Did covid screw anyone else's life up?

[girlmeetsboy]

Interested to hear on this as I have been reading a thread where people loved the solidarity of it all. For me it was redundancy, house lost, business lost and savings...

Yes please don't teacher bash.

DDs favourite teacher passed away from covid in January last year. That's one of the things that has her retreating and depressed. He was a great teacher, very much loved by the entire school community. When they went through a difficult time he kept her going.

That he died of covid because he kept on teaching through it all, alone due to the rules, well I will never forgive the government.

So please remember that teachers did pass away too

My daughter's general anxiety pre COVID turned into anorexia due to Camhs help being completely stopped due to COVID, plus not being able to have contact with family and friends. She's 16 now, and not been well enough to attend school for over 18 months. This has also seriously impacted my 11 year old son's mh aswell. It's a continuing nightmare...

Seeing so many people "scared" of a virus for which it was INCREDIBLY rare to die from, or even get bad side effects from.

Describing children in school as germ vectors with their covid breath was just cruel. The hatred towards children in school was heartbreaking, and the complete dismissal of how it would effect them.

The ADs spent MONTHS saying that lockdowns past summer 2020 was wrong, that the long term fallout from the restrictions was going to be horrific but we were yelled at, called granny killers and vilified yet here we are. A whole,huge thread full of people effected and the majority affected by the lockdowns and restrictions NOT the virus.

Covid kills, but isnt the plague (which had a 40% mortality rate compared to covids 1%)

I think plenty of us are affected by the virus and it is pretty awful. Some are affected by the death of loved ones who died of covid. Some are affected by the lockdown.

It isn't just about the people who died, although that was terrible in itself, but the people who were dying or seriously ill were overwhelming the NHS, how much worse would that have been without the lockdowns? Some NHS staff have PTSD because of what they saw and what they had to deal with, they are affected too.

@Mycatsgoldtooth tea it was an is so frustrating

I am sorry for anyone who suffered in the pandemic, whether through Covid itself, or other impacts.

However some of this thread has descended into a lot of misinformation about lockdowns. The fact is the lockdowns saved thousands of lives, and resulted in less deaths from crime/roads etc. Let’s not degenerate into anti-lockdown propoganda.

My work shut permanently as well because of covid so I lost my job as well

Being angry doesn’t solve anything, we all need to learn to cope in the best way we can. Life isn’t easy it’s damned hard. What happens to us as we go through life shapes us into who we become, it’s a hard long learning curve. Use your anger to make your life better not bitter. I’ve had some hard challenges in my life and still have more coming at me with my DC. It doesn’t end, it just changes. I wish you and everyone who contributes to this website well. Mumsnet is a great sounding ground and helps so many people to be heard and to ask for advice and support. It’s been a real lifeline through Covid for everyone. Keep posting, keep responding. A website that is actually helping people and making their lives better.

The fact is the lockdowns saved thousands of lives

This. Lockdown was awful and damaging and so hard, but that doesn't mean that it was the wrong thing thing to do. It was a totally unprecedented situation where all the options were awful. It was a case of trying to predict and balance all these different awful outcomes up.

I don't think it's helpful to frame it as two opposing teams. Everyone suffered in myriad ways. We can all feel empathy for each other. Everyone was trying to do the best for their families, and for society.

@channin really agreed. We are not opposing teams. Any ICU doctor or nurse will tell you what would have happened if we hadn’t locked down.

And reading with a lot of sympathy all the different stories, some who had lost from Covid, some who suffered through the lockdowns, some who lost jobs, some who suffered mental heath problems, others with positive stories but all of us feel for those who did not fare well.

I was stuck hundreds of miles from family and friends, with a partner who had cheated on me, and had to give up work to home school a disabled child. I was lucky as we seemed to make the most of it, amazingly even though financially I am f*ed. However my poor mum, having just lost her husband, was completely on her own, not the lockdown, she couldn't’ have seen anyone anyway as she was in the extremely vulnerable category (severe lung disease and also cancer). So I wasn’t in a pretty home enjoying the garden with a loved one. But it’s the pandemic that affected us.

Jobless now for choosing bodily autonomy

But thats fine, i will sit on the dole and get government money until businesses drop mandates

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I think we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of the after effects, especially to mental health, and they will become more apparent in time.

