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. 💕

This remends me of the moaning that people didnt have a spare room to isolate in by ppl that suppoerted the bedroom tax!!!!!!!

’Some’ bad consequences? Like women giving birth alone? Going to scans and being told they’d miscarried, alone. Children dying in hospital with only one parent by their side instead of 2? The elderly shut into care homes unable to see loved ones? Thousands of businesses collapsing, livelihoods lost and people committing suicide? Kids unable to go to school? Domestic violence rising as women couldn’t leave the home? Children so deprived of socialisation that they started school without basic skills? People’s mental health absolutely destroyed? The government spending billions on a furlough scheme that has created the economic mess we’re in today. The list goes on.

I’m sure it was extremely difficult to have loved ones die of Covid, but actually it was quite clear from the early data that it was not anywhere near as lethal as the government / media were suggesting. It was mass hysteria, and it sounds like you bought into every word of it.

There was a thread about two women who were fined for bringing a take away coffee to a woods to go for a walk because it counted as a picnic and they hadn’t travelled to the nearest place to go for walk, but one that was a bit further away. Anyway, this brought up the subject of what counted as ‘local’, as local can be open to ambiguity. Anyway, someone said that local should mean within your own postcode. I pointed out that half my town was one postcode and the other half another. This would mean that half the town could go the park, and the other half could go to a supermarket. But you can’t do both as that would mean traveling to a different postcode. Which would result is someone’s nan dying.

My DD was in hospital. When I went to the toilet I had to turn right out of the door and follow the one-way-system around the whole floor and through the packed waiting room. I was told I was NOT allowed to turn left out of the toilet to go back to her room (less than one metre) distance, I HAD to follow the one way system. MADNESS

It did bring out the craziness in people

Mate was routinely wiping down her shopping

Madness

I work at a school and late November and into December, we had staff off with terrible flu, but again felt different to normal flu due to the immense fatigue

I remember the “I’m afraid” brigade who took great delight in morosely telling us all through the pandemic that life as we knew it in 2019 was never coming back, we would only ever see our loved ones online, school would be virtual forever and the entire population would be online.

I often think of those posts and wonder if the authors feel slightly silly now?

You can still see remnants of the one way tape stuff on floors in some shops, and even city centres (am looking at you, Cardiff).
And some shops still have a big bottle of anti-bac hand gel to use before you go in.

I took the vaccine and I'm so proud to have been able to do so 🙌

and cuddled her dad using a clear plastic sheet
Wtf??!🤣🤣

I'm grateful for the invention of zoom/teams for hospital appointments, which i always found hard due to anxiety

And for the growing ability to wfh and for four day weeks

I personally feel the mental health of the country has been hugely affected by the whole thing. Its ironically damaged community despite the clapping etc

I often wondered at the time if they would get covid and find it an absolute breeze.

I just remember the absolute lack of nuanced thinking. "Oh you think this, and so does Donald Trump, therefore you must be a Trump supporter" or "Oh you are against forced vaccination/extended lockdowns therefore you must be a Covid denier" etc

Yes I had Covid in summer 2021 and felt like absolute shit, for a long time but no, it didn't make me "learn me lesson".

The clapping was so cringe. People banging pots and pans etc. They didn’t need clapping they needed payrise.

We'd agreed with my in-laws that we would spend Christmas with them (they live 200 miles away)

Day before Christmas day,mil rang to say she couldn't risk us going

She was convinced the police and army would be waiting for us on the motorway and we'd never get past them ('they'll have guns you know!')

We spent a shitty Christmas with barely any food in and the world's crappest trifle

We where thrown out of our local aldi for being together-we are a couple,we live together,we'd been together in our house for weeks but would kill old people if we did our weekly shop together-i had to go sit in the car

My boss screamed in my face for helping a customer that just kept moving towards me,no matter where i stood,all my fault apparently

I was screamed at in asda for daring to buy a 4 pack of soap by some mad woman

Fast forward to feb/March and mil rang to say fil wasn't very well,could we get down there-now?

