

Remembered another.

In the early days before testing NHS workers were told if they had possible symptoms of covid they had to take 2 weeks off. Fully paid and wouldn't count towards sickness recording. Some people took the piss I'm sure but that's a different issue.

But there was a post on MN from someone whose neighbours were NHS workers and had mentioned they were off sick because of that policy. And were enjoying the sun, drinking in their garden and the poster was rage-filled because she now wouldn't use her garden or let her kids use it because the neighbours were chatting and laughing outside and she thought if they had covid it might drift over to her garden and infect her and proposed that anyone with possible symptoms should have to stay indoors completely.

She had lots of supporters.

So many.

All the people with no comprehension skills or common sense who thought there was an imaginary list of essential food items and permitted outdoor exercise.

So you had MNetters being called names and abused because they bought a packet of hot cross buns or an Easter egg with their weekly shop.

Or being told their kids couldn't use a scooter for outdoor exercise because it wasn't on the imaginary list of permitted exercise.

The rigid rules are rules people who told the woman who'd just given birth and her crucial items were at her parents and her Dad could just drop them off without any contact with anyone, that she could just put the baby in an emptied out drawer.

The people who thought you couldn't sit down in a park. Or eat outside.

The posters washing their fruit and veg in disinfectant.

The posters picking up their mail with kitchen tongs and leaving it in the garage for days to quarantine.

The posters who didn't understand how the NHS works and how vastly different the country was experiencing covid-19 and thought every NHS hospital and worker was on their knees coping with third-world horror and didn't understand that many hospitals were virtually empty.

As above, not understanding how the NHS works and how common it is for hospitals to be rated in a red state and being closed to admissions so seeing a panic-inducing post on FB about their local hospital and coming to MN spreading the panic assuming it was covid-related.

I remember that - and I think it went on for longer than two years. Her position was that the kids would be fine making friends online, but that they had a family member who would definitely die if they contracted COVID so it was entirely justified

My thoughts exactly. The best protection is general good health: nutrition, exercise, sunlight. Our measures did the opposite.

Happily. I used chat GTP. Request was for ‘deaths per 1000 people’ over the last hundred years, showing significant spikes.

The reason for ‘per 1000 people’ was so that the death rate took account of changes to population. If I hadn’t opted for that measure, the death rates would look like they’re alarmingly increasing - but it would have been due to massive increases in population rather than a constant pandemic from around 1990!

The overall U shaped curve is due to the gradual shift in proportion of the population that are elderly - this is the Boomer generation working its way through. The upwards trend will continue for the next couple of decades, I reckon. If it suddenly spikes upwards, this will likely be due to antibiotics no longer being effective (again, most elderly people receive near constant antibiotic treatment at the end of their lives, contributing significantly to antibiotic resistance).

If you look carefully, there is a change in the rate of fall in death rates from around 1948. This was around the time the NHS was created and there was mass immunisation.

The dip after the covid spike is a normal, statistical phenomenon. It’s because covid ‘brought forward’ the deaths of those who would have died a year or so later (since we know that virtually all deaths with covid were people in their 80s and 90s).

I remember in early June 2020having my 4 friends round and sat on my garden all 6 feet apart on deckchairs in a big circle - somewhat shouting across at each other with a buffet set up in kitchen which we all went to , one by one- nuts on reflection

@MushroomDelight welcome back !

@Abra1t I couldn’t help but think when we lived in Denmark during 2nd lockdown that’s one reason they were coping better- it’s very clear their population on the whole was fitter and healthier

I remember getting told off in relation to the arrows. They were a pain in the arse to see as a visually impaired person

And I’m not sure about the crying nurses. After all, there were plenty of actors who needed work.

I was really pissed off when I watched an opera on TV for some escapism, and discovered it was a special “social distanced” edition, actors keeping apart on the stage, masked musicians… there was no fucking escape from the whole thing, even in fiction!

The thing I wrestle with, despite having NHS medics in the family and despite volunteering at a GP covid vaccination centre for four years now, is that during COvid instead of the NHS caring for us, we, the citizens, became responsible for caring for the NHS. The NHS should enable us to work productively and enjoy a prosperous life. In a time of crisis, you have to prioritise it, but the NHS shouldn't be the main focus of national life and it seems to have become this.

Ideally we would have a healthier, better-nourished, fitter population who don't often need to access the NHS outside routine appointments and screening, certainly in their younger years.

Someone (Wes?) said that we'd become an NHS with a state attached to it.

I’ve only just returned to the site as a new user but I vaguely remember there being a discussion about going out for the daily allowed exercise. What if your dog needed to go out twice, could you split the 30 minutes into two halves or would that cause Covid to spread even further?

There were definitely posters who were outraged at the thought of someone leaving the house TWICE.

The footage from "china" of people laying dead in the streets was from an art project which took place in Germany in 2014. This information was available online in 2020 so I am amazed that 5 years on people still don't know this.

There was also photos claiming to be mass graves in Italy, featuring people wandering around in hazmat suits, which were stills from the film Contagion.

This doesn't mean you can't also catch a virus off contact surfaces, hence why washing your hands is important.

I didn't wipe my groceries down by the way.