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?

Why would Bill gates talking about a pandemic 4 years beforehand be proof of anything ?!?!?!?

Governemnts throughout history have been aware of threats like this & the medical industry is constantly evolving to address things faster/better/easier.....

The biggest issue with Covid was that nobody knew wether it was natural or man made in a lab & wether treatment that was already in place for a natural flue style disease would treat a man made illness that had be purposefully or inadvertently created.

There was no consultation with Bill gates before or during because Bill gates is a business investor not a scientist ?!?

I guess it depends whether you’re a glass half full or half empty, person.

Part of me enjoyed lockdown. I was diagnosed with cancer at the start and we have a severely vulnerable son so we stayed in, out of choice. I walked the dog late at night and it was wonderful. No cars or people around. Heaven.

Never clapped for nhs or panic bought toilet roll though.

Ive read/skimmed most of this thread and haven't so far clocked anyone talking about my experience - which mirrors many others, particularly middle aged women.

I worked very hard, full time throughout covid, alongside home schooling and caring for a very vulnerable family member. My work involved making decisions that would impact a lot of people so it was intense and stressful.

I caught covid in early 2021 after having to rush said vulnerable family member to A&E after a serious attempt to end their own life. I caught the virus in A&E in the middle of a big surge of covid where I live that winter.

I never recovered. I spent 2 years in bed in the worst, absolutely worst pain I can describe. I lost my job, most of my friends and had to have a carer look after me. I am a single mother and had to somehow figure out how to take care of my kids whilst not being able to tolerate any light or sound at all for the best part of 24 months.

The 3rd year I lost both my parents - I couldnt see them or spend time with them as I was so ill.

This year, my 4th of living with long covid, I am seeing slow improvements. I am now able to leave my house for a couple of hours every day, although every couple of weeks I go back to being be bound for a while.

There are lots and lots and lots of people like me. The majority of them are women. Our lives are rarely talked about, documented or visible in any way. My support network now has become an online community of sufferers across the world.

We exist, there are lots of us and we are getting very little help, validation or support. Covid was not just about deaths.

The treatment of students was, I think, the first thing that really shocked me out of any complacency I might have felt about lockdown measures. Locking young people into their halls of residence with only meagre supplies, stating that they 'might be' allowed to return to their families at Christmas, was straight out of the worst kind of dystopian nightmare.

In no language is that sort of behaviour ever justifiable.

NomenNudum · Today 20:29
Most of the blame has to go to the government for their complete lack of pandemic planning despite a pandemic being well overdue and tip of the national risk register. Massive shower of shites

Which countries do you think were the best organised?
With hindsight, maybe Sweden but iirc there was plenty of support in the beginning for lockdown since, as pp have said, no one knew much about covid in the early stages.

So sorry for your loss x

Everyone sounds so blaze and dismissive now but lockdown arguably was the right thing and it should have been done sooner. With the benefit of hindsight some of the policies were illogical given airborne transmission (such as closing swimming pool changing rooms when the kids had just had a lesson together in the same pool).

But.. I guarantee if there was a nasty new illness that was killing children, people would be locking down and complying again. I do think though there would be debates around economic and social harms versus health harms and the decisions could well be very different depending on population affected.

@Barbadossunset

Finland

I'm sorry @ThisMauveHiker, that must be really, really hard.

Totally agree

We had a pandemic plan. The government chose to disregard it.

The first one I think was justified but after that not so much, especially schools. If mn is anything to go by if they'd fully opened schools teachers would probably have gone on strike

Yes, you're correct

Honestly this thread is actually bringing all my anger back. I went through a long period of being so angry with everyone because of how awful I thought people had behaved - I felt utterly let down that society went along with it all. I truly had contempt for my fellow man.

I feel much better now but this thread is making my eye twitch 😂

Just to come back to @Dacadactyl - you're saying that it was a good idea to take a risk with a deadly-for-some virus, because..
the government has not been truthful <unproven, but anyway> about some things, therefore anything the government says could be a lie, and I'll bet my life on the fact that this particular thing they're saying is one of those lie times.

You can see that there's some big ole jumps of logic there, surely. Even you.

I regret that the most knowledgeable person was Sunetra Gupta.

A woman of colour, no less, so guess what happened. She was not only ignored, but was deplatformed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunetra_Gupta

Also re schools the number of key worker kids in during the first wave was tiny. Lots of key workers kept their children at home if they could rather than expose them to the risk. By the last lock down everyone was desperate to get their kids into school, it was understood the risk to children was lower and it felt like everyone who could get away with being a key worker tried it on. But it wasn’t like that in March/April 2020. You can’t extrapolate the last months of the pandemic and people’s behaviour with how people would act in the first period of a new one.

Colds and chest infections (colds lead to chest infections and sometimes just get a cc) go on for longer since having covid. My friends and family found the same.

Would love to join a research group or study to see how covid has made my lungs shit.

In 1918/1919 it's estimated 50 million people worldwide died of Spanish flu.

A hundred years later Worldwide 7 million people died from COVID.

Well they were also telling me that if you were young, fit and healthy you were unlikely to be affected. That's not a jump in logic, that's a calculated risk.

Just like if you were older, fatter or ill already it might've made sense to you to be worried and take an untested, rushed vaccine because they told you it was safe.

Yeah and your point is?

Because it could easily be 'because of Rules, we only lost 7 and not 50 million.'

Guarantee? No you can't. None of us know what would happen if the population were more scared. Remember that lockdown didn't just need people to be afraid enough to modify their behaviour. It also needed them not to be so afraid that they stopped doing the things we need to keep the basic blocks of society in place.

That's awful. I'm sure she did xxx

Then when they went back to school, my friend had a two week time table for her DD1 and once a fortnight, it involved a full day of PE, which DD1 hates and kept her off school during that day,

The day was split into four - hockey. netball, some indoors thing and tennis for example.

They did have rules during the Spanish flu. What they didn't have were vaccines