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. 💕

I remember not being able to buy more than four loose baking potatoes in Aldi at a time. Pointing out that there were five of us in our house, or that they were also selling 2kg bags of smaller potatoes didn't help.

The denial was a sight to behold even though China and Italy were racking up numbers of dead.

I didn’t go in a supermarket the whole of lockdown. Managed to get a Tesco slot every week, I think mainly due to chronic insomnia and being awake at stupid hours. So glad because just going in the village shop was bad enough.

Late to the party but I remember someone posting about their children colouring on the footpath with chalk and a poster chastised them, saying it was "common".

So many more mad things happened, but the utter snobbery and classism has stayed with me.

I remember when the second lockdown started lifting (was there a Phase 1/Level 1 or something?) and I finally took my then-1 year old to a toddler music group, maybe the 3rd or 4th time in his life he'd ever seen other children in the flesh. I posted about it on MN.

It was outside in a chilly pub garden, everyone on individual mats with their own personal rattles and bells that were sanitised in between sessions, and the kicker was that only the group leader and four other chosen volunteers were allowed to join in with the singing at any one time. Yup, someone in the civil service had looked at The Science and decided that if six knackered mums mumbled their way through Wheels on the Bus at their babies through a mask then it would be a super-spreader event, but if only four of them were doing it then it was definitely a safe gathering.

The level of control and micromanagement was completely unreal. Didn't stop someone on here trying very hard to justify all of this to me - "Don't you understand how risk management works?!" 🤦‍♀️

People wearing masks when they were alone and inside their own cars. Madness.

The two teenagers, sons of friends, who died of cancer because their symptoms were ignored, delayed, because the NHS became the national covid service. The whole thing made me think we lived in a gerontocracy.

I still see families with children wearing masks in shops, actually. One family a month or so ago being very theatrical about wiping down their cups and cutlery at the shop café. I felt very sorry for the young, masked children.

The only upside for me was finding out which of my neighbours were curtain twitching rats, calling the police the minute our children went out for a walk. Now I know how their minds work.

I posted this a bit earlier, but I always suspected covid measures were over the top. The big spike is the 1918 pandemic. That one affected young people the most. The irony is that if something genuinely as dangerous swept in today, the UK would not be financially solvent enough to cope and this is due to….covid.

We don't have a big enough army or authoritarian state to be able to force the population into significant restrictions the majority don't want. If we have to talk about the army, it's already not happening.

In another pandemic, we will have restrictions only if the public are on board. That was also true during covid, hence the focus on messaging once the lockdown strategy had been chosen.

I couldn't agree more and thank you for posting the graph. The dip and uptick from 1980 is quite interesting. Can you link the source for more context please.

People wearing masks when they were alone and inside their own cars. Madness

This I understand. If going from place to place and in the car for a short time it is easier to keep it on than take it off and fanny with your glasses, hat, hair etc. Suppose some people didn't think that someone could be between two places and just making it easier for themselves!

From DHs work...
After the first few months of just carrying on, they were suddenly told their desks had to be 2m apart. It was a squeeze, but they managed it.

Except they still had to share a telephone....

I expressed mild disappointment and surprise that my DC couldn't have a school photo together on here and was basically told I wanted babies to die.
They only had 1 years overlap and hadn't had a school photo since primary 4 years previously and my Mum in particular wanted one.
The school situation was crazy, my DC were not allowed anywhere near eachother at school but walked home and lived together whereas the friends they spent all day with had to be distanced from as soon as they hit the school gates.
I don't blame the school, they were following the guidelines but it made no sense.

It really does! I think it’s the people just standing there

This doesn't mean you can't also catch a virus off contact surfaces, hence why washing your hands is important.

I didn't wipe my groceries down by the way.

The footage from "china" of people laying dead in the streets was from an art project which took place in Germany in 2014. This information was available online in 2020 so I am amazed that 5 years on people still don't know this.

There was also photos claiming to be mass graves in Italy, featuring people wandering around in hazmat suits, which were stills from the film Contagion.

