Response to first 2 UK cases of coronavirus not robust enough

[MissPoldark]

The hotel is still open and accepting visitors. Apparently they weren’t immediately informed that 2 of their guests had been diagnosed.
All public areas should have been deep cleaned but there is no suggestion this has been done.

No details are being released about where the tourists had visited (because of “patient confidentiality” - bureaucracy is dangerous) How on earth can anyone in York know whether they’ve been put at risk?
How can they trace possible contacts without making this information public?

This is such a wild thread. I remember my husband telling me he was worried. He waited until after our baby was born in late December as he didn’t want to panic me. He shouldn’t have worried - I told him he was being daft and catastrophising. And less than two months later...

this is why we should not take mumsnet as gospel

I think it's likely that that the virus was circulating in the UK for a good two-three months before these 'first cases' were identified.

I remember this time last year there were a couple of really informative threads which helped me to get prepared. We knew it was coming.

There were a lot of posters who thought we were crazy and over reacted and so many comments of 'not another covid thread'.

People definitely were worried at the point this thread was started. I remember being on a long train journey the week of this thread (the last time I was on a train, as it turned out) and feeling uneasy because someone near me was coughing.

@ZaraTheWonderDog

I think it's likely that that the virus was circulating in the UK for a good two-three months before these 'first cases' were identified.

I think that's a distinct possibility.

My husband became ill with a virus in late January' which if I had it now I would definitely be having a test - sore throat, cough, fever, exhaustion. I caught it from him a few days later - sore throat, cough, wheezing, fever, loss of taste and smell, loss of appetite. I had it slightly worse than my husband did and was in bed for 3 days and didn't eat for 4. I almost went to the doctor 2 or 3 weeks later thinking I had a chest infection, but it cleared up by itself. My adult daughter also caught it, but her primary aged children didn't seem to.

My husband caught it from his workplace. Later it emerged that the area he worked in was a CV hotspot. 7 of his colleagues went to their doctor with suspected chest infections at the time and the first person hospitalised in the local hospital was from his office. Lots of the people in his office had been to Italy to ski and became ill afterwards.

When we became ill it honestly never occurred to us that it might be CV. I wonder what I would have thought if I had read this thread at the time. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

@Sarahandduck18

I remember being frustrated last February that no one seemed to be taking CV seriously enough.

Even people who did think like that then though I do t think could have predicted how it turned out.

I get frustrated that people are still not taking it seriously, even after a year!

The "I want to live my life!" brigade.

My DH was also another one who was ill in dec / jan . He is very fit, works out every day, rarely Ill and never smoked .
He had a video call with a doctor for antibiotics who kept asking if he smoked or if he ever smoked as it looked like a really nasty chest infection.

Then when we were on holiday in Feb he lost his sense of taste and smell for about 10 days .
I remember him saying if an elderly person got this it would finish them off
He wasn’t well overall for about 3 months he could do every day stuff but it left him knackered

I also built up stocks before the panic buying. We never ran short of anything because of my foresight

I neither built up stocks nor panic bought. We never ran short of things either. At most, I went shopping early after shelves had been restocked and before the panic buyers turned up. There was never a genuine shortage of goods.

I remember my initial thoughts:
January 2020 is was completely naive to it and had no clue of what COVID 19 would become.
First half of February I was still very much under the impression that all would be fine.
Second half of February I understood there was a major problem but was still naive enough to think it would be like swine flu or such - it would sweep the nation but life would carry on as normal.
Late February when Italy and such was really crashing down I was getting it.....
March I was really grasping what was happening but clearly not entirely....I carried on as normal until around the 10th?
Then the reality hit me (I was working in a school and everything was now starting to get cancelled)
Even when the schools closed I honestly thought we would all be back a week or two after Easter, when it became clear half the children wouldn’t be back till September I remember just thinking how naive I was.

I don’t mind that going in the history books. Please let there be light at the end of the tunnel

The posts that really stand out to me are the ones saying that listing the places that infected people had visited would cause hysteria. I'm in Melbourne and this is exactly what we do everytime we have a case. Every public place they have visited and the times they were there are listed in the newspapers along with the guidelines of what to do if you were there at the same time. This ranges from low risk places the advice is just to monitor for symptoms to high risk places like a restaurant where everyone has to isolate for 14 days.

Yes I was very concerned about this then too and was laughed at and ridiculed at work by my team mates.