Covid has left me with physical problems but the January lockdown in particular broke me, I've had a lot of therapy since. I've been told I am a different person now.

A friend had a picture come up in her memories from that time and said it made her feel physically sick, we all agreed, but then we moved the conversation on, it's almost as if we can't talk about it.

I remember asking my Granny about the war for school and she felt similar about talking about that. I wonder if collectively it's being brushed over as it's just too hard?

Much love to everyone still struggling 💐

I don’t think it’s descended in to anything really. It’s everyone’s opinions without former censorship.

If people think lockdowns weee wrong let them say it.

@CherryBlossomWinter all
I have seen is people sharing their awful stories and acknowledge the harms of lock down. Something that has been taboo for two years. You need to face facts, lock downs harmed. Maybe not you but so many other people. Many of the measures were theatrics when the place most people got covid was in hospital or in care homes. Stopping children going to school, uni students studying, cancelling cancer services, stopping mental health appointments, social work visits, banning meeting outside and closing children’s play grounds. The rule of six. Women giving birth alone, people dying alone.We lost our humanity.

We now have a death toll from the effects that are higher then the deaths from covid. We sacrificed young people and children’s well being and the economy for a illness with a high survival rate. Countries that did not lock down have similar levels of excess deaths and less of the devastating after effects.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/29/disastrous-legacy-left-lockdown-non-covid-excess-deaths-overtake/

Yes, I’m an introvert and shy and struggle to make friends. Pre covid I’d had a good friend for a few years, we met up weekly, exchanged messages regularly and I felt happy and lucky to have her. Post covid, I’ve lost her and I feel really sad about it, especially as I’m in a marriage where we don’t talk and I feel alone. Life was different for her, and she’s moved on.

Homeschooling affected my relationship with my 10yo DD. Our school was great and set lots of interesting work. DD is very bright, but she struggled with lockdown and not seeing anyone, became very defiant with us and didn’t like me telling her what the work was or trying to help her in any way, so I had a struggle getting her to do it. I’m still not over that time, we had extended periods of it here. Life would have been very different if she’d been allowed to go in with the ‘keyworker’ kids, who she could see laughing together on video calls each morning.

I still feel a bit distant from family who I live hundreds of miles away from. We didn’t see each other for a long time because even when you could sit in gardens it didn’t help us because with the rules here (over the border) we couldn’t drive hours to do that. The DC and I felt very isolated. My DC cried because they heard that their friends were seeing grandparents who are local and they didn’t understand why they couldn’t see anyone. I struggled with not seeing very elderly relatives for an extended time, knowing that they might not have long left.

It almost destroyed my marriage. We’re in a small house where DH had to WFH from our bedroom as we had no other space available while I homeschooled the DC and it was a nightmare and we haven’t got over it yet.

It has permanently affected the health of my youngest DC. Due to covid he didn’t get a health check that he required, everything was delayed significantly and that has had long term consequences which I feel really sad about as it will affect his whole life.

The reality is that we don't yet know whether lockdowns were a net positive or negative in terms of lives saved and won't for some time.

I didn't find the 1st two lockdowns, that bad but I think that was because I was really lucky.
I was still working because I got classed as a Keyworker. I got to work more hours but around my childcare needs. Lucky they were not of school age. Oh I ended up pregnant with my 2nd child.

3rd lockdown heavily pregnant couldn't got on furlough as I didn't in the 1st lockdowns. The reality of giving birth in a pandemic was really hitting home.

I get the friendship that seem to have been hard to MAINTAIN due to lockdowns. I am slowly trying to get them back on track. I know if a lockdownwas to happen again now I would struggle.

We do.
they didn’t save lives.

I don't know how people can state for a fact lockdowns saved lives, there is precious little evidence of that. They did not stop transmission, they delayed it, ostensibly to prevent overwhelming the NHS. Meanwhile deaths at home skyrocketed, so were the deaths just shifted elsewhere? The current excess deaths stats from the ONS are almost 17% above the expected number for the five year average and are not related to covid. This trend has gone on for almost a year. So either people are dying in excess at home from lack of NHS care for heart disease/diabetes/cancer/vaccine side effects but they are dying in way higher numbers than expected.

They did not stop transmission, they delayed it, ostensibly to prevent overwhelming the NHS. Meanwhile deaths at home skyrocketed, so were the deaths just shifted elsewhere?

