When was the moment you realised covid was serious?

When I popped into Tesco for milk a few days before lockdown. DS (10) had been seriously ill for two weeks with what we and his drs presume to be Covid. We thought it was meningitis. He was so unwell I hadn’t been following much news and when he was discharged from hospital I went into the supermarket for some things to tide us over. The shock at the empty shelves and walking around like a zombie, I actually laughed it was pure hysteria. That feeling of horror and dread stayed with me every day for the next 6 months.

Very Early March, we were away in a caravan
Watching news night and after that, decided we would come home and lock down

Would not in a million years of thought we would still be in the situation we are

Valentine’s Day: I went out for lunch in an affluent area of London. Decided to pop into pharmacy for hand sanitizer/masks and was told they’d run out weeks ago: I realised I was being slow on the uptake

I headed home, but my instinct kicked in and took a detour to do a massive food shop realising what was coming

Week of the 16th March was really stressful: I think many Londoners thought we’d lock down a week before we actually did, I was convinced it would be during the school day to stop people running away across the country

Obviously now it’s clear lockdown a week earlier would have been so much better

I think the last 17 months have been surreally dystopian but Covid has killed a tiny, tiny percentage of people overall and who have contracted it and I have grave concerns about how statistics have been disseminated to us and the extent to which our human rights and freedoms have been eroded.

A tiny, tiny percentage of an enormous total is still a significant number of people.

Last February Chinese and Italian doctors were telling us Covid was killing roughly 1% of all people infected. Our own government told us in March that they expected 85% of the UK population to become infected, but they were content in the meantime that doing absolutely nothing whatsoever was a perfectly sensible approach.

Population of the UK is 69million, give or take, so figure out what 1% of 85% of 69million is, (586,000 or so). That is how many UK citizens that complete idiot Johnson was openly telling everyone last March that he was content to see killed.

It's only because that point was hammered home to him over and over that he finally twigged that wasn't a good look and took the bare minimum steps to try to mitigate it.

So you may believe that the resultant death figures are inconsequential, or what we were told throughout this doesn't bear scrutiny, but the Chinese and Italians were not lying about what Covid was doing to unprepared populations, and Johnson was seemingly happy for exactly the same thing to happen here. That's the measure of what a criminal incompetent the fool is.

Valentine's Day 2020.
That's the day I started my Coronavirus spreadsheet to log the numbers.
Looking back the numbers were very low then (64k worldwide) so I'm not sure what made me start, but I do love a spreadsheet....
The first day I started tracking the UK figures was 02/03/2020 and there were only 40 cases at that point

I use the figures from the Johns Hopkins dashboard: www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Today, the worldwide cases are over 202m and the UK figure has exceeded 6m....
Unbelievable really....

Just in case it turns out that I really am a witch and that's how I knew it was going to get bad, I've just checked and I only filled in the dates until 15/12/2022 so maybe that's my unconscious prediction of when it will all be over

Had an email whilst at work on the afternoon of March 12th 2020 telling us to pack up, take our laptops and chargers and WFH for 3 weeks. Here we are in August 2021 and I am still WFH with no change on the horizon. The other distinct memory is the absolute mayhem in Tesco that same night when people were literally stripping the shelves of everything!

I can't even remember, but maybe when DS1's hospital said he shouldn't leave his house, which was March last year.

For me it was when the pictures and news reports started coming in from Italy.

I remember the feeling of helpless desperation for the government to do something.

@Backwards31

I'm so sorry

@namechanged984630 could you provide the source for that statistic please?

Name change for a obvious reasons.

When I was invited to a cryptically worded meeting to “pitch innovation ideas” and it slowly dawned upon me while listening to people speak that the ideas they wanted me to pitch were disaster-mitigation things like how to rationalise supply chains, ramp up mass testing, organise food rationing, maintain civil order. They expected ME (and some others) to come up with ideas and the best ones would be put into play. It was like a disaster movie dragons den. Terrifying to me that I could somehow be important enough to be involved (and ludicrous in retrospect).

