If someone said to you last March...

[Wowcherarestalkingme]

That this would go on for another 16 months would you have believed them? Did you think a year ago that schools would still be closed, businesses going under left and right and still having to wear face masks all the time?
Do you think it would have affected your behaviour in the first lock down?
I was just thinking today that it’s coming up to a year when lockdown was first announced and I truly believed at the time it would all have blown over by Christmas. Never did I think we would still be where we are a year on. And thank goodness for the vaccine!! Just interested in peoples thoughts on how they felt a year ago to now really

@Spillanelle

If I’d known I would have seriously considered just leaving the country and working remotely from somewhere abroad. Some friends upped sticks at the start and moved to Bali then Dubai and have had an amazing year.

Same. If I had known I would have stayed in Cape Town (where we were in February, just before it all went down) and stayed for as long as possible working remotely, register the kids in a local nursery. Shame for DH who doesn’t have a work visa but I would have been fine.

That being said, South Africa had lots of lockdowns and the second wave has been really bad. I know one person who’s husband passed away and I have a colleague who nearly died

The vaccines are amazing.

And they're really going to help.

But most people haven't had one yet.

And the open up starts on Monday.

I think it was absolutely inevitable, given the way the government were so slow to lock down in the first place. They saw what had happened in Italy, and other European countries, and chose to ignore it.

It wouldn't surprise me if we get locked down again in the autumn.

I said this to my family last week,
I said remember when covid first came to the UK? Remember when we were like "the government won't let it go on! They'll figure out a way, we likely won't have a summer holiday, but October should be good.

A good 4 week lockdown, things might take a few months to get back to normal, the economy will not be allowed to suffer, maybe if Labour were in charge, Boris will not have it.

Well haha, wasn't I wrong!

I remember sitting and thinking omg how am I going to entertains myself toddler for 3 weeks indoors 🤦🏼‍♀️...... little did I know!!!

I fully expected it to go on throughout 2021 and was a bit at people who were acting like it would be fine in a month or two especially when you looked at what was going on in Italy.

I don’t think I comprehended what it would mean on a long term level personally though in terms of friends and family, even though it
Should have been obvious as soon as the first lockdown hit.

I’m expecting restrictions or lockdown again at winter or Christmas so am loosely planning for that in my head

I would have believed them. Given the previous pandemic info we have ( Spanish flu) and the knowledge 're waves. Also the government's lacklustre response at the start. I'm surprised people thought it would be over so soon - history has shown us how these things turn out.

That knowledge and expectation hasn't made it any less painful though.

I definitely thought it would be serious and would go on for a good while, snd everyone in my household took the p.*.

I’ve only skimmed this thread so apologies if it’s been mentioned already but I remember watching those buses of people, who had flown in from Wuhan, being transferred to a quarantine facility. I am sure that was at the end of January

Everybody seemed to think it was way over the top. I wonder how different 2020 would have been if they had did that to all incoming flights in February....

Anyone who actually listened to what epidemiologists were saying would not have been remotely surprised.

I never washed my shopping though, I always knew the risk from surfaces was bound to be negligible at best.

I knew it would take a year or more, never heard of a pandemic that was over in a few months. I didnt think.the government would handle it so badly requiring multiple lockdowns though.

When this first started I was working in a shop and terrified I was going to die. The management wouldn't allow us to wear masks or anything and I felt like every customer was a potential death trap. Nobody else at work was taking it seriously. I remember getting a cab home after a late shift and I started crying to the driver about how scared I was. He gave me a big blob of antibacterial hand gel and said he was scared too. I lost my job a few days after that.

I thought it would last forever and was mostly scared about catching it, but I enjoyed the empty streets, no cars on the road and had loads of lovely sunny walks with dd. When the schools first closed, I loved our routine of getting up to do Joe Wicks, me trying to invent some school work for her to do (the schools didn't really have home schooling set up then), having a nice lunch together and going for a walk to the river to see the ducks and get some fresh air.

I worried about the economy, about the virus itself and about dd's education, but I enjoyed that summer a lot. I couldn't see an ending to it though, and thought we were going to have to learn to live with the virus - I didn't imagine there would be a vaccine.

