To look back on the things we did in lockdown and cringe?

[Applescruffle]

Isn't it all just really cringeworthy when we look back?

The clapping on our doorsteps, all that false commradarie and "we're all in this together" and the drawings of rainbows in people's windows?
Condemning our neighbours for buying Easter Eggs because they weren't "essential" and wondering whether we would get arrested for sitting on a park bench?

At the time I, and probably loads of us, thought we were doing the right things but doesn't it all just look so false and hollow now when we look back and see that number 10 were having parties and Dominic Cummings was running around the country testing his eyesight? My kids missed out on so much while this was going on, my mental and physical health has still not recovered from the effects of lockdown, and for what?

Know what I mean?

I mean... people were dying. A beauty blogger I'd followed for 10 years got covid at the end of her pregnancy, went into a coma and first met her baby when he was about 3 months old. I think it was reasonable not to want to bring it into your household in 2020 pre vaccines and antivirals.

However I never did clap or wash my shopping and I look back on myself wearing a mask on rollercoasters at Alton Towers with some confusion!

@Youdontevengohere

Yes. I did. For all the reasons I explained. Not because I thought some of the NHS workers found it insulting.

Forgive me for finding a tiny slice of something that made me feel better in the midst of some really weird times.

I agree a lot of the attitudes were very ableist.

I’m not even going to repeat things I heard but more or less the attitude was that certain groups who were vulnerable “didn’t count” as much for various reasons . It was disgusting.

My point was that you knew they found it insulting, but still did it. Seems selfish to me. It was supposed to be for them (apparently), not you.

Agree. It really does.

Do you have kids? Because mine loved drawing rainbows and spotting rainbows when we walked around the neighbourhood (once a day because the park is a drive away). How lovely of people to put them up for the children.

The clapping was completely pointless for the NhS but everyone on our street got on their doorsteps, waved to each other and said hello. It was the only social interaction some of us had all week outside of our households.

How judgmental of you to sneer at the behaviour of people who were following the law we had at the time and just trying to grasp at ways we could interact socially without killing anyone.

I loved it too, the weather was beautiful, I had my son home for a few months, it was so peaceful with no traffic just birdsong. I put in fruit and vegetable patches, we had loads of BBQ's and it was just idyllic for me really.

I also did the clapping thing a couple of times and don't cringe about it at all. My next door neighbour is a nurse and was working on covid wards and I know she appreciated being appreciated.

'Miserable' is subjective. Restrictions made some people miserable, some say they liked it, some inbetween.

The point, though, is that some people's welfare was prioritised when we chose the restrictions based approach, and others deprioritised. Some groups were exposed to greater risk, for the benefit of others. Saying you think this was the best option doesn't refute that. Even if it turns out that it was.

My neighbour actually rang the police on is because we didn't stand on our doorstep and clap

What the stupid cow didn't know was,we'd just got a phone call to say darling fil was in hospital,wasn't going to live much longer and we'd better get our arses down to him if we wanted to say our goodbyes (he hadn't left the house in the last 9 months of his life-he was too scared)

She took great offence to us not clapping so rang the police to report us (ignoring the fact we hadn't clapped for the last few weeks either-she just wanted to know where we'd gone in such a hurry but had turned on us the year before,so couldn't just ask)

They came out!

I still can't believe they took her seriously

It made a hard time even more hard and upsetting-it was none of her business (she wasn't bothered about covid or the nhs-she wanted to spite us)

I still hate her for the pain she put us through at a very painful time

The clapping was completely pointless for the NhS but everyone on our street got on their doorsteps, waved to each other and said hello. It was the only social interaction some of us had all week outside of our households.

That's exactly what happened on our street! We used it as a reason to be out and chat. I did talk to the neighbours at other times too, but this was one where we knew it would happen.

The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of the omicron variant is nearly an order of magnitude lower than that of alpha / delta.

The IFR of the initial variants was actually "very high" in the context of a population of tens of millions of people. Even for 30-60 year olds it ranged somewhere between 0.01 and 0.5. There are around 26 million people in that age range in the UK, most of whom would expect to be managed on ICU prior to death. There are around 6500 ICU beds (running a high occupancy rate all year round), which can't rapidly expand capacity beyond 2-3x in the short or medium term. The same goes for all acute medical capacity.

If you therefore let even 10% of that age range get infected in a short period of time with that sort of IFR, then even tripling ICU capacity would be woefully inadequate, just for that smaller portion of the population. The idea that we simply were "protecting the elderly or vulnerable" at the beginning of the pandemic was (and remains) completely false.

The basic "back of fag packet" calculations at that IFR for a pathogen as infectious as Covid were so obviously in favour of lockdown (pretty much the only option available to society at that time) that it is extraordinary that we waited so long to do so.

