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 someone saying the army was out at Maidstone and that no one could get in or out. It was massive on the legal site roll on Friday at the time. I don’t think they have ever lived it down.

The clapping. I was a care home manager during Covid. I had just got home from a very long day and nipped the dog out for his walk and happened to be in our village high st as 7pm rolled around. I still had my id on. At first everyone assumed I was NHS snd I felt like the Queen. Then one of my neighbours said ‘she isn’t NHS, she’s only a care home manager’ and they all Stopped clapping. Having been in full PPE all day watching someone painfully struggle to breathe their last with no help from anyone medical as no doctors could come in and no hospitals would admit care home residents, that put a cap on it and I actually cried. (Over something that I thought was ridiculous in the first place!) Later on the clapping was enlarged to be for ‘NHS and keyworkers’, but at first if you weren’t NHS you didn’t warrant it. I got into a big Twitter row with John Lewis who were only offering free drinks to NHS staff, not care workers. And I began to think very differently about a friend who was a back room admin nhs person, wfh, regular hours who still used her ID to get free drinks from Costa and line jump at Tesco.
Dont even get me started on the silly care home ‘rules’ which were in place long after lockdown finished. My staff at one point were all out socialising with each other and everyone else outside of work with barely any restrictions then coming to work, getting changed outside in a spidery shed one by one and wearing full PPE all day. The whole thing was mad.

@piscofrisco That is so terrible, and shows exactly how fake the clapping was.

During the height of the madness, I was suddenly offered a temporary job of visiting a family with an autistic non-verbal child, who turned out to be extremely clingy: no social distancing to be had there! The family told me they think they had Covid in 2019. This child normally went to a specialist nursery, but of course that lifeline was incinerated by Saint Boris. I had to carry a letter authorising what I was doing, in case I was stopped by police (which didn’t happen). In the poorer areas of town, in seemed there were far more masks, on faces, and on the pavement, back when the word from Matt Hancock’s Ministry of Truth was “they don’t make any difference”. There was “Blood on govts hands” scrawled on a wall.

Did she think she was the supreme leader of a cult or something? Weirdo.

Not sure if it’s been mentioned (read up to p20 so far!) but I remember a big fuss being made about cats, should you stroke cats, should you let your cats out, what if you stroke a cat outside and you catch covid from the last person who stroked it??!

Probably there was a correlation between people making "mad comments" and those being scared shitless because they were highly vunerable and might actually die if they caught it.

Covid wasn't that deadly to a lot of people, but to some cohorts it was extremely dangerous. It's easy to be blase about rules and regs and think everyone else is mad for following them when it's not you that ends up in the coffin.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the mad stuff was unreasonable. But maybe understandable.

I agree, but I would add that the fear was largely manufactured. If you were so vulnerable that there was a high chance of dying from covid, then there was a high chance of dying from flu or a cold or other infection too - it was just the relentless emphasis on covid that made people feel like it was a definite death sentence.

There was one poster on here saying she would definitely die if she caught covid and I asked, not entirely innocently, what could increase her chances from say 1% to 100%. She couldn't answer because she wasn't thinking from a realistic point of view - she was thinking from a situation where relentless propaganda had made her feel like this was the worst threat in the world, rather than another threat in a world of threats.

And of course there were the frequent posts about 'idiots flocking to the beach' or how 'my town is rammed today'. It never seemed to occur to the poster that they were part of all that flocking and ramming. But there flocking and ramming was 'essential' I guess.

Flocking, ramming and flouting. No-one ever seemed to just break the Covid-related rules - it was always FLOUTING them.

That was a feature throughout. Other people prioritising their loved ones, lives and beliefs are selfish, but it's morally virtuous when I do it. You are traffic, I am sitting in traffic. Things are a protection or a restriction depending on whether they bother me. The easiest sacrifices are always the ones expected of other people.

I don't think there's anything particularly awful or surprising about any of that, but the lack of understanding from some quarters that this is what was happening was a problem.

