When was the moment you realised covid was serious?

[namechanged984630]

For me I think it was when it hit Italy, so early
March. Until then I really believed it'd be a storm in a tea cup like swine flu.

I remember certain songs I was listening to as I refreshed the news in early March that still give me the heebie jeebies even now.

And I remember taking my dog for a walk at some lakes a few miles away (so drove there) and wondering, on about the fifteenth of March, if it might be the last time for a while. When I was there an elderly man said to me that it was nice to get out to forget the state of the world, I'll always remember that.

I remember seeing the Wuhan hospital be built and only paying the vaguest amount of attention. So arrogant to think it wasn't a problem for us!

CheddarToldMeTo I admire all NHS staff effort but I was amazed at how many people went back after leaving especially people that had retired so were in a higher risk category due to their age so thank you for being one of the ones who went back.

I was worried just after Christmas. I was really scared when I caught it, taken I’ll on 18 March 2020, no tests then but I was incredibly unwell. Had two Skype calls with a Doctor at my GP surgery who considered putting me in hospital but I could breath enough and she said she would avoid if possible. I felt weak as a kitten for about four months and didn’t leave the house for five months. I remember listening to that first clap for the NHS , struggled to stand and crawled on my hands and knees to the window. I cried when I realised I couldn’t join in. But it was amazing hearing other people. I have never been so scared in my life.

I can barely think about it but I remember the queues for the supermarket. Standing outside for an hour or so. So many people stood in absolute silence unless to urge elderly people to the front
I'm glad I didn't know then what I know now

Popped to the shop for a few bits, and it was like a riot. I ended up helping an elderly man with his shopping and through a self service check out after I found him in tears. He said it was worse than the war.

feb half term. when the news came about the massive lockdown in wuhan.
then early march work sent us all to work from home.

When they were talking about closing schools. I was in our staff room at school insisting things here wouldn't get as bad as Italy. Then all of a sudden we were telling kids that we couldn't tell them when they'd be coming back to school.

The new hospitals being built in China was scary and watching as we left the airports open rather than close the borders.

I lived in busy city centre and the first day of lockdown I stuck my head out the window and there was eerie silence. Not like Christmas day quiet but total silence. I also remember a few weeks later walking through town on Good Friday on my "daily exercise" walking past all the pubs totally empty when normally they would be heaving with punters, police vans and kebabs everywhere. Totally surreal.

For me it was when Rishi Sunak announced the furlough scheme and said "the government will pay your wages". I thought, Christ, it must be bad.

I had read some articles about China and this virus that was there in late December 2019 and stored it somewhere in my mind.

Christmas 2019 I was unwell, rotten cold, my breathing was bad and chest felt crushed. I don't usually have chest problems with colds so after a few weeks went to the doctor. I joked that I had read about China and my symptoms were just like the virus they had out there. She replied that she had a lot of patients with the same symptoms and they were taking many weeks to recover.

I listened and took that seriously. I told family and friends to be on the look out for the symptoms and to take it seriously.
Made sure we had enough tinned food to see us through a couple of weeks of everyone in the house being sick, bought a steamer/facial to help with breathing. Stocked up on Vicks menthol rub, paracetamol and decongestant.

I work in a supermarket and watched it all unfold. Trying to tell people the food was there in the warehouses but we couldn't move it to stores fast enough. My store has an elderly customer base and trying to protect them in the early days was hard. Looking out for the ones that wouldn't isolate each week and their return once lockdown eased (I saw a couple I had been thinking about just this week, I was overjoyed to see them approach my till).

I just knew it was coming, I just didn't see the closing down of the country. My son and I travelling to work on deserted roads with our letter to say we were keyworkers in our pocket in case we were stopped by Police was strange.

End of January for me. On the 24th January I logged the first three cases in France as part of a project for John Hopkins university. There was very much a sense of it just being a matter of time before it spread much wider.

The weekend of 7 March when it was announced northern Italy was shutting down. I remember waking up on the Sunday morning thinking I must have dreamt it.

When we were in Cyprus for Feb half term and I kept meeting people who had had their planes diverted from the Canary Islands due to rising infections. I’d barely noticed the news at this point. Airports full of COVID news and everyone looked a bit shocked and bewildered.

I had been keeping an eye on things since the news from China first broke in late December/early January.

