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. 💕

The tier thing was crazy. I lived in Lincolnshire, on the western border. Apparently it was too dangerous to drive a few miles west, but safe enough to travel between Mablethorpe and Lincoln and Boston and Gainsborough...

I remember in the December, almost the entire country was in lockdown but Liverpool wasn’t. All the shops and restaurants were open as usual. We had literally half the UK descend on us. Trains arriving into Lime St were packed like sardines, full of day trippers coming to do their Christmas shopping. It all just seemed ridiculously nonsensical and I never understood the concept of the whole tier system.

Mum died in the very 1st week of lockdown. At that time there was no option of having a funeral via Zoom and the bereaved had to drive themselves there and back. My dad was 82 at the time and his eyesight was a bit poor so I said he could come with me. When I mentioned it on here I was questioned as to whether my dad really needed to go the funeral and that I should refuse to take him. One poster even ranted about how "lockdowns where there to protect the elderly" and that him wanting to say a last goodbye to the woman he had loved for 60 years was "selfish" and "irresponsible".

I never once remember being scared. I couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. Worked occasionally when I shouldn’t too. Never got jabbed either.

When I heard of locking kids up in their bedrooms bringing food to them or not leaving the house I felt really sad for people.

I genuinely felt and still do. If I’m in my 80s or have compromised health. I wouldn’t want the entire economy to shut down and children’s education to suffer on account of me. Even now let’s just say we saved thousands of elderly people locking down. How many children has been permanently damaged and affected? Who’s more important? To me it’s children’s wellbeing before nursing homes. This is an offensive statement to some but we are not immortal and I thought everyone would realise children’s wellbeing is the priority, to me that’s logical.

Really enjoyed lockdown was one of the happiest periods of my life. Just my teen son and I. He felt and looks back on that time as a really lovely happy time. I think I gave him too many hobbies to do prior and we were burnt out. Lockdown was a joy.

Looking back some of the messaging was just awful. The "can you look them in the eye" campaign which basically said that if you went into supermarkets then people would die and it would be your fault. Indefensible.

I think the issue with MN was that pretty soon into the pandemic there were many of us who realised that the idea of eradicating Covid as pushed by Ms Sturgeon and others was complete pie in the sky. That keeping numbers low and waiting for a vaccine was the best we could hope for. Others seemed to think that the aim was for everyone to avoid Covid forever and a day and this is what led to arguments. Those of us who accepted that most of us would probably get covid and that we'd be fine were branded as irresponsible granny killers.

There was also a lot of blind sticking to the rules without question, especially here in Scotland. We had a lot of VERY silly rules about pubs being allowed to open but not sell alcohol, wearing a mask to walk into a cafe but being allowed to remove it when seated, not leaving your council area irrespective of how small that was, different rules about meeting people. In Glasgow we were not allowed people in the house from March 2020 to Easter 2021. Our kids were out of school way longer than kids in England.

We did break the rules and I was roundly slated for it at the time and I didn't care then and don't care now. We regularly travelled out of area to go for a walk or do some geocaching and a change of scenery. My teenagers found being away from their friends very hard so we had them over for pizza and Netflix. My self-employed hairdresser started back working so she came and cut my hair.

There was a huge lack of people on MN who could not see that their situation could not apply to others. Lots of sanctimony about how THEY loved being at home with their children doing crafts and baking and how those of us moaning about schools being closed were just a bit shit at being a mum. Lots of tinkly laughs about how homeschool was such FUN and how if you weren't managing to work from home and simultaneously coach a 17 year old through advanced higher studies in Chemistry then you were just not trying hard enough.

To be fair, there are lots of numpties who can't imagine other people's circumstances at any time. Covid just gave them the perfect opportunity.

