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...

They should hang their heads In shame. I followed the rules was the worst thing in history on many occasions.

If I listened to the tyrants on here my friend wouldn't be alive today. Suicide. Mumsnet should be last place for any advice especially regarding covid and anything related to it

Really worried about the damage done to children and teenagers during lockdown and noticed a real jump in the number of overweight kids in the past two years.
When I look back, the memory of (open air) playground gates locked and bolted for three months makes me so angry, that was just a particular overreach, I think. And completely insane.

Same on both points. All those children with no access to outside play, for months at a time. What that must have done to them.

Child obesity rates did increase of course, which is another thing that was blatantly obvious would happen even at the time. And childhood obesity is dangerous. Obese children are at much higher risk of so many things in adulthood. I'm not aware of any example where there's been an increase that's successfully been reversed. We never seem to hear anything about that when people talk about years lost to covid.

I'm wondering how a "did you break Covid rules?" thread would go today? Am tempted but still not sure I'm brave enough!

Oh yes the FB "name and shame" shit that went on back them. My Dsis was one of those that got hounded for a while on the village page for going out everyday to work. "She's not a key worker, she works in a factory that makes fashion accessories....they should all be in jail the selfish bastards" was one such comment. They soon shut the fuck up when I pointed out that they were no longer making such things...they were now making body bags.

I'm wondering how a "did you break Covid rules?" thread would go today? Am tempted but still not sure I'm brave enough!

Haha go for it, if you're getting any shit I'll give an unabridged list of what me and mine were doing and deflect from you!

Honestly, I think there was a lot of it going on. MN just isn't necessarily representative of the stratas of society where it was happening. I saw so many lockdown breaches around me, especially in the second one. And there are whole things I didn't even do, like I never used any businesses that were illegally operating.

Oh God, I remember someone asking why I’d not been out clapping (for the NHS and keyworkers). It’s because I was at work (nurse on acute resp ward —> trying to bloody save the patients who had Covid!!). I did join in with clapping on the rare times I was at home (it was nice seeing people, and being able to wave at them).

I had another person questioning why I hadn’t been “staying at home”. Obvs, the same reason as above. I can’t bloody work from home!!!

It was bonkers. Then you had people asking others not to bang pots or set off fireworks as they worked for the NHS and needed sleep and were jumped on for suggesting it as people should show application in the way they wanted to.

We were subjected to Michael Jacksons Heal The World every Thursday during the clapping

I had a bloke from our local fb group send me PMs to make sure i was still "staying safe" I posted about it here at the time Was creepy

I was in a WhatsApp group in the height of the pandemic, where one friend suggested we report any unfamiliar cars we saw in our street

Oh you've just reminded me of other nonsense - people saying that they could tell if a car wasn't local. Well, firstly we don't have easily recognisable registration plates in the UK (unlike eg Germany where reg plates from Berlin start with a B, Mainz start MZ, Freiburg FR, etc so you know who's local. And secondly, even if a car was registered elsewhere, people buy second hand cars and so you can have a car registered in Devon "living" in Liverpool!

Same on both points. All those children with no access to outside play, for months at a time. What that must have done to them

Remember all the hysteria about people using public parks as well? There was a cartoon of a family with a garden large enough to have a tennis court reading an article about all the "law-breakers" in parks saying "so selfish". I wish I could find it again.

I was ok when it came to rules, but my main issue was how we treated young people from very young to university age. It was so wrong and any suggestion it was wrong led to crazy abuse, on here anyway. So sad, people just losing it.

Remember all the hysteria about people using public parks as well? There was a cartoon of a family with a garden large enough to have a tennis court reading an article about all the "law-breakers" in parks saying "so selfish". I wish I could find it again.

Oh yes, our local Facebook group went nuts if someone was spotted sitting on a bench and then there was the outrage at the sight of someone FLYING A KITE in the middle of a huge open space. Plus anyone who dared ask where they could buy paint, plants and anything else deemed non essential was shot down in flames.

Lots of my NHS colleagues knew right from the start that the whole pot banging nonsense was just that and once the first stage of the pandemic was behind us the virtue-signalling Tories round our way would think they'd done their bit and slither back under their stones. We also knew fine well that all those empty gestures wouldn't translate into anything genuine like pay rises for those who risked their life every day - but then from the start so many of my colleagues had to work with bin bags and shoddy fake PPE, so they knew right from the start how much the government REALLY gave a sh*t. You didn't dare voice it to anyone outside your circle though....

I agree with the PP in that hindsight has borne out that the extent of the lockdowns was extreme. There's no doubt that it has hugely impacted people's mental and physical health and their livelihoods.
However, I also think it's easy to be looking at this now and seeing the mistakes that were made. Saying schools should have stayed open for example is a difficult one. I'm a headteacher and in 2020 three colleagues had staff who died having almost certainly been infected at school, and one of my teachers and one TA were both desperately ill, having been two of my fittest and healthiest members of staff until then. Others were really ill too but these two stand out for the extent of how unwell they were and how they're still impacted now.
In the first lockdown I remember one of our parents who was a nurse coming to collect her children and just sobbing with exhaustion and horror at what was happening. She was utterly traumatised by what she was seeing and doing day in, day out. On that particular day two members of the same family had died within days of each other.
We knew we could probably manage having more children in (in the 2021 lockdown we did this) but there was no funding to help reduce class sizes and help keep people safe - there wasn't money for what was needed to operate sensibly. We could have had much shorter circuit breakers but when schools tried to do that to help stay open longer and for more children, Gavin Williamson threatened them with legal action (then locked down again days later).
I also remember the initial restrictions being announced and people behaving like idiots afterwards which contributed to tighter restrictions. It could all have been handled so much better and things could have been different for many people but we shouldn't forget that it was, and still is, a deadly virus and millions more people would have died if we'd just carried on regardless.