In late February I had to go in to hospital for emergency eye surgery. COVID was already in the UK, but not in any big way in my area. My pre-op booking tests threw up an issue and there was some discussion about whether it was safe for my surgery to be delayed by 3 or 4 days to the following Monday while it was investigated. There was a risk I’d lose the sight in my eye, so it was urgent. My surgeon moved heaven and Earth so I could be reviewed by the anaesthetist who would be doing my GA that day. He cleared me fit for surgery and my operation went ahead the next morning. I was in overnight and heard on the news as DH drove me home the next morning of the first COVID patient hospitalisation in our region. My surgeon was able to do the usual 2 week post-op review the week Boris announced the lockdown, but none of the other post-op follow up. He gave me really clear instructions about what a surgical failure would look like and when to call him to be seen as an emergency. Otherwise we had to hope for the best and he’d see me again when he could. His usual operating theatre was turned into an ICU the following week and the anaesthetist redeployed for the COVID effort. It turned out the list I was treated on was his last normal operating list and he only did emergency cases after that for about 6 months. I eventually saw him again in August. Fortunately my eye had healed OK and I didn’t lose my sight, but the whole experience was really frightening. I also realise in hindsight how hard my surgeon worked to get me through the surgery before the NHS ground to a halt and I will always be grateful to him.

I was off sick recovering at home throughout March and saw the whole thing unfold on the 24 hour news channels, but I already knew we were stuffed because I had been in hospital at the end of February as the shutters came down. We had a bit of a Brexit emergency stash that I’d been winding down, but I had been rebuilding gradually since late January. It got us through early lockdown as DS came down with COVID symptoms and we had to isolate and were unable to go grocery shopping in the week before lockdown.

After being very ill for 3 weeks in February and suspecting Covid (child in school having returned from abroad recently), I added quickly to my Brexit stash but it didn't really sink in till the announcement of school closures.
Bizarrely (thinking about social distancing now), we all crowded into the Head's office for an emergency planning meeting.

When the first reports came out of China. I thought the government were massively underestimating the risk and started buying a few more essentials, vitamins, pain relief and a sats monitor. I knew there would be panic buying, but I generally prep a bit anyway.

First time, we saw it in Wuhan on the news. We said to each other "That is coming here!" We bought masks in February 2020, and started wearing them in shops and on public transport - we are both in high risk groups!

For me it was in January some time, reading about all the symptoms/how it presented and realising that in late October when a work colleague got back from Singapore with what we had all nicknamed Singapore Flu as it ripped through the office and everyone got really strange symptoms exactly like Covid. I thought then it's already here and China had been keeping it quiet until December 2019. I gave it to my mum who took it into her work, where it also spread and one of her colleagues sadly passed away with pneumonia after contracting it.
I still think they will stick to the "it didn't arrive in the UK until February 2020" but none of my colleagues believe this (none of us have contracted the virus either)

When we had our first covid death in the hospital I work in February last year. Was one of the first in the UK.
Then what was happening in Italy and the government kept the borders open. That’s when I was like oh wow we are screwed they’re not even trying to stop it.

Being in a SMT meeting when N Italy was locked down, and planning ramping up (work in policing). Then a week later being told to grab laptop and go home.... followed by empty shelves in our supermarket.

I had prepped a bit re Brexit, so thankfully had a LOT of toilet rolls... got down to our last couple and remember the sheer relief when I managed to get some in the local Aldi

My first inkling was when my daughters dad rang me up to tell me to go and do a bulk shop and transferred me £100 to do so (at the time he was giving me £30 maintenance per month and only ever gave extra in august to go towards new school uniform). Think that was about a week before they announced schools would be closing. I knew for sure when they announced lockdown and that schools were closing.

@Hippywannabe

After being very ill for 3 weeks in February and suspecting Covid (child in school having returned from abroad recently), I added quickly to my Brexit stash but it didn't really sink in till the announcement of school closures. Bizarrely (thinking about social distancing now), we all crowded into the Head's office for an emergency planning meeting.

Your post has reminded me of a senior leadership team meeting in mid-March 2020 to discuss pandemic emergency planning. I joined remotely because I was still off sick. I logged in to see nearly the entire senior team crammed into one of our largest meeting rooms, no social distancing whatsoever. When it got to the Q&A one of my colleagues put her hand up and asked if it was sensible to have all of the senior management in the same room. The CEO laughed nervously and said “probably not. Let’s not do this again.” We went into lockdown the following week. It took people a while to get their heads around the seriousness of it and how radically differently we had to do things.

When the news came of the situation in Italy. Before then I had hoped maybe it would be like SARS and Swine flu and not really get out of its country of origin - but when it got to Italy it was clear it would get here.

At the risk of seeming maudlin, please could I nominate this thread for classics @mnhq

This is social history.

Oh and (I work in a micro lab) in February/March time we went back through all of our flu test results over the winter and something wasn’t adding up. There were a lot more negatives than what we would have expected. The flu/RSV PCR test is really expensive so they didn’t do them very often and only on people who are really unwell. Hardly any of them had flu but we didn’t know at the time what else they had. We think covid had been around for longer last winter.

One thing I find strange in common with other posters is that the government didn’t seem to realise how serious Covid was until very late. I remember when Wuhan locked down reading the information about it that Chinese scientists worked hard to disseminate. I remember that they thought it had a roughly 1% mortality rate (population wide) and doing that 1% of 60 million calculation in my head and being horrified at the potential death toll if it spread unchecked. It seems like the U.K. government were very late to come to that realisation