COVID cringe memories (light hearted)

[Floogal]

Looking back at the pandemic, especially at its height in 2020, what made your toes curl?

1. "Imagine". Enough said.
2. The Marsh family.
3. On the local news, footage was shown of the Thursday clap (may or June). There was a parade of bhangra drummers and smarmy bratty kids doing the irritating floss dance. Was that point the 'applause' was seen as having had it's day.

I know some people may mention the dancing nurses, I only saw tiny clips on the news. Even that made me cringe.

Oh god the language

‘ripping through’

’leaving in droves’ actually that hung around for ages

Matt Hancock and Gina in the office. I am still giggling about that now,totally cringe.

Urgh the nhs worship was crazy a friend of mine worked in a supermarket at the time and they opened on Easter Saturday for “NHS hour” giving the NHS staff Easter eggs and applauding them as they walked in! 😂😂😂

My friend suddenly urgently needed the loo.

What about the woman who was dressing up every Wednesday to take her bins out? It gave her neighbours a great lift apparently.

That made me laugh

Thankfully my street only did 'the clap' (that sounds wrong!) once.

The clapping.... I worked on a Thursday evening so missed most of it. I had a week off and was tiding the children's toys from outside one Thursday at 8pm, and was like WTF is that???? Pans banging, the lot. What madness.

Oh god yes that's awful!

I forgot 'shielding' from my list. Ugh. And of course PPE - which to me was always property, plant and equipment...

The people on here who "knew it was coming" and were therefore totally prepared unlike the rest of us plebeian folk.
"Well I actually take an interest in world affairs and am a bit of an epidemiologist so I was wearing a hazmat suit and stocking up in December 2019..." 🙄

My poor grandmother ate hers alone. Family who were relatively safe (one going out to work but working alone, and doing a weekly shop) made the safety assessment for her, she wasn't a risk to them. I was a risk as working with others and a child in school.

The clapping

Especially as it's going in our faces all the time.

I saw a Facebook post of a couple doing ballroom style ‘dancing for the NHS’ wtaf?

The post is about the ridiculousness of some of the rules i.e. not being allowed to sit on a park bench in the fresh air, benches taped off, wearing masks outdoors, only going for a 1 hour walk even though the rule didn’t ever exist, being allowed to turn one way in an office, but not the other. Totally bonkers.

Most people can see how alot of the rules were ridiculous, that doesn’t mean you deny a small minority of people may be severely affected by Covid (same as the flu).

I went away on a trip with friends in the Autumn of 2020 when the rule of 6 was in place - there were more than 6 of us (but we’d all booked seperately in rooms of two so our booking wasn’t cancelled). We could all stay in the same hotel, all use the facilities together like the pool, spent the whole weekend together, went round all the busy shops, tourist town etc, but at meals we had to divide up so only a maximum 6 of us sat together. Just beyond mad. If we’d been booked as one group, our booking would have had to be cancelled. It was just bizarre rules that were nothing to do with making any sacrifice to help others.

People claiming that the rest of the world was looking on at England in horror. As if we're that important and other countries didn't have their own problems to worry about.

Someone I know had a missed miscarriage and not only did she have to find out alone, she also had to be alone while she delivered the retained products. Apparently it didn't count as a birth so her partner couldn't be there. Absolutely heartbreaking.

We had a pub singer in the street. He got his guitar and acoustics out and sang ‘you will never walk alone’ and dedicated to the ‘NHS heroes’
The nearest hospital is 8 miles away.

In the v early days falling out with a colleague over a box of IIR2 masks. Then visiting someone at home who said a friend of a friend had Chinese contacts who could supply face masks at a ridiculously high price and him being surprised that our (NHS) procurement probably wouldn't agree to paying him £5k up front....

Only one person in the toilet block at a time in a restaurant. They were individual cubicles and you had to go in to see if anyone was in the loos and you were in closer proximity queuing in the corridor outside the loos🤦‍♀️

We were told at work to quarantine Christmas presents for days before giving them out and we had no Christmas decorations for a couple of years. We all sort of quietly ignored the quarantining advice🤷‍♀️🤣

2 meters apart and maximum numbers for rooms except our ward office and handover rooms could simply not be compliant so they just didn’t bother with the ward assessments🤣

The whole thing was batshit. I remember going for a walk with DH very early on and not eating lunch as we forgot hand sanitizer and we touched the gates! I worked throughout as a nurse but still went a little crazy occasionally.

DH went to the local supermarket for non essential chocolate, I felt like a criminal and made him shove it all in his pockets so no one would see🫣🤣

Oh jeez the clapping. My neighbour would walk up and down the street banging a wooden spoon against a pot instead of clapping

@MagpiePi 🙋🏻‍♀️That could be me. I drive someone around a lot as part of my job, Im very vulnerable, they're very careless & exposed. I drop them off and forget to remove my mask! I had just began to go mask free,windows open, then the numbers locally shot up with this new variant& I think I'll start masking up on the car again

People in the supermarket standing on the 'stay 2m apart' circles and carefully using them as stepping stones as if they conferred immunity

'Stay home and save grandma' - but grandad could take his chances. Then having saved grandma, if she was coming round for Christmas make sure to open all the windows and finish her off with hypothermia.

Was a Scotch egg a 'substantial meal - not just that that was debated but there were people PAID to debate it.

A neighbour donning a mask to step all of two feet outside his front door to take out recycling.

I don't feel light hearted about it. The country collectively lost its fucking mind and abandoned any common sense.

In the early days dh and I were ‘baking’ our daily paper in the oven for 10 minutes every morning, to kill any nasty little COVID bugs lurking on it. 😂

All the memories are flooding back. I can't stop laughing.

There was a car driving around the next town with a loudspeaker reciting Hail Marys.

A group of teenagers from my town did a silly tiktok saying they had it and were going to kiss everyone and pass it on. Drunk nonsense. It went viral and ended up on the national news.

I remember quite clearly, after a particularly harrowing night shift where we had three on ECMO ( a virtual death sentence ) and someone had collapsed from dehydration, when our Registrar, whom I knew well, said ................. " after all this is over, there will be shed loads of ppl who will tell you, with great authority, that all this was a load of old bollocks ", " a total over-reaction and that the numbers were exaggerated and none of it was really necessary ".

Oh, how we all laughed.

people behaving like the east german stasi and reporting their neighbours for socialising or going out, even worse the online reporting portals the various police services set up. I never forgot who the supporters of this kind of stuff where because they have to be watched covid or not! it felt like an orwellian dystopian nightmare