Yes, this is a good way of putting it.

There are going to be people who would've died without lockdown, who then didn't contract covid until later on when they'd had the chance to get vaccinated and when treatments had developed, hence survived. Those extra years of life then need to be balanced against various other factors such as deaths at home, years that will be or have been lost due to increases in obesity, alcohol consumption, people's dementia advancing more quickly due to loss of routine social contact, delays in accessing healthcare and loads of other things. Obviously a great deal of this hasn't actually happened yet.

"vaccine side effects"

Interesting that you include vaccine effects as a cause of excess deaths but not the impact of covid on the health system, longer term effects of covid which is now known to increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, damage kidneys, the brain etc.

Walkden I thought I had! lack of NHS care for heart disease/diabetes/cancer/vaccine side effects i.e. lack of care for heart disease, caused by any reason whatsoever, be it poor lifestyle/genetic/covid infection.

What a shame that a thread where people shared beautifully written, emotionally raw and honest feelings is now being jumped upon by those who want to deny the harms of lockdown. The thread was pretty calmly and evenly balanced between those who'd suffered bereavements due to covid, those who have long covid and those who have suffered or have family members who've suffered because of the lockdowns... and then some people come along and try to ruin it.

The loss of social skill and communication development is being fairly well documented among children now - our kids, the little troopers that they are, are clawing things back - but it's made gaps in society into gaping chasms... the children of parents working flexibly from home with good access to the internet, technology, printers, books and high levels of home literacy had a very very different lockdown to kids in overcrowded accommodation whose parents were working doing jobs like home deliveries or call centre work on the one house laptop and who weren't from the best educated family backgrounds to start with... one side of the equation is likely to come out of this much better than the others. I did a big research project on it for my dissertation - unfortunately I've just chucked out the folder with my research notes in as we're prepping to house move, but, even in the families who had "good" lockdowns - their kids have this distrust and fear that "normal" is going to stay and that they won't be put into another lockdown yet again... that's going to take a long time for young minds to get around in the future.

It almost broke DD2 completely - she lost most of her ability to speak fluently (she has communication needs but she'd had a LOT of SALT input and was doing really well prior to the lockdowns - and she lost so much ground she'd gained and she's not fully back to where she could have been in normal times. Her friend was about 5 when this started - asked her mum if her school had closed because she didn't wash her hands enough... and now has contamination-based OCD as a result of it all.

Personally - apart from vax- side effects I'm pretty much stuck with (and fairly resigned to being the "that guy" who gets unlucky with one set of medication or another) but would like to be able to acknowledge without being accused of wearing a tin foil hat or whatever else... I came out relatively OK. Masks are still a fucking nightmare for me with ASD and I've had to negotiate with work that if they come back in for full-time desk-work I'll work from home as I can cope for short durations to see a patient but if I wear them for longer then I tend to have pretty crappy autistic meltdowns - but I was halfway through a course for a career before the pandemic struck and it was basically keep going or throw thousands of pounds down the drain on tuition fees and not come out with anything to show for it. I did get a first for the course - but I scraped it, and I could have done much better if I didn't have a year of it trying to teach the kids, trying to teach myself and trying to prevent DD1 from doing my homework instead of her own.

It's also been catastrophic for many of my service users (I work in adult learning disabilities) who lost day service provision, who weren't able to engage via zoom, who rely on their routine to hook their understanding of the world onto - and who are really struggling to return to this after the last couple of years. Pretty much every case on my caseload at the moment has the line in the referral that "things have become much worse during the lockdowns and afterwards".

Even grown adults of normal levels of intelligence struggled with the stop-start nature of things being normal/not normal/normal-ish/totally not normal/pretending sitting in the Dog and Duck Car Park is normal... let alone kids and those with learning disabilities.

Covid wasn't just in the UK you know! Hundreds of thousands also died in many other countries in the World, all totalling a few million. The lockdowns/restrictions we had in the UK weren't that different to what lots of other countries did too! I seem to remember at times people in Italy and France needed permits to leave their homes. Personally, I think the entire World was ill prepared and then just copied eachother as to precautions/restrictions for fear of not doing enough, i.e. if the UK hadn't locked down, a few hundred thousand more people died, everyone would blame Boris for it. As it was, lots of countries did similar, so leading politicians could all say they were just doing what everyone else was doing!