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. 💕

Not a mumsnet post but too funny not to share. I’m a doctor and I’d moved to a new house just before the pandemic started. A group of neighbours gathered at the end of my drive (appropriately spaced, of course!) to berate me for leaving the house “constantly” and demanded to know what job I did that could possibly be so vital that it could not be performed at home. Then one accused me of lying and stood in front of my car and I had to hold up my NHS ID in order to safely pass through the socially distanced mob of furious neighbours. Hahahaahhaa

I need to know..did you give her the hair dye or did it get lobbed out a window

Well to be fair in Wales they did tape off non essential aisles in the supermarket for a while so there's some truth to it being against the rules

The clapping was nice, made a bit of excitement for the DC and community feel in what was otherwise a very isolating time at first.

When you were allowed up to 6 people in an outside gathering I had a quandary because you have to go through the house to get to the garden and the only loo is in said house.
I had remarkable advice such as make them wee in a bush and whether or not said guests could bring a stepladder with them to scale the fences of three other houses to get to my garden without going through the house.

I think people on here were really horrible during the pandemic. It turned me off mumsnet and I’ll have have the same affection for it as I did prior to the pandemic.

In real life. We went out when the "law" changed and went to the beach which was within the area allowed. I was 7 months pregnant and needed a wee and all the toilets were shut. Went to the Texaco who had one and it was locked told the member of staff i was pregnant and needed to pee and they coldly said "toilets have to be locked as people should not be going far from home". So nasty. I was pregnant and needed to pee often and thirsty as it was summer. Some people just showed their true colours and became sadistic.

Do your still live there? OMG that is horrid. Did they apologise are they sweet snd humble as apple pue now?

Pandenic was a taster of a zombie apocalypse

If you go to the shop. You're only allowed to pick up essentials. So even if you're already there, you can't pick up ice cream.

And in England, the Easter egg thing possibly came from this performance.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-uk-police-chief-threatened-to-check-shopping-trolleys-2020-4

What a tit.

I encountered a woman with the same in Richmond along the river…

I’ve always liked a bit o’ data. For me, the following helped to put things into perspective.

Some of the police enforcement pissed me off the most.

I remember Michael Gove being quizzed about what counted as local for local exercise on breakfast tv and he said if you could get there and back in a day you were fine. That evening some police superintendent from Skegness said they’d be stopping people in town that weekend and anyone from out of Skegness itself would be in trouble/fined.

later on when shops were open in certain zones of the country I went to York shopping outlet. It was legal for me to drive from my zone to the York zone for shopping as you just had to follow the rules from your own zone. The police were pulling cars over on the a64 and sending people from west yorks back even though they were allowed. I’d heard rumours and took a back road to avoid road blocks. Bonkers! The police were proudly on the news that night saying what they’d done.

some of the anti Vax stuff was pure bonkers. Chips were going to inserted into people, everyone was going to be sterile or dead with 12 months. I think MN wasn't as bad as twitter but it brought out the crazies.

Covid definitely gave some people and organisations an excuse to do things they already wanted to do, also to not do things they didn't want to do.

I know from work that Yorkshire Police were particularly bonkers. They were telling cleaners that they weren't allowed to go to work at places that were open as essential services. We ended up having to arrange for each to have a letter to carry in case stopped.

And those of us who dared to question the narrative were burned to a crisp.

The total hero-worshipping of Boris Johnson. “Boris said this, Boris said that”, as if he was some kind of paragon of truth. It’s why I call him Saint Boris, because he was practically worshipped as a saint, and he probably believed it himself. (Nobody told him you have to be dead before you can be a saint.)

Our GP surgery at the time put a post on Facebook on a Sunday morning with the reasons why they were not prepared to give CPR to anyone - the biggest reason was that they did not think it was fair that they could put be at risk of Covid for a usually pointless procedure, in their eyes. Also various stuff about that we could not rely on ambulances as they would be too busy with Covid so unlikely to attend any other illness. Fear mongering to the max.

