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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

To ask what the most COVID bonkers thing you did about

794 replies

Jay36 · 13/01/2022 21:42

First off this is not a COVID denier thread.

But I’m wondering what was the weird things you did at the start of the pandemic because you were worried about CV. I’ll go first;

Left my shoes outside the house as was worried about bringing the virus ‘in’ in case someone had coughed on the pavement !

Bleached the door handles daily.

Feel like I was a bit crazy now 😂😭

OP posts:
Chestnut23 · 14/01/2022 01:23

Singing happy birthday twice when washing hands!

PossiblyDreaming · 14/01/2022 01:40

I remember feeling like an absolute rebel and convinced I’d end up being shamed on my town Facebook page for going to the co-op that wasn’t closest to my house but going to the one in town instead. This was after I’d already been on my state permitted daily walk.

thefirstmrsrochester · 14/01/2022 01:49

My 2 ds had part time jobs in essential retail. I got a letter from my MP stating that I was allowed to drive them to work even although it was outwith the constituency where we live.

MollyBloomYes · 14/01/2022 01:57

Well for the first few months of 2020 I was massively sceptical so that was fairly stupid. Wasn't the only one in my office though (community healthcare). We'd all seen the hysteria over swine flu and bird flu etc and then not have it amount to much so honestly thought covid was going to go the same way.

Then when it did become serious I agreed with my parents that they'd have my children stay with them 'until this was over' to keep them safe while I was working at the hospital. That lasted about two weeks before rapidly realising that this wasn't going to be a quick flash in the pan. Can you imagine if we'd stuck to that, I wouldn't have seen them for two years!

Snoozer11 · 14/01/2022 02:00

Not what I did, but..

Before any lockdowns, when it hadn't really reached the UK but was starting to affect other countries in late Feb / early March, I was on the train to work one morning and we pass through an airport.

The windows were open, and on steps a woman in full face mask and with hand sanitizer. A real novelty at that point as everything was still normal for everyone and no one could foresee what was around the corner.

But once on the train, she went around and CLOSED every single window, and sat in the seat directly opposite, facing me. There were plenty of other seats available.

I will never understand how someone who was obviously ultra paranoid about it at that point, decided to sit as physically close to another person as possible and make the space as poorly ventilated as she could.

Nuts.

mrswishywashy1 · 14/01/2022 02:03

@Messilia

Took my teenage son grocery shopping with me when the first lockdown came in and everyone was panic buying

Not to help carry it, but in case he needed to fight Grin

This made me laugh and laugh 😂
batmanladybird · 14/01/2022 02:05

@WoodenReindeer

Washing shopping. Shielding. Anitbac for after touching gates when walking.
I did this with the gates
Veeveeoxox · 14/01/2022 02:28

Feeling irrationally angry at seeing the elderly walking outside or doing their shopping in lock down. I would think to myself we are locked down because we are protecting you and you are walking around !! I feel ashamed I thought that .

Ireallycantthinkofagoodone · 14/01/2022 02:34

I didn’t really do anything other than mask and hand sanitiser - certainly didn’t bleach door handles or wash the shopping.
I did follow all the rules though, and certainly stepped to the side to avoid being close to others on my daily walk.
I remember Dr Sarah Jarvis on the Jeremy Vine radio programme talking about how she dealt with her post……left on mat for 2 days, washed hands, opened envelope , washed hands, retrieved letter, washed hands……..blah blah blah
And, she said we shouldn’t wear masks, because we wouldn’t put them on properly and we would touch our faces, fiddle with the elastic…….blah blah blah.
I actually lost all respect for her. I know Covid was new to us all, but her pontifications were ridiculous.

stayfaraway · 14/01/2022 02:36

@Messilia Grinthis reminded me of when we recently had that recent petrol crisis and I was accompanying my sister to buy fuel in case she got into a fight with someone in the petrol station forecourt and I can help her out as it was literally like the Wild West in some petrol stations.

Isntitironic1 · 14/01/2022 02:39

[quote AllThePogs]@00100001 The government were sending texts telling people not to go in their garden and saying they could sit by an open window. People were also told to pack a bag in case they had to go into hospital. Getting those kinds of daily texts was going to scare people silly.[/quote]
I don’t think they were off the government 🤔 probably scam messages

lapasion · 14/01/2022 02:56

Told DS off for touching a tree while we were out on our daily walk.

camperqueen54 · 14/01/2022 03:03

This thread is an eye opener. I literally just wore a mask and used hand sanitizer and that was it. I did see some crazy behaviour though.
Husband and I were walking in woods and a guy literally made his whole family climb the side of a steep embankment to avoid passing us on the footpath.
Going to be so many kids with health anxiety now! Crazy stuff!

1forAll74 · 14/01/2022 03:37

I never did anything special except to wear a mask in any shop, never bought any santisiser stuff, or never bothered about having stuff delivered to the house, I just got it in the house, and put things away straight away.