On a more mundane note, I felt like I was living a dual life through Feb. I ordered laptops and desks for the kids, an extra freezer, seeds for growing our own veg. All while still routinely flying around Europe trying to convince myself it was all in my head (all of this before the weird meeting).

I realised when it hit Italy (I live there).

I started posting updates on a UK talkboard, where people still weren't taking it all that seriously.

It was when there was a sudden urgency to send my son and his colleagues back from mainland Europe. They were told at breakfast and at an English site by the afternoon. Then they were all ill but had no way of telling if they had caught Covid or something else.

They stayed there for a week or two then there was the same urgent rush again to get them home. A colleague drove him to the Midlands and I drove there to pick him up.

They had been cocooned really and my son was talking about being back in England unexpectedly and that he would catch up with all his friends. He wanted me to stop at McDonalds!

We got home, put the news on and were straight into the first lockdown.

When my dad died of covid. Up until then I was ignorant regarding the seriousness of it. Wish I had of kept him out of harm's way😕

I was watching the news from Italy (100km away) and then saw the news about the first French cases, a bit closer still. I don't think I realised properly until Macron announced in his speech on the 16th that on top of the strict national lockdown, the Schengen borders would close for the first time ever. We are frontaliers and all my ongoing medical treatment was in Switzerland. The rules were very unclear and people with legitimate reasons queued for five hours to cross the border the next day.

The week before lockdown. I had to travel to a course for work. I had to go by train as i don't drive. I had to make several changes. Masks weren't a thing, it was all about wash your hands etc. I was fucking petrified and spoke to my boss the following day and said i wouldn't be doing that again. I had until then dismissed it as media hype a week later we went into lockdown and i was furloughed. Definitely surreal, i knew then it wasnt going away

I went into a pharmacy and said to them 'I know this sounds a bit crazy but is there any chance you have hand sanitiser and they said the whole county was out and on the way home the news was practically apocalyptic telling people to try to stay away from hospitals if they could

When I talked to a friend who told me how bad things were in their hospitals in Madrid, and that doctors weren’t able to treat everyone who needed treatment. This was about 10 days before we locked down, and I kept my children home from school, which I thought was a bit OTT at the time. A week later schools were closed. I can’t believe our government, who must have known more, earlier that we did, were so casual about it. Remember Boris telling us he shook hands with everyone at a hospital.

So mid Jan whenever Chinese New Year was

When wuhan locked down and they basically cancelled Chinese New Year. Vividly remember thinking shit fuck this is really weird. Remember saying to husband, this shit is serious, the football season won’t be finished!

At the Peace Proms at the SSE Arena in Belfast to watch my then 11yo DS in the choir. It was 1st March 2020. I took DS2 to the toilets during the interval and there were warning posters up about coronavirus and the importance of hand washing and not touching surfaces. The expression 'my blood ran cold' was never so apt. It just suddenly felt real and scary. And then we had to go back and sit in a packed auditorium for the second half. It was a fantastic show, but that poster is one of my abiding memories. The next time I was at the SSE Arena was to get my covid jab a few weeks ago.

Towards the end of Feb 2020. I was a bit obsessed as DH in hospital for five weeks waiting for open heart surgery and I was really worried it would be cancelled. I watched Italy v closely, which is why I remember them begging us to act, weeks before Johnson brought in any kind of lockdown.

The middle of March. The end of February I went away for a weekend with teenage DD. She bought antibac wipes and sanitiser for the journey and wiped down all the hard surfaces we used on the train. A few days later a friend who is a microbiologist posted a status questioning attitudes to the virus and and saying that she was concerned that people were not taking it seriously.

A fortnight later DH and I went out for a picnic. It was the first time in a while I had been to the supermarket and I was shocked by people in face masks and gloves. We drove to the beach and went for a walk. As we passed people on the path we all nodded nervously at each other and stuck to the edges. As we drove home I said to DH that I felt a real sense of doom and anxiety.