To ask if anyone else feels like the covid era is a bad dream

[23rMarch2020]

Whenever I think of 2020 or 2021 it just doesn’t feel real at all. The lockdowns for months on end, the clapping for the NHS, the track and trace system, entire school years being sent home because a single case was discovered, panic buying, people developing intricate methods of sanitising their shopping, public shaming of rule breakers, religious holidays being stopped at very short notice. It’s all so bizarre to think of that this was in our country so recently and, really, there’s nothing to stop any of it happening again. In so many ways it just feels like a different world, my DS who had his GCSE’s cancelled is about to go off to uni (if he gets the grades 🤞) and my then little year 7 DD is doing her own GCSE’s next year. I guess my Aibu is to ask if anyone else feels so totally disconnected from that era to the extent it’s all like a bad dream?

I do think people have gone mad. Surely we can all see now that zero Covid was a ridiculous policy? A virus will do what a virus will do. By artificially suppressing it we actually made it come back stronger and this made cases sky rocket = more pressure on the NHS..

All lockdown then all eat out to help out! Great ideas.

Close all the schools for months. Then everyone in together in September - all schools, workplaces, unis. Brilliant ideas!

We’d have been better to let it bubble away over that first summer. From April onwards..

I would have supported a ‘lockdown if you want’ policy. The rest of us could have made our own decisions in what risks we were prepared to take.

While it's outrageous what the Tory hypocrites did, greater outrage should be reserved for those who told them there was not much to worry about wrt the virus (as many of us knew), while conveniently keeping that fact back from the rest of us. The Partygaters were partying because they weren't scared. Nor should they have been.

But why weren't they scared?

But surely you can see it was completely wrong to have pubs and golf open yet schools shut? It’s a valid argument.

It's not the fact he wasn't vaccinated, it's the fact he raged on and on about it on fb for months.

Thing is as i said earlier there are people still going through the courts for breaking Covid rules. Plus the ones who have already been fined. Now this has to at least be investigated or all previous fines must be rescinded. Too much two tier policing going on in this country.

They have effectively painted themselves into a corner

Funnily enough I was only thinking about the weirdness of it all this morning. It was around this time three years ago when my husband was working from home and going nowhere apart from in the woods to walk the dog and he had the text telling him he’d been in close contact with someone who’d tested positive and he had to isolate.
Apart from us he hadn’t been in contact with anyone, the only explanation we could come up with was that our neighbour had tested positive and my husband had been in our garage which is close to their house.

We also had a neighbour who reported some of us to the police for standing on our drives to have a little social occasion, we all took out garden chairs, no one moved off their own drives and we all kept our distance but the police came and sent everyone inside.

For the same reason some others weren’t.

They knew the Covid campaign used fear tactics that were effective. Once you could see that it lost its impact

Oh Christ yes. I remember the guy who was hassled for standing in his own garden

I didn't mind lockdown for me too much as I worked from home throughout and shopped online. I missed my family but kept in touch with them.

However, I remember sitting open mouthed watching shoppers in Wales being forbidden to buy anything but 'essential' items in supermarkets. How dare their government deny people a few treats? It was a despicable abuse of power and I'm still angry about it now.

Also I think that trust in authority has been irreparably damaged.

"authority" is just us. They are just normal people, doing the job they have at the time, not better or worst than any of us.

At least there are some specialists with specialist knowledge, but they don't belong to a different species.

Yes. I had a moment yesterday when I pressed a button to call a lift and it triggered a memory of pulling my sleeve over my hand to do it in the ‘covid era’. Seems really weird now looking back.

@Lessoftheold Im in North Essex and our town centre Tesco blocked off the upper floor

What was missing throughout was common sense from either side, the covid police and the faux-vid, anti bad brigade. I mean having a couple of friends round to prevent loneliness should have been ok.

I would have supported a ‘lockdown if you want’ policy. The rest of us could have made our own decisions in what risks we were prepared to take.

Explain how you think a lockdown works in a pandemic?

See my earlier point about not comprehending risk.

Rightly or wrongly, it was an attempt to keep things fair.

You can't shut the small independent stores, but allow the big supermarkets to sell similar items just because they can. You can't shut the local book store and ban them from selling, but allow their competitors, the supermarket to sell the same books.

Agree or disagree, but it wasn't an abuse of power for the sake of it.

This is true. It can't all be behind us when ordinary people are still getting fined now. The fines were and still are a disgusting system.

That said, I understand where OP is coming from. It's a common trauma response.

On the other hand, it took a pandemic and several lockdown to teach some people to watch their hands, with soap.

That is still what shocked me the most 😂

It's a valid argument in itself but not as a response here because noone here is arguing that it wasn't wrong. It wasn't the issue being discussed.

How is it fair that a customer cant buy much needed baby clothes for their child. I support small businesses but its a bit galling when they seemed to want their customers to go without essentials just to be "fair" comes across as childish

Rightly or wrongly, it was an attempt to keep things fair.

It was showboating, made no sense and did sod all to help anyone besides Amazon.

It's about as fair and makes as much sense as cutting off a leg from everyone to make an amputee feel better instead of giving them some practical help.

that's a bad example, because baby clothes were "essential" in the local shops?

Online shops were booming, that's another debate.

Boots never even stopped selling lipsticks, which is one you can also argue about!

IME local book stores sell books that the supermarkets dont. The latter just seems to stick to what is currently in the book charts.

It wasn't even about not being able to get "a few treats" kid clothes were not seen as essential either.

I feel like COVID was a bad dream, and metaphorically and literally stole lives/sanity. I feel that it robbed our country of nearly a year and a half of active life. It was also exploited by BJ to give us a punishing Brexit ( we were all frightened, distracted and confined to our homes) and there was so much government corruption, that I feel our post pandemic collective finances have been abused and undermined. Most of all, hated the daily death tolls, and seeing that we were doing so badly and knowing that each digit was a sacred human life. My relationship with my daughters was under strain, as they moved back home. I am not sure that it has fully recovered. Horrible times.

I liked lock downs!