Evidence of the pandemic?

[LaceWingMother]

Just idly wondering whether it's clear from any aspect of my life that the covid era ever happened.

Fortunately, no one I knew died or became seriously unwell from it, DH and I don't work from home because of it, DC now going through secondary school as normal, I didn't make any large purchases linked to it (one friend built a home office and a feckless neighbour bought a now-neglected dog). Apart from a few face masks stuffed in a drawer and forgotten about, I don't think there's any evidence of it in the house.

Does the impact of the pandemic appear in your life now?

I’m a senior ICU nurse and I work in one of the first hit, then worst hit units in London. I was at work at least 5 x 12 hour shifts a week. It was carnage but at least I felt I was doing something useful.

Weirdly I remember very very little from those shifts except the AMAZING efforts and camaraderie of the fantastic team I work with. They all deserve medals. I think in terms of most of the patients we lost, and the lives that were changed, I’ve blocked it out.

Even writing this upsets me. I’m sure it’ll come back to bite me one day but if you knew me you’d never know.

Thankfully my DC loved the lockdowns and thrived (undiagnosed SEN for 2 of them) so I’m massively grateful for that.

No one close to me died but two were very sick in ICU, one has significant long covid and had to take early retirement which she hates.

I hope to God we never see anything like this again but the way this planet is going I don’t hold out much hope.

Love you all of you who lost people. If any of them were in ICU please know that certainly in my unit they were never allowed to die alone, we were with them even when you were not allowed to be.

so many of us were in a high state of anxiety,
i felt like crashing my car on my way to work due to the anxiety.
my poor dm, home alone, but we got through it, i visited weekly and did her shopping, she telephoned friends and went out every day for a walk, i ordered puzzles for her from ebay!

Not for long :( It's clearly a strong desire amongst most CEOs to make hybrid the norm, and then 5 days in the office again.

Whilst I appreciate it may be something to do with it being easier to manage people, I think a lot of it has to do with psychology. It gives upper management a sense of superiority & control over their underlings when they know all of them are having to commute sometimes long times to come into a central location, which their view as their little kingdom. They don't get that same buzz when everywhere is off camera and spread all over the place.

WFH for me, we left our office in March 2020 and never returned. It's been life changing for me, much less stress.

My friend jumped down the QAnon conspiracy theory rabbit hole during that time and it definitely changed our relationship to the point I didn't expect it to survive.

Thankfully, no. The only thing that the pandemic era gave me was a deep and abiding hatred of Nicola Sturgeon, and I didn't exactly adore her anyway. I don't have kids, but I really felt for people who did during that time. To this day, I still don't believe that we were locked down for the best part of eighteen months (on and off) Never again.

Thank you for everything you did, you are a wonderful person 💜

I got away very lightly during covid but what changed for me personally is those lazy Sunday mornings or the few days around Christmas when everyone is moping about in PJs. I used to love those moments but now it mentally sends me back to lockdown and I get really stressed. The 3rd lockdown in particular was so hard. I also never lost all the weight I gained, yes that's uo to me but I would never have gained so rapidly if I wasn't stuck indoors extremely stressed for so long.

They have all been taken down where I am. My local post office used to have place markers on the floor which told you where to stand, and they left them there for an absurd amount of time, but they finally removed them early last year.

I was one of the lucky ones during covid, had all my family here, nice garden and lived near the beach so walking was good etc

BUT

sister in law has long covid

dd was the sickest I have ever seen her and i was very frightened at the time, she did well in her A levels but would have done better if she had taken her exams

ds1 and his partner had a bit of a breakdown, struggled with anxiety and depression and had to come back to our house for the first lockdown. I still feel guilty that I didn’t realise and didn’t let them come home earlier

dr appointments are virtually impossible now, its as if they don’t want to see people in person anymore and i think that has long term consequences for many people

dh and i work (mainly) from home now, I started the job in march 2023. i was not working between june 2019 and November 2021

I did not partake in judging people who did or did not wear masks or who broke certain rules but I did not like the way it became ‘them and us’ for some people, I do think that caused damage

i do have masks and anti bac and tests around the house….really ought to through the anti bac away, it probably won’t work now

Fully remote at the moment with a few trips to the office, mainly at my choosing.

It won't last. Once it finishes, I'll likely be forced to commute 2 -3 hrs every day to find any half decently paid work given the direction so many CEOs are going in. I'm really not looking forward to again sacrificing 10 - 15 hrs of my free time, unpaid just to get to work. 15 hrs is in itself 2 days working ffs.

The off shoring argument is ridiculous. Any other country that professional jobs can reasonably be offshored to probably has higher wages than the U.K. So definitely more flexible working.

