It's been five years since the pandemic and I have questions

[BaggyTrousing]

• will Paddington ever be investigated for his role in the departure of our dear old queen?
• was the woman who wrote "and the people stayed home" ever taken to task for her contribution to the awfulness?
• what about that nurse who was roaring about bread in a supermarket car park? Hopefully shunned and avoided at least
• how do you all feel now about protecting the NHS?

I regret getting the jab but it was a condition of returning to work.

It’s a very divisive/emotive subject. People who didn’t get it were labelled granny killers.

Omg I want a Paddington Tarot deck now

I am someone who is CEV, and I had pretty much the same attitude as your dad. Flu is just as lethal if you 're CEV so I was quite philosophical about it. That said, as a former ME sufferer I was a little uneasy about the prospect of long covid.

Ooh I love to see a good silencing tactic at work - this was employed really extensively during covid. It was very effective too. As soon as someone talked about legitimate issues such as childhoods and education being taken away, or people dying through isolation, someone would pop up and shut them down with hectoring references to covid deaths. Because somehow deaths through covid were more important than any other death or suffering. It's an interesting trick. I'm not sure it works so well anymore though.

I concur wholeheartedly.
It is simply “Barney” or “Bar-nud CAss-le” to all of us in it.

I wish I had never gotten the covid jab, made me so ill with inflammation. Never stopped me getting covid either (had it at least 5 times). It never impacted how badly I was affected by covid either.

And they’re still trying to get me to have another shot- even though finally they seem to agree that it badly affected me. Tossers,

Oh and I also remember getting my arse handed to me on here when I opened a thread questioning the wisdom of spending so much on the Nightingale hospitals that were opened up to deal with Covid patients. They would have required thousands of staff members at a time when the NHS was massively understaffed but this seemed to go over the heads of a lot of people. In the end they lay empty for months and were then decommissioned/repurposed. £500 million well spent.

Exactly- I missed the last two years of my Dads life during which he went rapidly downhill with dementia, my son last saw him in March 2020 shortly before he was removed from hospital and shoved in a care home with no family able to visit. His room was fairly bleak for those two years as the home never allowed us to take much in, my son was never allowed to visit so never saw his beloved grandad again. Still my dad got covid twice. I had to effectively force myself into a care home to be with him as he died (luckily it was a weekend and the staff turned a blind eye).

Covid gave an exclude for a lot of people to be on power trips and be jobsworths.

I’m not even going to start on the tossers in A&E preventing people who needed accompanying being refused, I have ptsd (caused by the nhs), this makes me unable to advocate for myself in most nhs situations- yet I was simply shoved out into a corridor alone.

All this shit about NHS staff suffering the most during the pandemic is quite frankly an absolute load of martyr bollocks.

I think you're speaking a lot of sense here @MoMhathair and I know nuclear war is a lot more of an extreme situation than the pandemic but I can't help recalling how well the film When the Wind Blows captured the futility of hoping that obeying government instructions to the letter would keep you safe.

It's outrageous that a supposed "friend" gave you grief for speaking to your sister outside in the fresh air! The attitude that mental health was some how less important than the virus really grated on me. I thank God that my therapist was able to continue doing sessions over the phone with me at least for a few weeks and that my G P told me that in her opinion it was important for me to get out and about if I needed to, she didn't think I should shield long term even though I was clinically vulnerable (asthma, diabetes, obesity, under care of social services and carers).

How do we know they wouldn't have died? And what about those who died because of prolonged lockdowns? Did Saint Boris have anything to say about them? (His reply would be "Er.... oh look, Peppa Pig!") Those who did not bother the doctors because they thought it was better for the NHS if they cowered in their homes? Those who killed themselves because their businesses and livelihoods were destroyed in one day in March 2020? It's not just about the exaggerated death porn which the government was bombarding us with every day, along with Boris's staged grovel when the figures supposedly hit 100,000. All that rhetoric on "the deaths that might have happened had lockdowns not happened", as conjured up by fortune-teller Ferguson with his crystal ball, we will never know.

It's not so easy to shut down a discussion now with "what about the deaths?" It might have been possible in 2020, but it isn't now.