The scary thing was the government taking this blind view. They were very naive and refused to listen to the science. That’s how we ended up with high death rates. It should have been a zero Covid policy as much as possible but they thought they knew better. The constant gaslighting about schools being safe has been worrying. Also they blamed their incompetence on the UK variant when tier 2 restrictions obviously weren’t strong enough.

Yes. Today a year ago I hugged my mum goodbye at the station having agreed she would isolate at home and we'd see each other on the other side, I'd spent 2 hours earlier in the day teaching her to use Skype. The memory of that goodbye will stay with me for a long time. We both assumed we were looking at 18-24 months of waves, rolling lockdowns and restrictions; we hoped there would be some remission over the summer allowing us to see each other then, and a vaccine within 2 years. I think it was obvious by the beginning of March 2019 to anyone paying any attention at all to the news that we were in for the long haul?

Plenty of people on here did tell us that it would be this long. I didn't listen, told a few that I thought that was ridiculous and generally chose extreme optimism.
I was wrong, totally accept that but do you know what? I'm not sorry that I chose to be naive and optimistic. Knowing and believing it would be this long initially would have been miserable and would have made things much harder for me. This way I've very much taken things one day at a time.

I heard the scientists back then saying it would be around for a year or so. I remember seeing posts on MN about it all being over by summer, then Christmas, and thinking "it won't". As they say, it's hope that kills.

I was supposed to be going to the sleepover at the Natural History Museum on the 14th March but they cancelled it due to the rising numbers of cases of this new cough thing in London.

DH and I discussed if we thought this was going to be the next pandemic and agreed it was concerning. He had always taken the piss out of my winter prepping, my swine flu prepping, my Brexit prepping (it was the same excess built up over years. My sisters are the same as we lived fairly remotely as children and my mothers 'full cupboards' were our normal). He very quietly asked me exactly how much we had in my boxes. We pulled it all out and there was no sneering.

We thought a couple of years of full grimness was the best case. I'm cautiously hopeful now with the vaccine rollout.

@FleetwoodRaincoat

I think it was absolutely inevitable, given the way the government were so slow to lock down in the first place. They saw what had happened in Italy, and other European countries, and chose to ignore it.

It wouldn't surprise me if we get locked down again in the autumn.

Locking down doesn't cure it. Closed borders doesn't cure it. Look at Isle of Man. It only takes 1 person and covid can spread to 50 in just a couple of weeks. If we'd locked down last March, we'd still have closed borders today with the screams of anguish that people hadn't seen their families/relatives etc for a year with no end in sight, and probably also had a succession of lockdowns every time just one person came in infected.

@Porcupineintherough

I knew it would take a year or more, never heard of a pandemic that was over in a few months. I didnt think.the government would handle it so badly requiring multiple lockdowns though.

There've been multiple lockdowns in countries with closed borders etc too!

I’ll admit I was a total idiot and genuinely thought we’d be back to normal life in June 2020. No way did I think it would be a year. I was going by our experiences in this country of the Swine Flu pandemic and I just thought if we locked down and stayed in for a couple of months (and closed our borders!) it would go down to zero.

The frightening thing is, I’m a very educated person and considered above average intelligence in many ways. I can’t believe how incredibly stupid/naive/uneducated I actually was. It’s completely laughable.

@confuseddotcom090

I remember thinking in March last year, if we stop acting normal now, when will it ever end? I mean, it's not that bad a virus, in the grand scheme of history. Not as bad as smallpox, the Black Death or even Spanish flu. Maybe not as bad as the Hong Kong flu. So if we act disproportionately now, it will never stop.

And so it has transpired. And science has died.

Why do you think science has died?

@Kazzyhoward I've got friends in both Australia and NZ. There lives are pretty much back to normal and have been for a long time. A 4 day lockdown every now and then doesnt change much.

I thought it would go on much longer. However, I would never have believed we'd have such fantastic vaccines so quickly or that the UK would be doing such an amazing job with their vaccination programme.

I told people right at the beginning that I thought it would be 3 years, like the spanish flu pandemic, as things were shaping up in the same pattern.

I still stand by that.