He didn't have long left-cancer had reared it's ugly head

We heard people clapping and whooping but didn't really take it in as we where running around,throwing pants into a suitcase and just trying not to cry as we got in the car and drove off

The day we got back (and no army or police in sight) the police knocked

The silly bitch next door had reported us for not clapping

I remember standing there saying 'really?this cannot be for bloody real-youve come out because we didn't make a racket on our doorstep?!'

We where up and down the m25 3 more times before fil finally passed away-not having a last Christmas with him racks me with guilt

Then it all came out about Boris and the gang having fucking parties

I really wish I'd told mil we'd already set off

I think I forgot about the drive through centres. Looking back it was like something in a bizarre dream. Ours was in a large park & ride car park and had several points/stations under plastic domes - it looked so alien. Being passed a test pack and sitting in your car swabbing your throat/nose next to a car full of strangers. Then waiting to receive the results sometimes up to 48 hours I think!
So much I blanked out as it was all so abnormal.

I haven't RTFT so apologies if this has already been posted.
But this thread saying everyone should have forced vacations had all of mn up in arms it was fantastic!
There is 1000 post on the thread but please take time to read at least the first few posts 🤣

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4206223-too-bloody-right

@PyongyangKipperbang

For me lock down really was an eye opener, same for my sister. We both worked in management in different sectors of hospitality. 60-70 hour weeks, only at home to sleep. I ended up signed off with severe stress just before lockdown as the doctor said he would either have to sign me off or I would be in hospital with exhaustion within a month. I was, in hindsight, very ill.

That summer was amazing for us because it was the first time for years we had anything like a proper break and reset. I had been suffering weekly migraines for years and didnt know why. Never had a single one in lockdown but had 2 my first week after we reopened. So we both took a long hard look at our careers and decided to step down. We are both at non management level now and our health and mental health has imporved massively.

Don't get me wrong, I totally understand why it was a big liberation for some people. As someone who still works far too hard, I understand how that must have felt.

But there was something so tone deaf about the way some people did it and with this awful faux pastoral condescension. "All you rat race people, you're so stuck and we're all liberated from this madness." With a nice revenge jab at working mums from people with trad wife tendencies.

At a time when people were genuinely frightened at many levels and those who weren't physically frightened were over-wrought, exhausted and cut off, desperately trying to keep their children's physical and mental health on track and keeping the wheels on, it was astonishingly graceless to celebrate playing Little Bo Peep on the internet.

I agree there were some tragic consequences of lock down but hospitals would have got overrun ?

My twins turned one in March 2020. I was panicking that if I and my husband are taken to hospital, they would perish, nobody would take care of them.

But normalising zoom/teams for hospital appointments was also detrimental to others.

I was so glad we were lambing when lockdown was happening. I realise we were very lucky

They should definitely be offered as a choice, rather than the only option

I didn't get the vaccine. I'm not opposed to vaccines in general but when I was a child I had a very severe reaction to the measles vaccine, that caused extreme swelling, febrile convulsions, and apparently I was a whisker away from brain damage. After that I had to take a little blue antihistamine before every further jab.

As an adult, and given it was a "new type" of vaccine, and knowing my frankly appalling "you couldn't make this shit up" luck (I was born on a Wednesday), I decided I'd take my chances. DP did try to persuade me at one point due to the threats of never being able to travel again unless fully jabbed. I have had Covid officially once, it was rough but I survived, obviously and count myself lucky I didn't suffer long term effects.

That said, I will never forgive the gas-lighting around what a vaccine actually is, and the fact that allegedly vaccines have never reduced transmission, but are in effect prophylactic that just minimise disease in an individual. I swear to God that's not what we were told at school, and also, we were told that jabbing was the answer to stopping transmission.

Also, in December 2021 I had pre-emptive risk surgery to have my ovaries out. At the pre-op when I admitted I wasn't vaccinated, the consultant icily told me my chances of dying under anaesthetic were increased if I hadn't been jabbed. I was like - eh? Did she mean if I had Covid during the OP? But of course, you test for it before the OP and they don't do it if you're positive, at least they didn't then. Am still utterly baffled by that one.

Me too, my dd turned one as well x