Heymumma29 · 14/01/2022 03:43

Disinfecting food shopping, buying 1kg flour for 4.50 from an overpriced farm shop because supermarkets had none, told my daughter she couldn’t pick up sticks on our walk just in case they had the virus on them 😩

FiddlefigOnTheRoof · 14/01/2022 04:07

Lots of these weren't crazy at the time, as we didn’t know so much about contagion, no one knew how bad/not bad the shortages would be, and it was morally right to try to follow the rules.

greenteafiend · 14/01/2022 04:34

Not much.

I did do some surface cleaning in the beginning because you were "supposed to" (before they figured out it was mostly a waste of time) and also it occurred to me that they were probably filthy anyway as I'd never cleaned a door handle in my life previously.

But I'd always been interested in the history of disease and have over the years done a lot of reading about previous plagues and endemic diseases. I really do think that gave me a lot of perspective and helped me to work out when and how much to panic.

When you've read up about a lot of past pandemics and disease outbreaks throughout history, you realize that:

a) Pandemics of novel viruses that populations are immune-naive to do have the potential to overwhelm society and are not just "seasonal flu."
b) Pandemics of respiratory viruses nearly always have an endpoint.
c) There is no clear division of "pandemic" versus "normal" viruses, because we spend our lives swimming in viruses which once featured in pandemics. The virus which caused the so-called Russian Flu in 1889-1890which was actually probably a coronavirus as wellnow causes colds as a mild respiratory bug and nobody really worries about it. It's mostly about how immune-naive the population is, or isn't, to any particular virus.
d) Pandemics are not going to be over in two weeks or even two months. So any behaviors that you're planning on doing are probably a bit of a waste of time unless they are things that you can actually do for two years or so. It is a marathon not a sprint. "Stay at home isolated for two years, crying hysterically and mopping every surface with Dettol" is not a sustainable behavior.
3) Reactionsand overreactionsto the threat of disease, can also be dangerous and can create health problems of their own.

DockOTheBay · 14/01/2022 05:53

I debated for hours whether it was acceptable to go for a runandtake my children out for a walk on the same day
I remember a thread on mumsnet about this. A woman with a child with learning difficulties asking whether it would be ok to take her outside more than once. They lived in the middle of nowhere and could walk around a field or something. The consensus from most was that it was absolutely NOT allowed and they would infect half the town by touching styles and gates. I feel so sorry for that woman and everyone else who came in here looking for advice and was shouted down for being selfish and thoughtless.

onemorecupofcoffeefortheroad · 14/01/2022 06:32

@greenteafiend those facts about pandemics are really interesting - and actually quite reassuring.
This thread should be in classics - it's almost an historical document!

garlictwist · 14/01/2022 06:34

I didn't really do anything particularly bonkers, never sanitised my shopping or bleached anything etc.

But I do remember in the first lockdown I went to read my book on the grass on my street and as I sat down I wondered if there could be covid on the grass and how I could tell.

Livetolive · 14/01/2022 06:37

I think we should nominate this thread for mumsnet classics, it's a really interesting record for social history in the future. I did many of the things on this thread, but it was all so surreal I'd actually forgotten.

To add one I've not read yet: we wore dog poo bags on our hands when opening gates due to contamination fear. My 2 year old used to wander round the house with a nappy disposal bag on his hand 'playing' at going for a walk Sad

onemorecupofcoffeefortheroad · 14/01/2022 06:40

@DockOTheBay

I debated for hours whether it was acceptable to go for a runandtake my children out for a walk on the same day I remember a thread on mumsnet about this. A woman with a child with learning difficulties asking whether it would be ok to take her outside more than once. They lived in the middle of nowhere and could walk around a field or something. The consensus from most was that it was absolutely NOT allowed and they would infect half the town by touching styles and gates. I feel so sorry for that woman and everyone else who came in here looking for advice and was shouted down for being selfish and thoughtless.
I remember that - posters were horrible to her and I thought at the time how ridiculous it was.

The idea that she couldn't go out twice in one day to walk around an empty field adjacent to her house in the middle of nowhere where she rarely saw anyone without infecting someone with COVID was nuts but she was treated like a pariah for even considering it - and with a total lack of understanding or empathy.

LondonQueen · 14/01/2022 06:42

Washing my shopping and and driving with a mask on, in my own car! I now realise how stupid I must have looked.

Devonmaid7292 · 14/01/2022 06:52

Opening gates and then getting my sanitizer out straight after or trying to open gates using anything but my hands!

Getting so scared everytime someone coughed at work.

VaccineSticker · 14/01/2022 06:57

The oddest one was when some countries were spraying the streets with disinfectants. 🤦🏻‍♀️Streets aren’t common touch points like door handles, and no one is going to lick it. It was a pure waste of resources.
Some things we did might seem odd now but they weren’t odd at the time as we didn’t know much about CV19. People were getting severely ill and we had over 1000 deaths a day. People we’re genuinely worried - there were no vaccines and no anti virals then.

Eventually in few years’ time we will understand more about Long Covid but we will have a thread about why we let so many people get infected before we got a vaccine.