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.

a friend also timed arriving home after a run just as the clapping was underway… was clapped along the street 🤣

😂😂 This is priceless!

There was a wonderful thread where people were kicking off about 2 friends who had the temerity to stop and talk to each other in a supermarket for a few minutes.

I imagine they not only stopped to talk, they also broke the rules on the arrow system. Heinous

This was repeated this year as the crowd clamoured for bottles of Prime.

And people going on about Easter eggs, even if you were in the shop buying essentials picking up a few easter eggs as well was you killing people.

This place was totally batshit

I remember a thread on here by a mum who asked if she could drive to a beach a few miles away to allow her son, who had SEN, to get some exercise. Multiple people told her she couldn’t, it was against the rules, what if she had a car accident and needed an ambulance, why was she being so selfish? Completely nuts.

On 1st March so a good 3 weeks before lockdown I went on a train to a textiles lesson with a weaver and came back with an inkle loom (a big wooden thing about 2 feet by 2 feet by 6 inches). Half the trains were cancelled and on the way back a load of us were crammed standing into the lobby at the end of the carriage including one person who was coughing and clearly ill, but at that point we had been told we couldn’t get covid if we kept far enough away from people so I was using this damn loom to hold out in front of me to stop people coming within 50cms or whatever the ridiculous distance was we were told would magically protect us.
When I was ill a few weeks later (which in retrospect was almost certainly covid though I didn’t realise at the time) it didn’t occur to me I might have caught it on the train because my magical loom had ensured I hadn’t been that close to anyone.

Someone on Mumsnet asking permission from her fellow posters as to whether or not she would be 'allowed' to pick up some eye liner while waiting for her prescription in Boots.

I also remember some pensioners being moved on from a bench on the sea front by the police

You can't make this stuff up

Hindsight is wonderful, especially backed up by all the knowledge we have gained since.

But it was truly terrifying in the beginning, because - and people forget this - we had no defence against it, it was brand new, and we knew nothing about how it spread or what the effects were, or how to treat it.

Can you remember the tv pictures of coffins in the streets in Italy? The numbers of dead each day in the UK in the thousands?

Keeping people apart until we understood what would stop the spread, and how it could be treated, was the only sensible option. It’s easy to forget now why we did things, because now we know (many of) the effects and have effective vaccines and acquired immunity.

The clapping and, less lighthearted, my naive tiny glimmer of hope right at the beginning that the government were at least trying to do the right thing.

(When they were really partying, laughing at us and stealing public funds for their own accounts.)

I had a friend who was complaining that she had to stay at home because she went to Waterloo once and apparently someone in her vicinity had covid.
I just said 'why do you even have the app? Just delete it'. It was like a lightbulb moment.

We got shouted at for talking to someone, socially distanced, outside Aldi. This other customer got really arsey, like covid was going to infect him by walking past us. He complained and someone from the store came outside and told us to move. Absolute batshittery.

Lockdown amnesia is really odd. People talk about “2 years of lockdown” when in total we had 16 months of restrictions in England so not full lockdown - which was probably about 9 months in total, for most people.

Does anyone remember the Dalgona coffee fad? Not as widespread as sourdough starters or banana bread, but for a while all my friends on facebook were making this utterly vile drink from instant coffee (that they'd probably been on an illegal non-essential extra trip to the supermarket to purchase! 😜)

I remember people on here insisting you shouldn't have a bbq in your garden either because if someone was ill in bed with the window open the smoke would make their covid worse.

Banging saucepans and setting off fireworks in broad daylight during the Orwellian clap

I remember that one too.

And the absolute pile on when someone dared post that they picked up an Easter Egg at the shop while buying milk.

Sorry but Dalgona is DELICIOUS!

Oh God the insanity! Not being able to visit my 94yo dying mother at Christmas, because I might give her a disease which -might kill her? She's 94!

The clapping - never did it. Never saw any FB posts about not doing it either.

Worked throughout. My NDN told me he was 'furlonged' (sic) - when I raised an eyebrow, he told me 'I'm vulnerable. I'm overweight and a smoker' Yes mate, and 3 years on, you are still fat and a smoker. If you can't be bothered to look after your own health, why should anyone else?

The posts on here were hilarious. I remember a poster asking if it would be allowed to organise to 'join a queue outside fucking Tesco, at the same time as a friend, so they could chat' from 2 meters away. She was told NO!

The screens. The masks. Bubbles. Tiers. All useless. When I suggested that in fact we all ought to be boosting our immune systems (you know, the thing that will ACTUALLY make a difference to you living or dying if you catch it) and get out in the lovely sunshine (remember that lovely summer?) get fresh air, not sit in a dark room watching Netflix and storing up mental and physical health issues for the future, I was told I was 'selfish selfish selfish'.

The whole key worker thing was weird and it was divisive - in my job I actively help people and I'd like to think contribute to society but I definitely felt like a second class citizen who was stuck at home, couldn't pop the kids into school or go into a place of work, but instead was lumped with homeschooling ontop of remote working and being isolated. My sister works in oncology and said she pretty much went about her normal life, going into work, seeing actual people and patients, going to tescos on the way home etc, her kids were in school although obv that was mostly babysitting. I know working in a hospital she was more at risk but tbh I was jealous of her freedom at the time and she says other than fewer patients it was all pretty normal for her wheras I felt like a bomb went off in my life.

Yes, it took a while to work out it wasn’t being spread by touch. I remember sharing an article which described someone going into a lift and turning out to have caught it from the air from the person before him who wasn’t even in there at the same time. And the restaurant with the map of who had caught it, and it was the people sitting downwind of the infected one.

I was classed as a key worker doing admin for a company in the supply chain for the utilities. We were not geared up to work from home so worked split shifts in the office. It was so strange seeing people on social media quarantining mail, yet we were handling paperwork daily.

There was someone on a local Facebook group who used to make comments about anyone driving their cars ‘too often’

Anyone who worked for the NHS in any capacity (even when working from home) taking advantage of special shopping hours and other NHS offers.

Oh god, the mad phone calls from test and trace. When my son tested positive, they rang and were insisting I gave them the address of everywhere he'd been. After I'd had to google the address of his school, our local costa, our local supermarket (on my phone, while they were presumably sat at a laptop) and the place where he went to Beavers (which they insisted wasn't on their system because it was relatively new and expected me to somehow come up with a different address that was) I decided he hadn't been anywhere else...

Hindsight is wonderful, especially backed up by all the knowledge we have gained since.

I know some people don't believe this but there were people who all thought it was batshit at the time, they didn't need hindsight. Chris Whitty was always very clear that "for most people this is a mild illness" but for some reason people didn't want to hear that.