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 didn't know about the butter one but I definitely remember the thread where someone was told to put cheese in their coffee (it's all dairy innit!).

@saltinesandcoffeecups don't forget that there were loads of posters who didn't claim to have every member of their family working on frontline NHS...theirs all worked in top secret high up governmental positions instead. And they always had confidential top secret information that the government was going to keep us under lockdown until at least 2042. You heard it here first!

"All your being asked to do is sit on your sofas" used to be a favourite pious lines 🙄🙄🙄.

Crazy and funny - there was an excellent one from a poster advising everyone of a detailed technique she’d developed for using 4 disposable latex gloves to go into the supermarket without touching anything. There was an intricate protocol for disposing of each on at certain stages in the process and using a clean one to take a ‘dirty’ one off.

Crazy, but not remotely funny - the threads blaming Sarah Everard for what happened to her because she was technically breaching lockdown regulations.

Oh yes, with ominous warnings about what was to come. Lots of "you will see soon enough" claptrap. None of it happened

That is just a choice behaviour. People can and are arseholes at times. There isn't anything making that happen apart from their own free will.

The privilege was off the scale!

See also, telling people they only needed to wear a mask for a short time in a shop and it's not that hard. Clearly giving no thought whatsoever to the possibility that a person who actually works in a shop might be on MN.

I had relatives working for the NHS too, and not even they would have agreed with some of the nonsense rule-following that has been posted about here; the siblings who couldn’t be together for a school photo for example, despite living in the same house 🙄

It wasn’t the fact that there were rules to try and keep the virus from spreading that we’re retrospectively complaining about, it’s how some of them were either completely inconsistent, or rigidly adhered to with no common sense. That’s what I remember mostly about the anti-dementor threads; that they were a safe place to discuss the questionable logic without being accused of wanting granny dead.

I was very “good” throughout the whole thing. I always wore a mask, followed one way systems, got myself and the children tested if anyone started coughing, kept bored and miserable young kids confined to our 2 bedroom flat for 10 days if a school bubble burst, and knackered my back trying to carry home a week’s worth of groceries. But on the day the pubs opened (July 4th I think?) we walked past a heaving mass of drunk people crowding the pavement outside a bar and one delightful chap pissing against the window of the cafe next door, only to reach the small playground down the street and find the gates still padlocked and the swings chained up, I definitely wondered why the fuck we were all bothering.

I bet they are the same posters who are now moaning about obesity

You would have people counter with 'oh but surgeons wear a mask for hours' etc.
Surgeons don't move around much, and are in air conditioned theatres. They are not walking around The Range in the peak of summer (my local Range is a fucking sweatbox in the summer).

So is our Savers. Its fucking awful

Well surgeons and NHS workers are another good reason why the only a few minutes in a shop was total nonsense. But yes, there was a lot of invocation of NHS workers to justify stupid takes and, as this thread has shown, that phenomenon is still not over.

Don't regret starting this! We need threads like this, because we must never forget the insane regime which the government foisted upon us, which made people lose their minds; so that next time the idea of lockdown is floated, we can all scream NO NO NO!!!! If we are not careful, the horror of lockdown will be lost in a rhetoric "actually, it wasn't that bad", which is not true at all.

Please don’t regret starting the thread - it’s cathartic to talk about all this stuff. It was so bloody awful at the time, and all the doom mongers were so convinced they were right, that it’s nice to be reminded that they were talking out of their arses.

ETA: this is in response to various posters pointing out we thought it could be much more deadly/didn't know what we were dealing with at the start.

I thought, at the start, it was going to be reallly serious - like the Black Death, perhaps, or maybe less but something like 20% of the population dead.
I wondered who would die in my immediate family (parents/siblings, no DC).
I wondered if I couldn't look after them if I'd have to kill my pets.
I wondered about all the people dying and who would look after them.
I was ok with dying myself, so figured it was just my luck that I'd be fine and so would volunteer to do my best for people in their dying moments.

I still think it was inhumane to isolate people living alone. That was the worst thing. When it seems like the time is up, you want to spend every second with others, not hide away in a sterile, pointless existence.

Or at least some of us do. That was a real dividing line.

Various posters at the time talked about how awful it was living alone, and there was one poster who kept saying they had it easy. She lived with her DH but was isolating from him within the home (one was CEV) and seemed to think this self-imposed isolation somehow trumped the suffering and mental decline of those who were truly alone.

Are there really people who still won’t meet inside…socially distance…and won’t see family? In 2025 😬😳
I still see people in masks but only very occasionally. Like once every six months.

The banging on about that "rule" did my head in as it was never a rule.

It was Michael Gove's opinion...

And my DD is so vulnerable we still test for covid when we're ill etc so we locked down quite hard. Yet still wound me up something chronic

And the prick never clarified that it wasn't a rule

This made me laugh so much I woke DH up. Hard to believe how ridiculous those days were

Yes a few I knew got 'pneumonia ' christmas before lockdown. They were ill for ages.

Yes exbil and his dw. Exdh hasn't seen him for years. Exbil used to like going to the pub and football etc. He doesn't go anywhere or let anyone in his house.

Poor sods.

That’s so sad. Is there any justification for their reading? Elderly? ECV?

My father, elderly, with heart failure, died of a chest infection in December 2019. Frankly, any virus would have taken him at that stage, he was frail. but I did wonder.

Exactly. The government failed to correct the record, probably deliberately, because it suited them to have the public squabbling and fighting each other, instead of looking at the government. Classic divide and conquer.

I’ve seen a real increase in mask wearing recently. I saw somebody driving alone the other day and they were wearing one. I wouldn’t be doing that again, it was awful.

No just paranoid.