Almost 4 years ago, Lockdown started (23 March 2020)

[SparrowSally]

Can't believe it's almost 4 years ago. I feel so uncomfortable looking back at that time, we really had no idea what was to come.

I remember threads of people on MN waiting for ambulances for their loved ones and being turned down because the person's oxygen levels weren't low enough. This was before proper testing was available and long before the vaccine. I remember the vulnerable people I supported who died alone in hospital. I remember how sick the first vaccine made me and again how sick I was when I finally caught it.

i had given up my very part time caring job in favour of my other job,
it was a frightening time.
come easter we moved out of our office and were relocated, never went back sadly.

The double standards with everything. The masks littering the pavement. The MN label of "selfish arseholes". The use of the word flocking. "AIBU about those selfish arseholes flocking to the beaches?" (A parallel I remember in the media was people flocking to see the eclipse in 1999, and virtue-signalling pictures everywhere of people wearing eclipse glasses, like the "do your bit, wear a mask" slogans.)

It was pure madness. I heard this from somebody who queued past the late Queen's coffin (and yes, I am on the right thread). They had something confiscated by security. What was it? Hand sanitiser. Yes, you read that right. The irony, moments after the government was ordering everyone to use it all the time, and it was another thing which ran out in shops. Also ironic was the government pleading with people to take strangers (from Ukraine) into their homes, moments after criminalising people for having their own families as guests.

And what worries me now is how easily all this could happen again, and it might not be for health. Now the government have discovered the "success" of frightening the public out of their wits, they will might this method again, when they think we've forgotten about Partygate. (They think we've forgotten about the MPs expenses scandal, while they award themselves extremely generous pay rises, and the rest of us struggle with the cost of living.) They way they executed lockdowns, with no exit plan, no Parliamentary scrutiny, no cost-benefit discussion, and the infantilising campaign of fear "look her in the eyes, and tell her you never bend the rules", deliberate suppression of any dissent from the government narrative, all set an extremely dangerous precedent. The inquiry is a complete sham: there's not been a word about the harms of lockdowns, it's clearly there to cement the narrative of "we should have locked down harder, faster, longer, and we will next time".

Absolutely ridiculous decision that caused more harm than good. And I said that from the beginning.

I remember going to the supermarket to get my food shop during lockdown. Ds had a football that needed pumping up so thought I could pick one up there.
All the toy isles were taped off but the sport isle was still open. I walked down there and was looking for the pump when a member of staff shouted ' excuse me you shouldn't be down there' I looked round and they were stood at the end of the isle shaking their head disapproving of what I was doing. The felt like a criminal so left the pump and carried on with my essential only shopping.

Remember the first lockdown was when it was a new virus already having a devastating effect in China and in Italy (remember that?) with no known treatment, never mind vaccine. Much as I despised Johnson and members of his government I think they did their best based on the medical advice they received. They made some serious mistakes though.

We got sent home the week before the first lockdown started. We now wfh 40% of the time. Things have changed so much since then. I remember thinking that it was really serious when it was announced schools were closing.

There was a mindset of if we locked down for long enough and hard enough and if everyone got the Covid jab then we could finally beat Covid.
Even at the time this was insane and even more so now.

Zero Covid is impossible- it is a global virus there is no way it was ever going to just disappear, even up to 2023 there were politicians talking about zero Covid.

And what worries me now is how easily all this could happen again, and it might not be for health. Now the government have discovered the "success" of frightening the public out of their wits, they will might this method again, when they think we've forgotten about Partygate.

Mmm, I'm never sure about this. I think clearly governments would like to have lockdown available as a future tool, but I don't think we can assume it'll necessarily be doable again. It wouldn't be now. The space where people are afraid enough to want or at least accept significant restrictions but things still keep functioning was never that big even in 2020-2021. It's not there at all now. Which isn't to say it'll never come back, but I don't think we can assume that it inevitably will either.

We would never have been able to have lockdown if there hadn't been significant public willingness to go along with it, it's not something that can be imposed in a society like this.