I also remember the initial restrictions being announced and people behaving like idiots afterwards which contributed to tighter restrictions.

Can you tell us more about what you mean here?

An example was our village pub the week that lockdowns were announced. Boris had already encouraged people to avoid "busy" crowded places like pubs and restaurants. Then on the Friday, he announced pubs had to close that day. Cue all the locals in our village flocking to our village pub for a "last pint" before the pub closed! There were so many, they were spilling out onto the road outside and mid evening, the police had to come and instruct the pub to close because there were so many drinkers, they were blocking the road!

Similarly, on the last day schools were able to open pre lockdown, our village primary school held a "whole school" assembly with all pupils and staff packed into the school hall during the afternoon!

It was no surprise that lots of locals caught covid in the first couple of weeks of lockdown! They simply ignored the "recommendations" ahead of the lockdown, and the school head was pretty stupid for packing probably 300 pupils/teachers together in the school hall for an hour or so!

Unfortunately, I don't think people took covid seriously in those few weeks ahead of the lockdown. We were being told to avoid crowded places, start practicing social distancing, etc., but people just didn't heed the advice. It was only the strict lockdown being announced that forced people to realise the seriousness. I think if everyone had just "toned down" their personal interactions in late Feb/early March, we may not have needed the strict lockdowns and lockdowns lasting for so many months.

I assume they mean people taking notes of people going for walks, and being dragged over the coals for q walk ok an isolated beach, or taking some fresh air in a park.

I agree people did act like idiots….

Thanks for clarifying @Badbadbunny. An alternative perspective is that people had correctly identified which way the wind was blowing, it being pretty obvious by Friday 20th that we'd be locked down soon, and were taking the opportunity to enjoy the last chance to socialise they were going to get for a while. This might well be a rational choice depending on one's own risk profile and priorities. Given that the loosening of the 2020 restrictions didn't match case numbers at all, the idea that the spread meant we needed a long lockdown is questionable.

I do agree that it's worth discussing whether encouragement to the population to voluntarily change behaviour much earlier on would've been better than what we actually did. Done properly. But that ship had long sailed by the weekend before lockdown got announced.

My favourite batshit post was someone saying that you shouldn't drive anywhere for fear of spreading covid even if you stayed in your car. How, you might ask?
Apparently, the tyres would drive over the where people had walked, pick up the covid and spread it far and wide.

At least it gave DH and I a laugh as we waited for the government to get bored of preventing him earning a living.

I wasn't in the UK for the first lockdown and when it started these white mini marquee tents were erected outside of pharmacies, presumably to make it look official, still don't know what they were about.

That is bat shit.
Even now, I still know a couple who both wear a mask in their own car together.

The batshittery is spilling over into other infections too. The HSE, which is the Irish health service, has recently advised people to stay off nursery/school/work with the symptoms of a common cold. Yes, really. I am beginning to think this is how intelligent civilizations die. www2.hse.ie/conditions/common-cold/

We had someone local who had the police called on them for "having visitors". Their father had died of covid, and they didn't have a shirt the right colour or size to attend the funeral (as one of the like 2 people allowed to go at that time or something), so they'd phoned a relative who had walked up the garden path, left a carrier bag by the door and gone back to their car.

Curtain twitching parasitical joy sucking arsehole rang the coppers on them pretty much accusing them of having a rave or something.

And the clapping - it was hell. They didn't clap round here - they did car horns, open air doorstep concerts, "lockdown discos" where the music was blared for everyone to hear. It was horrific for me - having kids who were struggling to sleep for the level of sad in their brain, and who are ASD and sound-sensitive anyway, and me with sound sensitivities from my own autism waiting for the barrage of noise to start each week - then the ones on our street would pile into someone's back garden to mingle, drink and slag us off for not joining in the fucking clapping.

We broke the rules after a month or so of those three weeks to flatten the curve when the kids were really crumbling mentally, I had long-since fallen apart, and couldn't get any of my uni work done so my marks were going through the floor... and we met my parents at the services so they could go to their house for a bit - just in terms of more space for the pair of my kids, the garden to play in and run a bit free-er and to try to reduce the pressure on particularly DD2. Likewise when it looked like whichever wave was going to cancel Christmas - we headed to my parents house sooner so we were there ahead of any restrictions knowing some of the stunts one local police force had pulled in the past in terms of "Covid enforcement".

Would I follow rules again? No. The reason being the behaviour I saw on here where people gleefully told me how my kids didn't matter, how they needed to learn resilience, how they were being oversensitive and should suck it up - and then tried to paint those who dared raise an eyebrow at rules, or query any inconsistencies (and there were some corkers) as hedonistic granny murderers. I realised that whatever we did was never going to be good enough for those arseholes and that, in that case, why put my family through crap to still be bitched at for it.

@CoffeeWithCheese i remember saying to other posters on here that whatever we do it will never be good enough or enough period. We got proved right.