Mumsnet during the beginning of the Pandemic - please tell me your stories of the maddest comments you saw

[mumofoneAlonebutokay]

Inspired by chat on another thread - one woman was told not to pop to the shop for milk but to put butter in her coffee instead 😄

I wasn't on mumsnet then but would love to know the maddest comments you saw?

I myself went mad during the pandemic 🙈 and refused to leave the house and judged anybody that did, I'll admit 😬😄 - I wish I'd been calmer

Please share 🥰

Edit - I know how awful the pandemic was for those who lost loved ones, and how serious those losses are - this is just about the unnecessary hysteria and comments stemming from that, not to poke fun at those who lost someone or became ill. 💕

Never knew if her posts were serious.. they'd start off okayish bit bonkers then would on about getting the army in so people wouldn't leave their houses 🤣 and would do food drop offs once a week or something. Then came bit hmm maybe this is a wind up haha.

The combo of whimpering cowardice and rank aggression in the same poster happened a lot.

The bizarre lie that people in care homes matter more than everyone else.

They may very well be. I agree that there's no space now for a pandemic that both scares people enough to voluntarily restrict their movements but doesn't scare them enough to mean society might stop running properly. And at least some of this is because of the policy decisions during covid, plus also Partygate.

However, with something as bad as a 10% mortality rate with under 10s, assuming also fairly transmissible, we'd be completely buggered regardless. There might not even be rules in that situation, much less the infrastructure to educate people about them. And that would be true even if we'd never had covid 19. I actually don't even worry about this myself. It's in asteroid hitting Earth territory. Just fuck all that could be done.

So I agree with you we were actually pretty lucky. There's no guarantee any future pandemic would hit the Goldilocks spot, or that we could rely on so many of the basic blocks of society to continue functioning.

I believed that the army would be on the streets to ensure no mixing 🤭

I loved piers Morgan and would tune into gmb every morning and cheer when he'd shout at politicians

I thought he was right about a few things but I've since heard he went on holiday when he wasn't supposed to 🤷‍♀️

I recall management in my NHS hospital telling us off for sitting outside, on our breaks, closer than 2m to each other, in a small area, because of ‘how it looked’. Well, guess what, 20 mins later, there’d be 8 of us in a 7x3m2 room for 12 hours. I got sainted and slammed on here for that!

I'd also work myself up into tears about it all most days 🙈, despite never leaving the house. Was a bit mad 🤭

And I clapped a couple of times but then once, I went out to clap, and nobody else was there - so I let out a tester clap to see if anyone would respond

When nobody did, that was the end of my clapping journey

There was a lot of utter batshit madness, and yet I am glad people took it seriously. The threat was unknown, and at the beginning there was no vaccine. I got covid in the first wave, and was very ill. It felt like drowning. Here we are in 2025, and I still cannot breathe properly, and have no idea if my lungs will ever recover.

Not a thread.. but I got called “pompous” by someone when I said she really shouldn’t be having parties!!!!! I also got told to wear a mask in a garden centre by security (this was after lockdown etc). His face when I told him I couldn’t wear one due to a previous SA that involved a hand over my mouth as it caused severe flashbacks etc. He looked so shocked and he pushed my trolley into the farm shop part and gave me flowers as I left!!!!!

DH and his Army colleagues found it hilarious that people thought they had enough soldiers to manage this! Especially with all the other stuff the government kept giving them to do...

@PyongyangKipperbang blimey - sounds like they needed my majestic delivery more than I did -!! I’m a person who likes my space so even though it’s only me and H at home these days I felt really claustrophobic in a 24/7 situation - I’m sure I’m not the only one who food shopped possibly a bit more than strictly necessary - I think you have to do what keeps you sane in these kinds of situations

I was furloughed & DH was working & I mentioned that he used his daily walk to go & buy his newspaper. Obviously a daily newspaper is not essential & not worth killing people for.

And I remember all the arguments about masks. I realise that some people have been sexually assaulted & strangled & I'm not trying to downplay that. But all of these people seem to have been on Mumsnet using that trauma as a reason not to wear a mask.

😄😄

The pestering they mustve recieved! And I imagine the complaints about people breaking the rules, as though it was their responsibility!

Worth pointing out, if it's not been already, that it was government policy to try and make people more afraid. Some behaviour was still inexcusable, but the population were getting plenty of nudges and there was no real thought given to the longer term impact that was going to have on mental health.

We do think we had Covid in December 2019. A horrible flu like illness, that MIL brought back with her from China....

Yes, this is important

I wasn't on here then, thank god judging by the craziness. I live alone and had to wfh alone solely on Covid related stuff (NHS) and it was hard to keep rational, We knew so little about the virus and how it was spread when it first arrived so some of the madness (and in retrospect it was mad) was just a response to the fear of the unknown. If I had been on here I think that I would have been very influenced by some of the things posted as it was such a strange and scary time. I know I used to wash my shopping bags when I got back from Asda and looking back it seems mad. My solace was reading, I got though about 70 books, they transported me far away from the fear of catching it and dying alone.

@MinkyWales I’m so sorry - I got some awful neuro stuff post covid totally out the blue in 2022 for around 8 months and it was incredibly frightening - so living with it must make even the mention of it hard to take

Yes. It was reprehensible. But golly we the peeps were jolly stupid.

I must be in the minority but never got the vaccine and never had covid(unless I had and was asymptomatic) nobody in my house got it so it was easier for us to think it was all mad. I get that so many people were devastated by it but personal experience shapes how you see things and I just saw the world going mad, leaving shopping outside for hours and disinfecting it etc.

I used to wipe down my shopping and when I took rubbish out to the communal bin, would come in, wash my hands straight away, and then dettol wipe the door handles, tap and everything. Similarly I worked in a care home and would strip myself naked as soon as I got home. Clothes on a boil wash, straight in the shower and everything wiped down.

I was forever anti baccing my hands if I touched a door or gate when out. And went as far as disinfecting my doorbell and letter box on a regular basis.

I genuinely thought at the time I was being sensible and hadn't succumbed to madness when I clearly had! Needless to say, my doorbell hasn't been cleaned since!

I don't think that people will ever be as willingly compliant ever again. Any trust capital between the population and the government has been almost entirely spent.

I know! It was actually quite scary how quickly authoritarian attitudes ramped up.

I remember so many comments about people who knew someone who was run over by a bus and killed and covid being written on the death certificate. Seemed like everyone knew someone it had happened to 🤔😂

I always wondered:

1. why were the buses running people over when there were less cars on the road and less people out.

2. What has happened to all these murdering bus drivers and why did they stop running people over!

3)Or was it just one bus driver being a serial killer and going round the UK killing as many as he/she could?

So many questions left unanswered!

Which sounds plausible enough tbh. The index case was on 1st December when a person was hospitalised. Odds are they were ill a bit before that. Wuhan is a massive city, millions of people, airport hub. There must have been any number of people flying between there and the UK in December 2019, as well as more indirect spread. I'm not saying you definitely did have it, but I can see why anyone who had anything with similar symptoms to covid from December onwards might suspect something.

Also I do remember some talk of a nasty chest infection going round in the January!

Which was what made me so angry. She was probably just trolling, just to upset people.