They asked that all people who were clinically vulnerable (ie anyone who got a flu jab) or likely to drop dead soon seriously considered signing a DNR and stated that reception would ring their way round all patients considered at risk and ask them to sign to say they did not want CPR.

Funnily enough it was removed by Monday afternoon and they never did do the phone calls. They did apologise eventually saying it was a necessary evil due to the situation.

We also had a village emergency group which got very weird very quickly - one resident wanted a list of all people and all their ‘skills’. He included in the list of skills - fire management, rope making, fishing, hunting, basic medicine, being able to identify edible foods in the woods … fucking insane. I’m not sure what he thought he was going to happen - maybe he’d seen Threads too many times and imagined we’d be slaughtering covidy sheep for tea. The only wildlife we had were a few sad looking fish in the river and the odd roe deer or rabbit. Not exactly life sustaining. No one signed up for it beyond the shop doing a half hearted food bank for 2 weeks.

Bizarrely enough a friend still has a Covid job 5 years on, deals with people needing antiviral medication. She did say recently it’s not exactly busy anymore!!

I’m afraid that’s what we did. I’m embarrassed and shudder to think how stupid I was at that time. Mind you, my mum would wipe her shopping trolley down as well when she got back from the shop.

As for the MN threads, well some of them were staggering. I’m sure I saw one post where a woman was ‘literally crying and shaking’ because her neighbours had come close to her fence whilst her children were playing in the garden and she thought they might catch COVID that way?

I live in Wales and this was the daftest idea the Welsh Labour Government brought in. Children's toys and books were taped off but feel free to buy as much booze and fags as you want! Ludicrous.

I worked in a small mental health care home at the time so while we didn't experience the absolute awfulness and trauma that happened in the elderly nursing homes, we were still subject to a lot of the same rules which looking back seem absolutey mad now and probably contributed to my own mad anxieties such as washing shopping.

The Easter egg thing was mental. I remember a notice coming out from public health (I'm in Scotland), that if easter eggs or any easter gifts were bought then these must be wiped down and then "quarantined" (that was the actual phrase!) for 48 hours. We could however get our own shopping delivered from the same supermarket no problem and none of that had to be quarantined but easter eggs were a completey different story! I still never understood why this was.

Staff couldn't accept a lift with their colleagues even if they sat in the back with the window open and despite the fact they would both be doing lft tests in work. But getting the bus with a load of strangers wasn't a problem.

Debates about where to hang up coats incase covid could spread between clothing.

And then there was the online cleaning training session I attended that was set up by our local public health body that had to be abandoned halfway through when we were told we shouldn't be using trigger spray bottles in the event that the metal part of the spray became infected with covid and we ended up spraying covid infected disinfectant all over the care home! It descended into so much arguments, the session had to be stopped by the organisers. Absolute madness.

I hope you don’t ever eat out because I can guarantee the food isn’t always prepped/cooked in sanitary conditions.

Right, and you could argue that the first lockdown - when we didn’t have as much info and needed time to develop testing and roll out a vaccine - was needed (I don’t think this but you could argue). But there were 3 lockdowns in total,1 of which was introduced long after the vaccine roll out.

And we faced trial by Mumsnet for saying these things at the time, being called "selfish arseholes", "granny murderers". And indeed, thanks to 2020 and 2021, I will never believe, respect or trust anything that any politician says again, in my life, especially if it is reinforced with fear and hysteria. The government cried wolf on a massive scale, by deliberately exaggerating the danger of the virus.

Other mad MN comments were:

Driving a car churns up virus particles, and spreads them.

Remember the “tier” thing? There’s a nice cycle loop we do which taught me where the boundary with the next local authority is a someone had put a sign up telling us to keep out. Yet apparently it didn’t matter for others when visiting the country park that’s within our local authority (DH recognised some people).