I mostly got yelled at on here for saying women and children would be harmed more and you couldn’t shut our borders a la NZ

Both turned out to be the case

Mind you people lost it

I had Covid in this date and was horrendously ill. Never known anything like it.
I then actually quite loved locked down. My DC were 10, 13 and 14 and preferred being at home. We got enjoy lots of time together. I already work half from home so that was easy. I did lose half my income and ruined my business but we didn't spend much money. DH had to work in A&E /intensive care so that was stressful.
I missed my parents. But enjoyed all the outside parties we went to. Also my social life is fun but too busy so was good to step back and not go out so much.
I knew it would end at some point so just went with it all. I did lose 2 relatives to covid and not being able to attend their funeral will always be a sadness. I will never forgive the government for allowing people to die alone when they were having fucking parties.

I remember I had split with my ex only 18 months before. My dd were y4 & y8.

I worked full time (and was going through redundancy consultation / restructuring ) and was trying to juggle that and home learning. As my youngest is suspected adhd it was not going well.

My ex lived with his parents so would not come round the house to see the children at all because of the risk.

I rang him in desperation asking him to please support by spending some time video calling youngest to do schoolwork online with her because I could not cope with both things.

I got told that when I had said there was less work for me when he wasn't there I was obviously lying.

I did point out I wasn't trying to do the equivalent of 2 full time Jobs at that point!

I worked in payroll at the time, managing around 100 small business payrolls, and the different reactions of employers was fascinating. Some immediately sent staff home on full pay, others were demanding ways to get rid of staff, or get out of paying them at all. My own employer at the time offered to pay us for up to two weeks, then deduct it from our pay for the rest of the year 😅. This was all in the days pre furlough announcement, and my employer was extremely anti WFH. That lasted a day. The same day I got a job offer, the first words out of their mouth were come to us, we'll pay you for however long this lasts (as the business was shut down) and then start as soon as we open again. I did, never looked back.

Covid affected us - we lost my mum to covid and with the difficulties in hospitals two of my nieces, young women, probably didn't get the appropriate treatment as quickly as they needed resulting in emergency surgeries with significant life changing impacts.

For us, lockdowns were a change, just for a while, with many pros and some cons, but in the grand scheme of things no biggie.

Were they 100% the right decision? Who knows, but in unprecedented times there were not a lot of choices for any country to try. I would rather remember those who tragically died, or are suffering long covid than rehash the inconvenience of staying at home again and again.

All I know as an ICU nurse was that we were overrun with patients, running out of Fio2, running out of sedation and haemofilters. Was the worst time in my >30 year career. Patients admitted with sats of 80% but awake talking, and then dead within 12 hours. Using scuba masks from decathalon as we ran out of CPAP masks.
Horrendous shifts where we’d go from an arrest situation to someone peri arrest, another needing intubation, desaturating, absolutely dripping with sweat in full gown, mask, hat and gloves, glasses steaming up.
We merged with another area, we took over 3 wards, we had 4 times as many patients, stuff was all over the show, could never find it so spent more time looking for it, then none of the bed spaces were really adequate for crit care patients.
I didn’t get Covid til dec 2020 but had a close shave when a pt who tested negative turned out to be positive, we didn’t have to wear masks at that point and they were on high flow Fio2. 10 of us had to self isolate.
I ended up with with long Covid in dec 2020, have a heart issue now as a result. Was obviously a keen runner.
Those questioning lockdown, well for our unit it definitely helped. Numbers dropped like a rock…

The equivalent Friday 4 years ago was when DH brought home his computer and he never went back, now retired. I carried on working as normal as a nurse in mental health. All the community staff went home, the car park emptied and we just carried on with no visitors.

It was a batshit crazy time, hard to recall how scared we all were. I forget we had no masks, no tests, it was all guesswork at first as to whether anyone actually had Covid.

I remember dh popping into Asda to buy me chocolate and me telling him off as it was essential shopping only. I felt so guilty, feels bonkers now!