Otherwise what I see every day and what will shorten everyone’s lives in the long term is the mess that the public finances are in because of it.

i wonder whether people who blame nicola sturgeon and boris also blame chris whitty and colleagues?
i think he was careful to distance himself, and spoke as a medic rather than a politician, bit of a responsibility

I read your post with interest because I wholeheartedly agree that there is a huge mental health crisis in our young people, and it really worries me. My DS is 13 and he developed anxiety and OCD shortly after 2020 which continues now. He has a lovely set of friends, all lovely boys, but every one of them is dealing with anxiety to a clinical level. All from stable, loving homes. All of them are struggling with school.
But it's made me wonder with my own DS and his friends, is the school anxiety rooted in when their schools shut down, a leftover feeling of fear and disruption. I mean, how frightening the message was to kids that their schools were shut down and locked up.
Or, is it the reverse. Is it that they felt better being at home. And going back to school after 2 rounds of months off of school showed them that school is really hard to deal with on a daily basis, the rules, the restrictions, the number of other kids, the environment, the institution of school life. Did lockdown of schools show them that their lives don't have to be like that, and then when they all went back to school again it felt mentally overwhelming?
I don't know.
I suspect it's a mix of having lived during formative years through the pandemic, lockdown, being bombarded with instructions to keep their distance from loved ones, not to hug people, not allowed to socialise with each other, keeping 2 metres away from other people, all their amenities locked up, empty parks with padlocks on the gates, etc. all mixed up with the impact on our young people of screen use, smartphones and SM influences, watching inappropriate stuff online on their phones, online bullying, etc.
Looking at it objectively, any young person that's gone/is going through the above is going to have mental health consequences.
There is a mental health crisis developing in our young generation.
Meanwhile our nearest CAMHS has a THREE YEAR waiting list now.

Huge sympathy for everyone who had a family member or friend die or incapacitated because of covid.

My question was similar to 'if an alien landed in your house, would they be able to tell there was a pandemic?'. I mentioned how fortunate I feel we were, in my family, for whom lockdowns seemed to offer some respite from the daily grind of life. As others have said, I think we returned to 'normal' too readily and missed the opportunity to develop better mental and physical health for all, and help the planet to take a sigh of relief.

One significant hangover for me is what was once a mistrust of a Conservative government is now a deep loathing. Not because of lockdowns - I can only see those as a good thing and think they were needlessly delayed, in fact - but because of the hypocrisy they displayed, the contempt with which they obviously held the public and the atrocious PPE contracts to their cronies.

A lot of CEOs are old codgers with interests in property. I am supposed to go in two days a week but I don't go in at all. As long as you get the work done a good employer won't care.

I personally don't 'blame' Sturgeon and/or Johnson.

The powers that be buckled under pressure from the population.

That said, I'm glad both of them have since suffered spectacular falls from grace, because neither of them acted in good faith. Johnson should've stuck to his instinct that public health messaging should be robust guidance, not law. And Sturgeon politicised at every opportunity, and used daily briefings as party political broadcasts. I think her behaviour was worse than his (Scotland didn't benefit in terms of lives saved by opting for the go earlier/harder/longer approach to lockdown!).

My daughter was hospitalised and suffered months of brain fog. Nephew was in ITU for weeks and nearly died. On a slightly less serious note my sense of taste has not come back properly.

I had an awful time in Covid but I appreciate a lot of people got through fine or even enjoyed the furlough they had.
As to the lasting impact you asked about I think we lost a lot of connections and things ended that never restarted. My DD's were affected by my having to work in a nursing home and they were alone for some of the day.
There are impacts on one DD's mental health and we had many problems.
I tested positive one morning at work and I had to ring their school at that point to advise and when I arrived to pick them up they were terrified as they thought someone had died they had been snatched out of their classrooms like they had the plague and no one told them why.
I was fine, had Covid loads pre vaccine and post so luckily no lung problems But this was when you had to quarantine for 10 days.
I now work fully remote although I didn't during covid and the care home I was in lost 9 residents early on pre vaccine. I think I carry a lot guilt from the situation I was put in when I couldn't afford to just up and leave and I wasn't furloughed.

Long covid, constantly exhausted and in pain. I can only work 2 days a week as I have to pace myself.
Front line worker, caught it due to inadequate PPE at the beginning of the pandemic

@Everythingisnumbersnow Someone at Director level in a department told me the other day that they worked from home for a bit and hated it and they no longer work remotely in the company.....which got me thinking.....how many senior leadership people out there are forcing many many people back into the office, mainly on the basis that they themselves don't like working from home?

Or how many of them are doing it because they really want an excuse to present to their partner as to why they're away more, why they have to work late nights? One guy I was interviewed by said he wanted to ensure everybody came into the office in the middle of Covid - I'd say it was clear it was because he was a new father and he actually said he didn't want to be at home so much with his wife & child. 😕

What kind of tests are they doing these days regarding long covid? Have you been to rheumatology? Have they tested your blood platelets? Oxygen levels?

Interesting. Physically my house is the same apart from additon of a very well loved dog and a TV in the bedroom.

It gave us a glimpse of both a dystopian society and some sort of utopia. IE no cars,bird noises, nature, physical movements being limited and social gatherings criminalised.

Like most people, I find it an unsettling time to remember.

As a teacher and a parent, I wish we weren't returning to face to face parents' meetings. The efficiency of 5 minutes online is great.

[This isn't my opinion (I have no training or knowledge in the area), it's entirely an observation] Long covid appears to be looked upon with cynical suspicion now. It has superseded Fibromyalgia as the go to diagnosis.

You're a teacher and you don't see evidence of the pandemic's impact in your daily life?