I’ve only just returned to the site as a new user but I vaguely remember there being a discussion about going out for the daily allowed exercise. What if your dog needed to go out twice, could you split the 30 minutes into two halves or would that cause Covid to spread even further?

There were definitely posters who were outraged at the thought of someone leaving the house TWICE.

The thing I wrestle with, despite having NHS medics in the family and despite volunteering at a GP covid vaccination centre for four years now, is that during COvid instead of the NHS caring for us, we, the citizens, became responsible for caring for the NHS. The NHS should enable us to work productively and enjoy a prosperous life. In a time of crisis, you have to prioritise it, but the NHS shouldn't be the main focus of national life and it seems to have become this.

Ideally we would have a healthier, better-nourished, fitter population who don't often need to access the NHS outside routine appointments and screening, certainly in their younger years.

Someone (Wes?) said that we'd become an NHS with a state attached to it.

And I’m not sure about the crying nurses. After all, there were plenty of actors who needed work.

I was really pissed off when I watched an opera on TV for some escapism, and discovered it was a special “social distanced” edition, actors keeping apart on the stage, masked musicians… there was no fucking escape from the whole thing, even in fiction!

I remember getting told off in relation to the arrows. They were a pain in the arse to see as a visually impaired person

@Abra1t I couldn’t help but think when we lived in Denmark during 2nd lockdown that’s one reason they were coping better- it’s very clear their population on the whole was fitter and healthier

@MushroomDelight welcome back !

I remember in early June 2020having my 4 friends round and sat on my garden all 6 feet apart on deckchairs in a big circle - somewhat shouting across at each other with a buffet set up in kitchen which we all went to , one by one- nuts on reflection

Happily. I used chat GTP. Request was for ‘deaths per 1000 people’ over the last hundred years, showing significant spikes.

The reason for ‘per 1000 people’ was so that the death rate took account of changes to population. If I hadn’t opted for that measure, the death rates would look like they’re alarmingly increasing - but it would have been due to massive increases in population rather than a constant pandemic from around 1990!

The overall U shaped curve is due to the gradual shift in proportion of the population that are elderly - this is the Boomer generation working its way through. The upwards trend will continue for the next couple of decades, I reckon. If it suddenly spikes upwards, this will likely be due to antibiotics no longer being effective (again, most elderly people receive near constant antibiotic treatment at the end of their lives, contributing significantly to antibiotic resistance).

If you look carefully, there is a change in the rate of fall in death rates from around 1948. This was around the time the NHS was created and there was mass immunisation.

The dip after the covid spike is a normal, statistical phenomenon. It’s because covid ‘brought forward’ the deaths of those who would have died a year or so later (since we know that virtually all deaths with covid were people in their 80s and 90s).

My thoughts exactly. The best protection is general good health: nutrition, exercise, sunlight. Our measures did the opposite.

I remember that - and I think it went on for longer than two years. Her position was that the kids would be fine making friends online, but that they had a family member who would definitely die if they contracted COVID so it was entirely justified

So many.

All the people with no comprehension skills or common sense who thought there was an imaginary list of essential food items and permitted outdoor exercise.

So you had MNetters being called names and abused because they bought a packet of hot cross buns or an Easter egg with their weekly shop.

Or being told their kids couldn't use a scooter for outdoor exercise because it wasn't on the imaginary list of permitted exercise.

The rigid rules are rules people who told the woman who'd just given birth and her crucial items were at her parents and her Dad could just drop them off without any contact with anyone, that she could just put the baby in an emptied out drawer.

The people who thought you couldn't sit down in a park. Or eat outside.

The posters washing their fruit and veg in disinfectant.

The posters picking up their mail with kitchen tongs and leaving it in the garage for days to quarantine.

The posters who didn't understand how the NHS works and how vastly different the country was experiencing covid-19 and thought every NHS hospital and worker was on their knees coping with third-world horror and didn't understand that many hospitals were virtually empty.

As above, not understanding how the NHS works and how common it is for hospitals to be rated in a red state and being closed to admissions so seeing a panic-inducing post on FB about their local hospital and coming to MN spreading the panic assuming it was covid-related.