One of the positives was that A&E was empty. In and out for a fracture in less than an hour, including X-ray and splinting. I think the staff were grateful to have some work to do.

Ours is still in use. It’s a brilliant facility

My son's GCSEs being cancelled and thinking, that's it- armageddon.
I'm still shocked they cancelled them!

The restrictions around funerals were cruel. 3 people at my mum's funeral...it could have been 6 but then which of the 6 GC should we have banned? At that time there were no "zoom" funerals and my youngest sister had to watch the funeral on facetime. Oh and the "roolz" stated that me, my elder sister and my dad should all go our separate ways after the service. My 83 year old dad who had just said goodbye to the woman he had loved for 60 years, was expected to be at home alone (that was the cruellest restriction of all and one that was totally ignored by us), and all the while we were expected to suck it up and move on because "people are dying dontcha know".

You see I don’t think it is a silencing tactic. (I had to google) 227,000 people died in the uk so I would guess there are a million or perhaps millions who read these threads having lost someone they knew and loved or worked with. I don’t think it’s silencing for them to speak what they are feeling any more than they should feel unapologetic about saying their experience.

I don’t think we have to be at war with each other do we?

Presumably that’s Exeter. 1 out of 7 (NHS England) ain’t bad I guess, despite the wasted £360 million.

Yes that was stupidly unkind. I’m so sorry you and your father and family had that experience.

I had a naughty elderly client who put her house on the market and carried on as normal saying if she was questioned she could say she was out and about on house selling business. Cracked me up

Some of the rules were ridiculous and others were heartbreaking. There was a phone in from a woman whose daughter was in crisis and she called the police to check on her but she had killed herself.

To a degree I think some of the guidelines now are also ridiculous, with heartbreaking results. Long covid is destroying so many lives, nosocomial infections are too high, people hugely reliant on care staff or health services can be treated by covid positive staff, no one seems that bothered by the tens of thousands of children still getting long covid.

I don't think we need to downplay covid, I certainly don't want lockdowns. To do nothing and ignore the research and impacts seems reckless and cruel. It doesn't bode well in preparing for the next pandemic.

As for the Paddington question, he was framed by Truss.

Our family is living with real impacts and I don't share your viewpoint.

I am totally on board with people talking about their experiences around covid. What I'm talking about is calling the thread 'tasteless' or subtly implying hero status ('I spent the period working in an intensive care unit') as tactics to shut conversation down or to imply that the conversation is somehow overlooking the wonderful work of the selfless among us. It was a constantly used tactic during covid - as soon as anyone said anything about schools closing, for example, the immediate response was 'but what about the all elderly people who are at risk?' The two issues, while connected, are actually separate considerations (ie children still need education even if elderly people are at risk) but it was a tactic succeeded in preventing people from looking too closely at the logic and consequences of lockdown decisions by appealing to guilt and judgement rather than anything like a logical thought process.

And while I agree that there is a large number of people directly affected by covid, the number of people affected by lockdown equals the total population of the country. It didn't matter whether you were susceptible to the virus or not, you were going to suffer the consequences of lockdown regardless.

It's also clear that some of the critics of this thread have gone well beyond their own experience. We've had a poster claim there's no cathartic humour possible, apparently on behalf of 60 odd million people.

But it is tasteless to that poster? I don’t see why she has to hide that. Presumably all the people laughing about some of the more crazy parts of those years know that they will be read by people who might find it upsetting. We don’t have a right to upset people without being made aware of it any more than we have the right to stop people from upsetting us.

The unshakeable belief people have that Scientists and ‘people in authority’ are always 100% correct is one of life’s enduring mysteries. I read an article with Anthony Fauci and he was asked about the early days of the pandemic when he released a statement clearly saying masks were useless, would not stop transmission etc and then of course his message completely changed. He basically replied “yes I got it wrong. Scientists always get things wrong because we only know what we think we know and we make decisions based on the data we have at the time. So a lot of the time we make decisions based on incomplete information”

I wish more people understood this and also understood that it’s ok to question things, to think critically, to not automatically follow everything the government or scientists tell you.