The emergence of Omicron, with a substantially lower IFR, alongside vaccination programmes, fundamentally changed the necessary public health approach and allowed us to start to exit the lockdown phase of the pandemic as a consequence.

The fact that the govt ( and certain individuals) did not enough to help doesn’t mean none of the measures were useful.

People seem to take the parties etc as proof that there was no risk. I’m not sure that’s the logical conclusion; rather, having got everyone else to reduce the risk, they felt more comfortable. But there’s a conflation of those things at times.

There were some cringeworthy things I agree.

What we should never forget and hope for justice is the corruption of some in the government and their friends, and that many needlessly died because the Prime Minister was more concerned to have a holiday with his latest wife than do the job.

The families of those who died at Hillsborough had to wait over 20 years for even a limited amount of justice, the Covid families should not have to wait that long.

The people I judge most harshly are the people with authority and power - not idiots like politicians, but doctors, epidemiologists etc - who knew what they were saying was an outright lie but went ahead and said it anyway 'for the good of the nation.' They believed that people were too stupid to understand the truth and therefore just made things up to get the result they wanted. The fallout of those lies and the response of the liars is interesting to see - they know they were full of shit but to protect their own self image they can't admit it and instead they double down on what they said or they do a 'poor me' routine around how they were doing the best they could at the time. They are the worst sort of cowards in my view.

An example is medical professionals who said the covid vaccine was proven safe and effective. It might well have been safe and effective but there was zero reliable proof that it was, simply because it had been developed so quickly. They had to say it was safe and effective because they had pushed the idea for so long that covid was deadly that they couldn't just get everyone to go back to normal, they had to present the vaccine as the saviour and the 'way out.' The honest thing would be to say 'we can't prove this vaccine is effective but it's the only way we can get out of this massive hole we've dug for ourselves, so please get it.' I could have respected that. The whole narrative that it was perfectly safe and you must get it or you're responsible for everyone dying is so incredibly dishonest and manipulative that I don't know how anyone who pushed it sleeps at night. I feel sorry for people who fell for it, particularly people like my colleague's friend who were killed by the vaccine.

To be clear I am in no way anti-vaxx - that's the convenient slur used to silence anyone who says 'hang on a minute how do you know a vaccine that's less than a year old is really safe.' Vaccines are amazing. The covid vaccine is a totally new medication and as such should have undergone far more thorough testing before millions of people were injected with it. The only thing we should be thankful for is that it killed relatively few people. Of course no one should be killed by a medication.

Literally nothing changed for me except there were fewer people around.
I did not get 1 day off work or at home.
I worked in an office, we all continued as normal whilst everyone else lay around in the sun getting paid.
Next time I'll be sitting on my arse at home.

How can anyone know what evidence you do or don't have, given that you have produced precisely no evidence to support your original assertion?

It is therefore perfectly reasonable to assume that you don't have any evidence at all.

Does that help?

Very interesting and clear, thank you. Why is it Mumsnetters can give a plain English answer that science websites can't?

I was terrified of covid. I have a seriously immuno-compromised disabled child and i was so scared he would get covid. I was reading the news about disabled patients being given DNR orders no matter what- like their lives don't count.

So I complied with everything. And I don't cringe at all looking back at all because I think we were faced with something novel and new and no-one really knew what was going on or was going to happen. I am grateful for the vaccines (DS has had 4) and I am so grateful that when he did finally get covid he sailed through it.

But it was a horrible horrible time and I feel for us all. Those who died, those who missed out of time with loved ones, those who were isolated and alone, those who were stuck in unimaginable abusive situations. Those of us who found everything to be mroe or less okay but still had to go through it all.

I didn’t do all that stuff though. I didn’t think it was the right thing at the time and I still don’t.
But yes, people blindly following the rules because they think it’s virtuous and morally correct to do what the government and the bbc tell them, and getting sucked into group think is completely cringe.

I fear it's already been forgotten. No one seems to have been charged with the giving of contracts to crones. Unless I missed it?

‘Everyone else’? I had to work full time from home, but as I wasn’t a ‘key worker’ my children didn’t get a place at school or nursery. So I was working full time with a 4 year old, a 3 year old and a 1 year old at home with me. Fun.

I never got the condemning of neighbours for getting Easter eggs as non-essentials. That was a very ridiculous "sense of duty", stiff-upper-lip, blinders on eyes British habit. We were still human and wanted to feel a bit of normality. But the clapping etc. was normal, IMHO.

Proud to say that my family never clapped and we sat in horrified cringe when neighbours were enthusiastically clapping and banging pots. Also, it was clear from.the beginning that the Captain Tom business was dodgy as hell but helped by mass hysteria. Just awful the whole thing

Not allowing people with dementia to be visited by their loved ones was unbelievably cruel.

Yes, I'm grateful my mum complied with isolation and all vaccines, as a severe asthmatic and that she is still with us.