I worked on a surgical ward which was next to icu and we became the first Covid ward in our hospital. Just before lockdown when schools were open as normal I had messages from parents telling me they had heard I was nursing Covid patients and if this was true they would be removing their child from school as they had elderly parents that they wanted to visit at the weekend and if their child sat or played with mine it would kill the elderly parents 😔

I remember people getting very indignant about a group of housemates playing mini-football in a local park. When it was pointed out that what they were doing was totally legal and not risky, they were accused of reducing the space available to other park users who had to walk around them.

Ah yes, everyone trundling over from our Tier 3 area to Tier 2 down the road so we could still go to pubs and restaurants!

I fell pregnant in summer 2020 - much wanted child and we'd been trying pre-pandemic etc. for quite a while. Low risk pregnancy and neither myself nor DH were at particular risk of Covid as we were in 30s and no health issues etc.

The amount of abuse I got for being so selfish as to get pregnant ON PURPPOSE during the pandemic, whilst the NHS is so busy was actually awful. I remember being very emotional about it at the time, now I find it hilarious! Several posters genuinely seemed shocked people were even risking having sex during the pandemic, should fate intervene and cause said shocking-pregnancy and many agreed and claimed they hadn't been near DH for months to avoid the unnecessary risk to the NHS 😂

Just before I was due to give birth I was due for my first covid jab (this was when pregnant women weren't prioritised for the jab - that came later) and I had posters claiming I wasn't deserving of a covid jab on the basis I'd recklessly risked multiple people's health by getting pregnant during the pandemic!

• Panic over a child blowing bubbles that were floating over the garden fence. Bubbles of Covid floating around!
• People saying that in addition to clapping for the NHS we should also be doing a clap 'for the children'
• My in-laws' neighbours had a bust up over who was and wasn't going out to clap each week
• The man who was nasty to me because I took my 2yo with me to the supermarket. Did not tell him to fuck off but should have
• I think the worst for me as someone who has working FT in a very busy job, juggling homeschooling and caring for a toddler with DH, were the hysterical 'close the schools!!!' people without young children who then wasted no time in taking to social media to slag off parents who admitted to struggling with it all, claiming they 'hate their kids'
• The people fanatical about how you couldn't drive somewhere to go for a walk in case you got into an accident (on a deserted road) and therefore wasted the time of the emergency services

I think it was Christmas 2020? DH was at uni doing a PhD and had had dinner with the footie team a few days before. His team mates started testing +ve for Covid. I dashed to his uni town to get him home before he tested +ve, spending 2.5 hours in the car with him. He tested +ve the following morning. Meanwhile dd tested +ve. DS's girlfriend, living in a shared house tested +ve and her parents had elderly grandparents for Christmas and she couldn't get home. I went and collected her as covid was already in the house. None of the young people were particularly ill. I sent DH to his mother's (they were a bubble) and had Christmas with the kids in a covid septic tank. I didn't get it.

I got it 13 months later after jabs and whilst I breathed like a train for two days I was fine.

It was a strange time and the measures were wholly disproportionate vis a vis the severity and the statistics.

We should have protected our vulnerable and carried on. I have no time for those now whinging about cost of living, etc. The measures bankrupted the country and I fail to see what people thought would happen vis a vis consequences.

Clive Myrie doing those staged 'down in the morgue' piece for News at Ten. Not really news, and repeated in a dramatic way at least three times.

They had my recently widowed 82-year-old mother, just in remission for blood cancer, living alone, in tears each night. Frightening the wrong demographic as I doubt the conscientious, News-at-Ten watchers were the big lockdown breakers.

Gawd, NannyandJohn (the most vociferous IMO) and Princess Nutnuts. Can’t recall in particular the zebra poster.
N&J’s posts used to fill me with anxiety, but I was inexplicably drawn to them 😬
The emotive language ‘absolute carnage’…’I’m sorry to say’ and so on. The insistence that we’d spend the rest of our lives in lockdown, and all social gatherings would be conducted on zoom for the rest of our lives. No more Christmas as we once knew it.
Don’t recall seeing them making a brief reappearance during MPox scare. What did they have to say about that?

