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 don’t think you should regret starting it because it’s important not to forget how quickly people lost their minds. It illustrates how society and democracy exists on a knife edge.

I remember learning in school about the Holocaust and really struggling to understand the mindset and motivation of ‘normal’ people who reported Jews in hiding, or neighbours who were hiding Jews in their homes, to the authorities, because those were The Rules. It just seemed like such an impossibly, unnecessary evil thing to do. But when the pandemic happened, I suddenly understood how it happened. Fear. The Rules.

It was inevitable that it would get dark and sad, OP. Because the speed with which people lost their minds WAS seriously dark. But that’s why it should be talked about and not forgotten.

I think there was some other particularly unpleasant strain of flu or something going round at the time. I don't believe all these people had covid.

Wasn't there a choir in the news who all appeared to have covid that winter, but when tested it seemed it must have been something else?

I myself had something covid-like in early March 2020, but I tested for antibodies in May and didn't have any, so I don't think it was covid.

I think there was some other particularly unpleasant strain of flu or something going round at the time. I don't believe all these people had covid

There was - I remember my mum talking about how many people in her village had flu. It probably wasn't flu but we had a discussion about whether the flu vaccine had worked that year. Must have been in January 2020.

In February 2019 my DH had a really nasty bug with a cough. We'd certainly have thought it was covid if it had been a year later.

The tier system was intresting especially as one area could be in one tier but depending where the boarder or cut off was you could walk a few mins and be in another. Then there was the football staduim which had the car park in England but the pitch or something was in Wales which had different rules.

The one way systems never made sense either. Let's have people spend more time in the shop by going round and round to get to where they need to go to

I've seen people post on social media (NOW, not during covid) that only the rabidly selfish stopped wearing masks and did we think that the clinically vulnerable don't exist anymore. Apparently we should all be wearing masks every time we go to a public place for all eternity

The bonkers ones for me were:

the criticism of people walking to buy a newspaper each day

supporting the batshit laws in Wales about taping off areas of supermarkets so you couldn't buy non-essential goods (anyone (who a poster perceived to be) in England who criticised it was being imperialistic).

Going out in your car. You were DEFINITELY going to have an accident or break down and put pressure on the NHS.

It didn't matter if you were ill with, or died of, anything else. Only covid mattered.

All the runners who apparently breathed all over everyone at every corner. I couldn't believe how many people were constantly colliding with runners!

And all the people who constantly said we didn't lock down hard enough and wanted us to be like Spain. Presumably they all lived in large houses in rural areas with massive gardens.

The one way systems never made sense either. Let's have people spend more time in the shop by going round and round to get to where they need to go to

And queueing outside when the supermarket was in an indoor shopping centre. It made far more sense to let people in, get what they wanted, and get out again, rather than all standing in a queue in a confined space. But when did common sense ever apply to any of the covid theatre.

I think we got off lightly in the UK. In Queensland Australia they locked down immediately (after coming out of lockdown) because they found ONE person who had covid. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-09/how-a-single-case-of-covid-19-forced-a-lockdown/13042612

And New Zealand was locking down for absolutely no reason and everyone thought they were fantastic and bowing at the altar of Jacinda Arden

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/09/melbourne-public-housing-tower-residents-win-5m-payout-over-covid-lockdown

God I remember people doing that! I caught a family member goggling hazmat suits at one point.

The one thing that used to amuse me during the early days was the things people would wear in the supermarket, my favourite was a man in a full balaclava (today that would make me recoil in shock but back then I barley turned a hair) but there was also an actual ancient gas mask, lots of rubber gloves and many tea towels covering faces.

I was always hoping I'd see a hazmat suit but sadly never did.

As Goths and in the live performance industry, DP and I have alot of weird and wonderful costumery. DP was keen to go either full Mad Max including shoulder pads, or complete medieval plague doctor. For the sake of keeping the peace I dissuaded him from rocking up to Sainsbury's in either ensemble. Kind of wish I hadn't now.....

@MistressoftheDarkSide I'd have loved to have seen that in the supermarket 😂. God forbid but should we ever live through another pandemic then you have a civic duty to fellow shoppers to let your DP go full out there.

Ah, I will do it in his name for sure as sadly he is no longer corporeal. The plague mask will loudly beckon 😘

@MistressoftheDarkSide Oh I'm so sorry.💐

My mum was in a tier 3 area, and I was in a tier 2. According to the rules, because I was "bubbled" with my mum (fucking bubbles... remember them?), I was meant to live my life as a tier 3 person.

I did stay on MN but I avoided my local Facebook group for months.

That going to a shop to buy milk or bread wasn't an essential trip.

The one way systems in shops was harebrained precisely because of what you’ve said. Rigidly sticking to the one way system meant spending longer in the shops in the process.

Speaking of Wales, it provided a very good example to underline the absurdity of the one way systems in shops. An Asda branch in South Wales was served a notice by the council for failure to comply with the Covid regs - customers were prevented from social distancing, so the council claimed. Why? “According to Bridgend council, customers entering on one side of the supermarket were having to cross paths with others to comply with a one-way system.“

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/asda-supermarket-bridgend-pyle-coronavirus-19118161

I’m surprised other supermarket branches didn’t suffer the same fate.

Did you see this from the time? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-52533718 It was a teenage boy dressed as a plague doctor walking around in a village near Norwich.

I thought it was hilarious.

Some cunt told me that on a thread that I shouldn't be visiting my dad (the day after my mum dropped dead at the family home) due to not being part of his bubble.

I cannot express how disappointed I was in humanity at this point.

I remember some people in my friend group downloaded the track and trace app, and some didn't.

We had a big group meal one day and a couple of days later half the group were instructed by the app to isolate, and the other half were saying "thank God we didn't download it, otherwise we'd have to isolate".

The weirdest bit was that no one stopped to think which one made the most sense. Either you're scared of a deadly virus or you aren't. Very quickly it became more about following rules than actual fear of the virus

Not to worry, as a Tier 3 person living like we were in Tier 2 as far as possible is exactly what lots of us did!

I downloaded it. The only time I got pinged was after visiting my cousin. Before I visited he asked if I'd been in contact with anyone with covid as they have a CEV child. I said I hadn't.

A few days after visiting them I got pinged

I never understood the concept of the whole tier system.
The concept was so that the government could appear to be doing something, and also to avoid the word "lockdown". Tier 4 was basically lockdown, but by then, Saint Boris couldn't bear to say the word.

When spurring people on to take the vaccines, some politician or other said "so we can go down through the gears of tiers". 😩Ugh.

And I refused to download the app, as a matter of principle. There were times when I held my phone up and pretended to scan the codes. I attended the anti-lockdown protests, which the BBC described as "a couple of hundred conspiracy theorists on Speaker's Corner", if it reported on them at all. I saw with my own eyes that they were in excess of hundreds of thousands of people: a march about forty people wide going down Oxford street, extending literally more than a mile. More people were against lockdown than anyone might think, and certainly more than what the BBC implied.