The absolute maddest post I read was from a Mnetter triggered by the rainbow pictures she saw in people's windows.🤯😆

Oh gawd yes, and the madder parts of the LGBTQ community claiming ownership of a fucking rainbow,. saying it was offensive to use it for anything other than their own ideas...

No, that wasn't it. Quite the opposite.

A poster started a thread saying rainbow pictures in windows triggered her because she associated it with the trans community.🤯

Yes. I genuinely feared for the safety of my cats, because people had gone so mad, and might take matters into their own hands. The government thinks we’ve forgotten that they were “considering” killing all pet cats. People (including me) were saying “they’ll have to kill me first”.

I honestly think that there would have been people who would be out "hunting" cats if cats spreading Covid was thing.

Denmark culled 17 million mink due to Covid fears.

ETA - Hong Kong also ordered the killing of pet hamsters due to Covid too.

This. I was working in a supermarket, and it was an absolute nightmare. My mental health took a nosedive. (My favourite was the woman shouting at me about not knowing what other people were going through when I was feeling suicidal. Yeah, maybe she should have taken her own advice.🖕🏻All I did was ask her very politely to pull up her mask while talking to me.) Got sacked in March 2021, (not related to the stupid woman,) went on UC, found another job after three and a half months. Felt much better because although it was retail, it was also mostly warehouse work. I finally got COVID in 2022 and felt awful.

RE people saying they think they had COVID in 2019. Not unreasonable, they did a study about it, using chest x-rays they'd taken from people in 2019 and ones from people with confirmed cases of COVID, and found them to be very similar. I saw people in 2019 who were complaining about feeling very poorly, we just didn't know it was COVID

There was someone who believed the whole of Kent had been shutdown and all of the roads in and out were closed. It was a complete fabrication. It was also posted on the legal website roll on Friday. I lived there and there was nothing of the sort so in a way it was weirdly entertaining as they kept posting live street closures but obviously not being from the area, the detail skewed and it was always after a few drinks. As it happens they were outed as someone living a life of luxury in Edinburgh, getting food and nice wine delivered and having a right go at everyone on the front line NHS. Couldn’t make it up. Can’t believe that’s been five years, total nonsense and embarrassing on their part.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/coronavirus/3916300-ve-day-spike

I went on a date during lock down and kissed him, thoroughly! I then went home and washed my mouth out with mouthwash! It was all a bit surreal. I kind of believed it all. I used to wash my hands thoroughly after opening my mail or putting my groceries away. I never clapped for the NHS though or downloaded the app. I didn't really want to know if I'd been near someone who'd been diagnosed with covid. I mainly stayed at home alone anyway. My daughter dropped out of uni because she couldn't cope with not seeing anyone. She hasn't gone back. She was severely depressed.

I remember seeing a video on tik tok of army vans just driving and it being shared everywhere saying that they were coming in for lockdown ( when lockdown was a rumour ). Also had someone tell me - again before lockdown and when it was still a rumour - that there would be army all over the street and they would shoot anyone who came out of their house.

That reminds me of the BBC article about sex during Covid. No kissing, wear masks, and have him take you from behind!

@thetorturedpoetsdepartmentssecretary that's so sad. Is she doing anything else? Does she socialise?

The thing that surprised me was the emphasis on washing hands and how everyone started washing their hands. Evidently, most people didn't wash their hands very much.

I always wash my hands when coming in, would after unpacking the shopping, before meals, etc. I thought that was normal.

She's working now, not a very satisfying job though. It took her a long time to be able to socialise again though. I'm just so angry, as I feel covid/the government cost her a degree. Maybe she would have dropped out anyway though, we'll never know.

@thetorturedpoetsdepartmentssecretary I hope she goes from strength to strength.

We ignored a lot of the rules . I even had a birthday party at home. I said at the time if you think those politicians aren't partying you're wrong. Obviously no one vulnerable came. Plus it was their choice.