I can remember our Head Master saying to me on the school playground, no way will we be in Monday - he was right.

Sadly, my friend's Dad was suffering with a stomach bug and started to go downhill, he died within the week of covid. That brought it home to me why we needed to try and protect everyone and the NHS.

We had to isolate from 18th. It was DDs birthday and I hadn't brought any candles for the cake 😂. Had no food in, couldn't get an order and only had one chocolate bar to my name. I didn't speak to another adult until August.

Madness now looking back.

While there were lots of really awful periods I look back on it now and am heartened to see how little time it took for nature to rebalance a little…thinking about stories of the canals in Venice being clear etc. Trying to focus on some positives of what was a really difficult time.

I'm really sorry you experienced that here. Utterly disgraceful. As I said earlier in the thread, I was being treated for cancer during the first lockdown and the medical staff were absolute angels. I'm so sorry you received abuse, particularly here

I remember the 16th March particularly as it was my DH's 50th birthday. He worked from home that day just so we could go for a nice pub lunch and he ended up not going back to the office for about 18 months I think.

On that day we found out our joint 50th birthday trip to Thailand had been cancelled and spent most of the morning on the phone to the travel company trying to work out what if any money we would get back.

Went for our pub lunch and remember chatting about the fact that our brother in law had arrived in Dublin the night before to visit his relatives just as all the pubs in Ireland were shut.

That evening DH got an email from his employers saying that as a precaution they wanted all staff to stay at home for their own safety until they had a clearer picture of what was going on. That was a week before the official lockdown I think.

Whilst - on paper - I had a relatively easy lock down, something that has surprised me is how watching dramas set during the initial days of the pandemic (eg Breathtaking) trigger a sense of panic in me. Looking back at my diary over that time, I felt very much like death was stalking my family, hovering outside, trying to find a way in.

I think there was a bit of collective trauma for us all and, for that reason, I cannot find it in me to be angry at those that panicked and reacted to people walking twice a day or buying easter eggs as ell as bread etc. I think everyone was perhaps more mentally impacted than we realised at the time. And I thin some of that mental impact is ongoing for many people: in one form or another.

What I think it has done, is ruin any chances of a lockdown again for a generation. I agree with pp that it requires public cooperation and I don't think the gov would get that again so quickly. Especially now we all now they weren't following the rules themselves, anyway.

I think everyone was perhaps more mentally impacted than we realised at the time.

I think that's definitely true for a lot of people, not everyone probably but enough. We're seeing the longer term effects now, of both the disease itself and the restrictions.

I remember standing in the sun in the big snake like queue at our big Tesco.

I remember following the rigidly imposed one way system.

Lots of people would sort of loiter in the crisp aisle (the very last aisle at the far end) because the piped music down there was pretty loud. It was like a forbidden happy place!

One week it was reggae and as i went down the crisp aisle Bob Marley, One Love struck up. I couldn't help sort of dancing as i was shuffling along with my trolly pretending to look at the crisps, and i suddenly realised everyone else was too - folk actually smiled at each other and it was a surreal, bizarre but nice moment.

The lockdowns were awful in my profession (vet medicine). We had to see patients in the car park even in the pissing rain, and take animals away from their owners for any kind of examination or procedure. Owners couldn’t be with their pets for euthanasias. The results 4 years later are many many dogs that are petrified of coming to the vets. I saw one yesterday that is almost unhandleable due to fear aggression which stemmed from the covid restrictions. A large proportion of the puppies bought during that time were (understandably) not socialised properly and are hugely anxious and fearful. We also had to reduce to skeleton staff and one vet I worked with had a breakdown after a few months. Horrible times.

Owners couldn’t be with their pets for euthanasias.

We had a dog PTS a little bit later on during a later lockdown. Fortunately, by then the weather was better and our vet was able to do it in the garden with a long line to inject form a distance (after getting her set up). That meant we could sit with her outside while she went. I am so grateful for that, because it would have been so hard to just say goodbye at the car and know she faced the end without us.