Remember the millennium bug? Yeah, never happened. Not because the threat didn’t exist - the threat was recognised, measures were put in place to prevent catastrophic consequences, years of work was done to ensure information and IT systems were kept safe. But ‘the millennium bug’ became a joke about experts overestimating a threat, about hysteria, about all those silly people who fell for it. Not like us, the genius majority, who knew the whole thing was a load of froth about nothing. Shut up, doom-sayers, you were wrong.
AIBU to think COVID has become this generation’s millennium bug?
The bitterness and bile recently thrown on Mumsnet at anyone who dares to bring up the work they did during the pandemic - junior doctors, for example - has boggled me. It’s not a surprise that people want to put the pandemic behind them - it’s foolish and short-sighted, but it’s what society does. Exactly the same thing happened after the Spanish Flu. Lockdown was shit for the majority and had many, many negative consequences for the economy, people’s mental health, etc. So, I get it - people are bored of talking about it, think it no longer matters to them, want to move on. But the extent to which people are willing to re-write such recent history in order to belittle anyone who doesn’t share their perspective has really taken me by surprise.
As a newly identified virus moving rapidly through the population, SARS-CoV-2 was an unknown quantity in late 2019/early 2020. The response of the WHO to designate it a pandemic and the response of governments to try to control its spread was entirely appropriate. The work of hundreds of thousands of medical professionals meant that the majority emerged from the lockdown periods relatively unscathed in terms of their physical health. Seems like public health policy doing its job, to me.
“Yeah, well, we should have just let old people/the vulnerable/anyone who isn’t me because the sheer power of my ignorance makes me immune to disease DIE, shouldn’t we? Let the rest of us get on with our lives!” WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY, JANET.
The NHS didn’t completely buckle under the strain, which meant significant numbers requiring hospitalisation were able to access treatment. And people are somehow seeing this as proof that we DIDN’T need to be in lockdown? Lunacy.
I’m so fed up with some people, with the benefit of hindsight, minimising the threat posed by COVID. Apart from anything else, it’s fucking insulting to those who died, those suffering with long COVID and related conditions, young people left with lifelong cardiac and respiratory issues, the clinically vulnerable who still have to live with a high level of risk in alongside an increasingly complacent general public. Mavis down the shops is not somehow magically more qualified to comprehend the implications of the unchecked spread of COVID than a swathe of epidemiologists just because she says so and “that’s her opinion!!1!”
If you do disagree, I’m genuinely, grimly fascinated by what you, as an armchair expert on epidemiology and public health, would have advised, in March 2020?
Tldr: a vocal minority (on Mumsnet) persists in claiming that COVID wasn’t a genuine threat to public health; AIBU in wishing they’d stfu?