I eventually got so worried I asked to WFH which was not the norm 2 weeks before actual lockdown and was not allowed, and people thought I was over the top and crazy, then we all got sent home abruptly 2 weeks later.

My dismissive colleagues who thought it was all blown out of proportion still think this.

Weird reading this now. I ignored it at first but by end of February was starting to get it so by the time I developed a cough just before mid March (after DS’s teacher got back from Venice and also the school ski trip to N.Italy )and we had to isolate for 2 weeks and all 4 of us were ill we had everything we needed. Very grateful to MN for that.

Little did I know that I would still be wheezing and not back to normal all these months later.

I’m convinced DD18 had it in November 2019.

She was absolutely floored one morning by a horrific illness. She couldn’t get out of bed and had the chills. Could barely breathe. She rang me on her phone from her bed highly distressed. She couldn’t drink much as her throat was agony. Sounds fluey granted but it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. What I found most bizarre was that her face swelled up and she looked like she’d gained a stone overnight just looking at her face.

Her symptoms tailed off after a couple of days but she had a horrendous cough for 2 weeks after. She had an uncontrollable coughing fit (she says it was like the coughs where your chest forces it out but it was unrelenting) at college that lasted 10 minutes (she excused herself from the room) and the teacher had to go and check on her in the bathroom because the whole class could hear her hacking her lungs up and were worried it was a serious medical emergency.

@Skyr2

Yes I was very concerned about this then too and was laughed at and ridiculed at work by my team mates.

I eventually got so worried I asked to WFH which was not the norm 2 weeks before actual lockdown and was not allowed, and people thought I was over the top and crazy, then we all got sent home abruptly 2 weeks later.

My dismissive colleagues who thought it was all blown out of proportion still think this.

My husband's office was closed 2 weeks before lockdown. As soon as the man I mentioned was taken to hospital and confirmed as CV they sent everyone home. That was when it hit home to us.

To be fair though my husband's mum died just before Christmas and was buried in the latter part of January and we weren't really concentrating on the news at the time. I do remember our grandson mentioning it when we were driving in the car and we reassured him that it was in another country and not to worry because we were safe here. Turns out a 5 year old was more ahead of the game than the adults in his life.

This is fascinating and depressing reading.
I deregistered not long after this, as I found reading Mumsnet was making me doubt myself and feel awful for worrying - I can see why now!

Dd1 I suspect had it end of November 2919. We went to a festival that was so packed the marshals were being abused and we stayed to chat to one for a while because he was quite distressed.

Dd1 went down that day 26/11 I think. High temp for a week and very weak. No other symptoms.

I work closely with nhs staff. They all got emails in feb maybe earlier saying that the numbers of cases in China were being minimised and it was 90k then.

Nhs staff we're getting itchy about this when we first heard about China. It made us think about patients we had been looking after in November/December that had respiratory problems that we couldn't treat. We were fighting it before it had a name.
I bought face masks for the family and was laughed at.
I wore a face mask to go shopping and was stared at.
How things have changed.
We haven't learnt from history. That was even stated back in 1919.
Hopefully future generations will take note.

I almost had a breakdown in Feb as I felt like I was losing my mind as I was concerned about COVID but nobody else was taking it seriously. I honestly felt like I was going insane and it was so scary. Some of my friends laughed at me for avoiding busy places and using hand sanitizer back then. I felt like I was watching a car crash and I couldn’t stop it.

Wow, this takes me back.

25th January 2020 we'd gone out for breakfast and the TV in there was on BBC News talking about the virus situation in China. I remember DS talking about how this was bad news for the Chinese Grand Prix, and saying "Oh, that's not for nearly 3 months yet, it'll either all be forgotten by then or we'll have bigger things to worry about than racing!"

Seems like another lifetime now!

I had first heard of possible issues in Wuhan in between Xmas and New Year 2019 and was vaguely following.
I was certainly worried by the time this thread was started as my Amazon record shows me ordering masks on 29 Jan.

Looking at the original part of thread it’s a good indication of where we were with it

Imagine if in the midst of these posts everything had slammed down with very few cases

@TimeMarchesOnNeverEnding

YABVU. Do you really think the government wants to risk this spreading? They are 100% doing everything they need to. Threads like this are massively unhelpful and just get people worried for no reason.

In hindsight, this comment is both hilarious and very sad...

have asked for my post to be deleted as this is a bloody zombie thread.