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?

What was the footage from Italy thsn?

My autistic kid drinks gallons of milk a week, so three of one thing was tricky, especially as we had people shopping for us as DD (turns out all of us) was vulnerable. Carrying 18 pints of milk (3x6 pints) and the rest of the shopping up the flat stairs was not fun.

Thankfully though, I had my Brexit stash of bog roll.

The relief when someone on here found appendix 1 so we could travel to their dad's house so I didn't have to have two autistic kids 23 hours or so in a two bed flat for months on end.

We still qualified for free COVID and flu vaccinations this year.

That’s more like it!

Roaring?

The tier system was bonkers. We had a country park in ours. DH spotted lots of people there who didn’t live in it (we didn’t care- it was funny). Yet when we cycled a different way, we passed a big sign telling people from our tier to not come any further.

Start of the pandemic ( end of feb time ) they showed coffins lined up somewhere and it was from Italy. Turned out to be old footage of something else.

A keyworker was someone who put their health at risk in 2020 for the good of the country and was considered a worthwhile contribution to society.

Then in 2024 they were considered a drain on society and the cause of inflation for wanting a pay packet to reflect their apparent considered role to society.

Can you tell it still boils my piss!

I live in a city where lockdown went on forever but only half of it was in further lockdown, there were literally redmarks outlining on maps which areas you could go in, some were streets apart!

I remember queuing in a shop to pay and a woman infront of me turned round and said "I work in a school you are too close to me", I just said move forward then!

I remember Idris Elba making a video of having covid and oh the drama of it 🤣

Which I'm sure everyone adhered to!

The thinking behind the alcohol ban was that it was going to free up space in hospitals, due to amount of alcohol related injuries/illnesses. We had stats of how many less people attended Casualty over weekends, and all sorts to justify it.

So if you fancied a glass of red with dinner three times a week, you had to be sure and calculate what you would need and buy it all in that small time frame that we were given. Problem was, no one knew how long the ban would be... and in the end it was lifted after around 4 months iirc. Cigarettes too. Banned. As they polluted the air even more and those around you were breathing in second hand smoke, y'know Covid infested second hand smoke. Honestly, it was quite crazy.

I don't actually drink (or smoke), but I do like to cook with wine. Well we were all stuffed as our first lockdown was mid winter and it was a harsh one. So we were making red wine stews and the likes with grape juice and ginger ale 😂 No one was wasting a drop of alcohol by cooking with it.... If you had wine at home, that was fine. But if you gave a bottle to someone, they couldn't take it as we were not allowed to transport it either. If you were stopped in the roadblock (often) and had a bottle of wine/spirits/cigarettes with you, you would be arrested.

I am in South Africa, and then our scientists discovered the Omicron strain. Lawd, then there was no hope of anything being lifted, but also the rest of the world then clamped down on us even more, we were put onto the red banned list and once again all our flights were cancelled, no one was allowed in or out again without special permissions.

Also, similar to pp. We were not allowed into shops / centres without a mask. If you didn't have one on, you were not allowed in. While in the shop you were not allowed to drop the mask at all. Say you had a sip of water while walking, you would get shunned and reminded not to remove your mask. But if you wanted to go get a cup of coffee at the restaurant in the centre, you could take off your mask when you sat down. 😂 And then you could sit there mask free and watch everyone walking past getting told off for having a sip of water....

Did we ever find out why when the rule NEVER was an hours exercise the media said "your hours daily exercise" in practically every sentence.

I watched the interview it all stemmed from. The minister was being pushed to say how long people should be allowed out and simply said that as 5k is approximately what most people would consider a decent distance and that's about an hours walk he would think most people would be out for that amount of time.

No one anywhere ever said you could only leave your house an hour a day to exercise.

But god yes the judgement on how many times sometime left their house and for how long and what they brought when they were out

I think it came from Gove's estimate. There were people at the time arguing that a minister saying it on telly outweighed the fact that there was nothing in the legislation or guidance about duration, which was heroically idiotic.

Welsh posters have also said that was the rule there, so maybe there were some people elsewhere in the UK who heard about the Welsh reg and didn't realise it only applied there.