I recall this giving me many laughs.

It wasn’t just that campaign. Behavioural experts knew daily case and deaths would be highly effective.

It’s this that over exposed the risk so we’d get pretty good compliance. I can understand why some felt manipulated by a fear campaign. It was intentional.

The pp on ‘I’m sorry to say here comes lockdown’ etc reminds me of those posters who were adamant nightclubs would never open again, we should holiday virtually and students were fine only with online learning, if they got much at all.

We had something similar happen at work

It was during the eat out to help out-we where packed,I've never seen it so busy

I was running (and I mean running-i have arthritis in my knee,but the bosses didnt give a fuck) around when I heard shouting in the part of dining area I was the farthest from

I ran over and some old lady was screaming at some bloke (I wouldn't have messed with him-he was huge) for sitting too close to her (he couldn't help it-the tables are close together)and she just wouldn't let it go

He was calm and trying to explain he was trying to eat his meal,he'd leave straight afterwards,if it wasn't him that sat there,it would be someone else and if she was that worried,why was she out in a busy restaurant rather than staying at home?

She lost it and belted him with her handbag,he knocked it away so she started hitting him again

I'm trying to sort it out and get between them,bosses where sat in their office watching it all unfold on cctv,she's whacking me around the head with her (heavy) bag and finally some customer went down to get a manager to break it up

Last I saw was the old lady in the back of a police van and I'm running around trying to calm down customers while saying I was so sorry they had to see that

It wasn't until my shift ended,I was like 'wtf happened??'

The boss that was sat in the office was obsessed with capt Tom

She got it in her head that we would all donate and she'd send it off (under her name for the praise and to get her ugly face in the papers)

For weeks all we got was 'it's only £50!' (each!)

She got about a tenner and sent it off-and we all know what happened about that

I did say I thought the whole thing was a grift and got shouted at in the office for daring to say it about 'an old man who served in the war!' (So did my grandad but no fucker gave £50 to him)

She held this against me for weeks but then went very quiet a few months later and moved stores not long after

In defence of the people bleaching their groceries – at the start we didn't know it was airborne. Remember all the "Wash Your Hands" stuff?

Oof I washed my shopping once (well they were cat litter trays) they came from a depot shut down that day because all the staff came down with covid literally that day just after my package was put on the truck I had two clinically vulnerable children at my home and I panicked 😂 I went in with masks and gloves took them around the outside of the house removed all the packaging and soaped them all down left them to dry before bringing them in totally second guessing myself if I was over reacting or not

But we didn't catch covid (that time) so I guess it was OK

If it was intentional, why? What was the motivation? What was to be gained?

I think some people have weird worldviews or realities, which normally other people laugh at, or express concern at. When something like Covid happens, it appears to validate those weird worldviews as being 'true' after all. For years, they've been told they're neurotic and suddenly they're right (in their minds).

I also think they pushed the agenda that vaccination was the be all and end all and it was like polio etc ( ie you wouldn’t get it) clearly not the case at all - I’ve had 4 by the way so am not an anti vaxxer - I do think the gvt got lots of things very wrong , particularly the constant scaring of older people with all the daily conferences and as someone else said about the Main news channels- down at the morgue etc!! Maybe if the Tory’s had actually been ‘governing’ and made sure they did their pandemic prep as they were due to do in 2016 and kept in huge supplies of quality PPE they would have been in a better position to take swift action - instead what were they doing in 2016? Playing politics and fannying around with a totally unneeded Brexit to shore up a Tory vote because of a UKIP threat.

