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?

In the country where I live there got to a point where you could have 6 people around but only in your garden, for less than 3 hours and it was verboten if they they had to walk through your house to get to said garden.

We had 7 people around so me and Dh, two couples and a single friend who had been alone for months. We shat ourselves for the 5 hours they stayed that neighbours would dob us in for one extra human and two hours over limit.

We insisted they all had to climb over a 8 foot fence to get to the garden to avoid going though the house and no one was allowed to go for a wee in the house so they were directed to do it behind the big fir tree.

We used disposable everything lest they leave lip and finger cooties on our glassware and crockery.

Fucking ridiculous!! Welcome guests! Climb over this fence, eat off this paper plate, go piss behind a tree and fuck off back over the fence after 5 hours.

Fucking ridiculous!! Welcome guests! Climb over this fence, eat off this paper plate, go piss behind a tree and fuck off back over the fence after 5 hours

You won't have been the only ones. I wonder if the accident rate went up at that time.

Let’s also not forget poor Sarah Everard and how that vile beast was able to use Covid rules to abuse his powers. And the morons on social media who effectively blamed Sarah

the Archbishop of Canterbury getting involved. "Jesus would get vaccinated to protect others." There was a poster (which I think was banned) aimed at children, showing them in superhero costumes.

I've a good idea what Jesus thinks of Justin.

And how his colleagues and bosses treated the women who held an outdoor vigil to make a stand for her.

@isthismylifenow Seriously, that really sounds extreme, though the reasons make sense.
AFAIK, nothing here was "banned". We were just locked down for quite a while (but less than many other countries). Since I am a homebody, it didn't bother me, except for not having much "me time".

I also was extremely lucky that I had stocked up on TP in December of '19. I would try and get a year's worth at one time, or at least 8-9 months worth, so had just bought two cases and had two more already here. Ditto Kleenex and paper towels.

There was someone who posted on here at the time who claimed to be a police officer and said they couldn't possibly read all the regulations so it was fine for it to be her/his interpretation!

I gave them their arse on a plate at the time, as did a few others.

I will never forgive the Met Police for that. Tone deaf doesn't even half way describe it.

The unfortunate thing was, the state and court system were fine with that. When they said what they were doing was fine, they didn't come up with the idea by themselves. A legal shitshow.

Yes that was the end for me too. I remember listening to an interview with a petite lady who had been manhandled and handcuffed. It was unforgivable. And I don't think there has been very much spoken against it since. It still upsets and angers me now.

Weren't they on the spot fines though? I don't think the courts got involved. I think that was the problem.

Courts interpret the law. Not made-up police (or Michael Gove) guidance.

They did when people didn't pay them. The single justice procedure is a scourge. Tristan Kirk has some great work on this.

https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/paul-foot-award-tristan-kirk-evening-standard-single-justice-procedure/

And of course, the people caught up in the single justice procedure for covid fines are disproportionately those who didn't have resources in the first place. Lots of people just paid the £60 for an easy life. There's a poster in this thread who did, and the fine sounds like it was unlawful.

Yes on the spot unless you didnt pay up. Then off to court. I didn't have the cash on me so my choices were go to a cash machine now or pay later but pay more, I think it increased about 20 pounds every so often. I went to the cash machine, me, two dogs, two police officers walked down to the nearest cash machine. The irony didnt pass me by.

I didn't realise they got caught up in that single justice procedure. Not much justice in it.

Quite.

I hadn't realised there were on the spot fines. I wonder how much just got pocketed.

A few comments earlier on in the thread about how everyone knew that lockdowns weren't to eliminate COVID, just spread out the infections. This came up today as a reminder that that's absolutely not what everyone believed. This sort of exchange was very common at the time and formed part of the public shunning and shaming that made it very uncomfortable not to toe the line.

'I'm a policeman, stand and deliver'

do you really think the comparatively senior staff in Downing Street open their own post, particularly unexpected parcels? It would have been some poor low level admin bod, probably in a completely different building.

Even outside of covid and in my low level, fairly uncontroversial civil service job the post is opened by a specific admin staff member, in a specific locked room, to limit damage/retain evidence as much as possible in case of anthrax/bomb/other threat. In fact in many places it's scanned onto the system by admin staff and the original documents sent back or destroyed, so not only are packages never opened by the person they are addressed to but we often wouldn't ever see the original docs, only the electronic versions.

So your friend basically screwed over the equivalent of the cleaners who had to tidy up downing street after the parties. Not really a 'stick it to the man.'

If another strain of covid or a similarly respiratory virus broke out, do you think this country would accept another lockdown?

Hard to say, it's about perception of risk and whether people would be more concerned about that or the huge economic and social cost which we all know about now

Well now I have that in my head.
Thank you baked biscuit.

I really want to find some of the more batshit threads - like a history lesson or something.

Not at this point no. People wouldn't be scared enough or sufficiently accepting of authority to limit their behaviour voluntarily. Or not enough people anyway.

Though I doubt the issue would even arise, because lockdown requires furlough and we blatantly wouldn't be paying for that again so soon. Further into the future, it's hard to say.

Furlough initially was meant to be 8 weeks then went for how long? Over a year for some I think

I always thought they wouldn't do it but in the end the public were sufficiently covid risk averse due to the messaging to demand it

If it's covid-like maybe we'll just avoid the same tactics and not report figures, anything worse and lets hope it's a long time as we spent a huge amount on covid already

The scheme ran from March 2020 to September 2021, though I think it must be a tiny number who were furloughed throughout. The peaks were during the lockdowns, for obvious reasons.

I think we'd probably also see deliberate under-reporting of figures if it were something more dangerous. The priority in that situation would need to be making the public less scared, not more like with covid.