It was a crazy time. I remember all the looks and comments I got taking my son to school. My job was on the official key worker list from the government. But obviously people thought they knew better than the government, and decided I wasn’t really a key worker and my son shouldn’t be going to school.

So much of it was absolutely insane. I have two severely disabled kids and one of them just went berserk at the lockdown, he screamed all day and all night. He slapped us for hours every day. His nursery closed completely. Our Paediatrician (in her 70s) cycled around a hospital prescription for a sedative for him. I wrote to the police asking for permission to drive to the other side of the country to stay with my MIL for some support, they said no. I wrote to SS, they said yes, so I told the police I was doing it. DH couldn't be furloughed as apparently he was a "key worker" (he is not - hard to explain but he really isn't).

Then everyone kept saying "we're all in the same boat" over and over. The rage I feel at that phrase!!!!

Yeah we definitely weren’t all in the same boat @OutingUserName some people openly admit now they enjoyed the lockdowns whereas for others it was terrible.

The people in charge seemed to think we were stupid and tbh some people did lose their minds for a bit due to all the scaremongering.

Yes, but you must take your family with you.

The celebs that sang Imagine to cheer up world and were ridiculed for it it - their careers have never really been the same. Not cancelled as such, more sort of sucked dry of that elusive film star essence.

Yeah I remember getting my arse thoroughly handed to me by an acquaintance who I had as a Facebook friend, for posting photos of a bike ride I'd been on. He worked out that from the distances involved I must have been out for more than an hour and that I was therefore a selfish granny-killing superspreader. WTF

I also recall going for a walk with 2 friends when we were technically still allowed to meet up with only one person due to being in the highest tier; we saw a policeman nearby and quickly agreed I would scarper off and pretend to be on a walk by myself so none of us would get in trouble... again wtaf

There was a Facebook group set up where I lived for people who had caught Covid by walking past someone who was jogging. They were planning to campaign to have jogging banned. Madness.

on here I will never forget the lady who was in her own words “overweight” and a smoker so decided she was going to die from Covid and wanted her kids to pick new guardians. Insanity.

100% this! I was expected to do the work of 3/4 people and we ended up having a real bump in profits. Easy to think how. The government was paying the furlough to the other staff at home, walking in the sunshine, gardening and doing DIY whilst the rest of us were killing ourselves and being guilt tripped into “keeping jobs safe so everyone can come back”.

Heard him and tiger king guy where jn it together

At the very beginning of lockdown, I picked up an item in the supermarket, realised it wasn’t the thing I wanted but bought it anyway, I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to put it back on the shelf…🙈

Oh how I miss the vitriol aimed at those of us on furlough.
"My taxes are paying for that"...erm so was ours because we were paying tax on our 80% pay
"Sat around doing nothing whilst we're hard at work"....some of us would have loved to be at work but the government made it illegal for us to do so.
"look at them, not a care in the world"...whilst a great many of us were organising funerals for (in my case both), parents.

I often wonder if any of those posters actually regret being so nasty?

Italy had a horror start to the pandemic. There hospitals and ICU wards were utterly overwhelmed, and people were dying in alarming numbers.

As you surely know, Italy is suffering a dramatic spreading of the coronavirus. In just 3 weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, the virus has reached more than 10.000 infected people. From our data, about 10% of patients require ICU (Intensive Care Unit) or sub ICU assistance and about 5% of patients die. We are now in the tragic situation that the most efficient health system of the richest area of the country (Lombardy) is almost at its full capacity and will soon be difficult to assist more people with Covid-19. This is the reason why an almost complete lockdown of the country has been ordered: to slow down and hopefully stop the contagion as soon as possible. The virus is spreading at maximum speed, doubling the number of infected people in just 2,4 days.

Covid_19: Open letter from Italy to the international scientific community | Left

I remember the crazy of having to teach in a mask, making sure teenagers didn't get to close to each other and then the madness of sending kids home if they sat near a class mate who was off with covid but only if they sat to the side or directly in front of not behind them as the germs couldn't travel backwards 🥴