@Mumoftwo52 Respectfully, I think you need some perspective here. I was clear that some consequences (inevitable) were far from ideal. However, this does not negate the fact that lockdown also brought about some positives. Regardless, it was a necessary response, which helped keep the virus from spreading, this has all been clearly evidenced.
I feel that for many, families got opportunities spend time together they would never have been afforded prior to the pandemic. Even these days, I see a far higher percentage of father's participating in school drop offs, attending activities, which was not typical before. I think this is a great positive. WFH for some meant that professional opportunities that did not exist before for many women have been opened up, offering them vital independence and income, around home/family responsibilities. Schools prior to the pandemic were not the safe haven for a great number of SEND child. My DC thrived at home, learning way more than they had at school and were calmer than they had ever been. This says far more about the state of mainstream education, but nevertheless, was I cannot begin to tell you a most welcome change.
As a society, lockdown really shone a light on the public services we rely upon, not just those who had the luxury of working from home, able to get most things delivered. Our health workers, education support services, medical teams, retail staff, rubbish teams etc were all suddenly afforded the credit they deserve. This I think was a very positive change.
Was all perfect? Absolutely not. My own mother went through lengthy cancer treatment from the very early days of lockdown, it was stressful and the limitations of how we were able to "bubble" and support her through this was stressful. But we understood why.
In the first few weeks, we lost a local headteacher to Covid which was very sobering, then followed a great number of relatives, friends and acquaintances. This was of course horrific.
When it comes to mental health, I think we could and should have responded, had better volumes of support available as we came out of lockdown. The word "unprecedented" still haunts and irritates me, but like all services for the vulnerable, there just is not funding where it needs to be. The same applies to DV and the increase we saw there. Piece and social services are again still woefully oovrsubscribed and underfunded, what's your solution here? IIt's not as if these issues did not exist before the pandemic, if we were to learn any lessons on this, you would hope and pray that specialist teams not only better predicted the increases, but also prepared for them. These are areas I do think we could have delivered better, but again, none of us knew the extent or duration lockdown was going to take. Remember when they talked about it being three weeks only?
My experience informed me clearly that Covid was as lethal as we were told, the fearmongering was I believe a wholly wrong method applied to make people comply when it mattered. But only the benefit of hindsight informs us of this now. At the time, the information coming through all led to this being the only way to protect as many as possible. I am not saying it was easy for indeed that consequences were insignificant, not at all. We had a number of deeply stressful challenges, losses and the daily grind of having a SEND child to navigate through this unknown was a hellish 24/7 job.
Therefore for your to cite, with no knowledge of me, the circumstances and challenges I faced with: It was mass hysteria, and it sounds like you bought into every word of it. is as offensive as it is inaccurate. We did the same as anybody did. Read the info and guidance, did the very best we could and muddled through, trying to help all we could along the way. You clearly resent lockdown, this is your right, though I disliked much of it, I disagree it was not needed. What you do not have the right to do here though is abuse me or jump to assumptions you have zero ability to judge properly. What I "brought into" was the best option available for all at the time, with an unknown, growing problem looming across the globe.

Scaring the general public into adherence with the rules. It's discussed in more detail here. The date of the meeting is 22/03/20, ie the day before the first lockdown was announced.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5ecd084586650c76acac37e0/25-options-for-increasing-adherence-to-social-distancing-measures-22032020.pdf

The bottom of page 1 literally spells it out. People needed to be made more afraid, so this is how they planned to do it.

Perceived threat: A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group (8), although levels of concern may be rising (9). Having a good understanding of the risk has been found to be positively associated with adoption of COVID-19 social distancing measures in Hong Kong (10). The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.

We’d stay home when asked. You can’t enforce that kind of behaviour change really. We don’t have the policing capacity. The U.K. is well regarded on behavioural stuff and we used experts to get compliance.

Spi B I think it was called.

@EasternStandard says a lot really though about certain sections of the population- in Denmark (2nd lockdown) we had daily figures and cases on a website and only had 1 conference when rules changed ( every few weeks) I certainly don’t remember the scaremongering stuff , it was all very matter of fact and didn’t have all these ludicrous tiers or multiple conflicting rules etc