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!

@gildalily

At the risk of seeming maudlin, please could I nominate this thread for classics *@mnhq* This is social history.

I agree.

@EmilyDickinson

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

I recall driving home from work and stopping at Aldi for dinner. BBC announced that BJ was going for herd immunity and I recall just sitting with my hands white knuckle clenched on the steering wheels for minutes in numbed horror.

@gildalily

At the risk of seeming maudlin, please could I nominate this thread for classics *@mnhq* This is social history.

I would support this. Does it help if a few people nominate it?

Would MNHQ let it stand where it is for a while longer though?

My in laws were very ill with a flu-like illness last December and nearly didn’t make it to ours for Christmas. They both lost their sense of taste and smell.

@Meaninglesss

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.

That's interesting. My mum was very very ill with what she thought was flu and a chest infection last December even though she had had the flu jab. My DF called paramedics at one point although she wasn't poorly enough to be admitted. It took her a long time to get back up to full strength.

We are also convinced it was around in the UK earlier than Feb/March.

March 16th 2020.

Walked into the office and my whole team were in the boardroom waiting for me (I start later, contractually). We were told to pack up what we need and take a taxi home.

Haven't been back to the office since

I left my two screens, everything in my desk drawers (spare shoes, umbrella, deodorant etc) as I honestly didn't think that in August 2021 we'd still be WFH.

We have no return to the office date, nobody I speak to wants to go back. We have a hotdesk system in place do we don't have out own desks now (this was set up when people were able to go back last summer for a brief period. It was optional and take up was very low!)

*that should say December 19 not last December!

Anyone else just totally lost track of time over the last 18 months??

When it was spreading in Italy, but I still thought we would not be locked down whatever because of having a conservative government, did get caught 120 miles from home at lockdown (at dp's) what a shame

But I have a friend who works in public health though and he showed me information from wuhan so I did know much earlier, I should add, I was just being a bit blasé thinking bojo wouldn't shut the country down. I had brought lots of clothes etc to dp's just in case

@XDownwiththissortofthingX

I started buying masks, hand sanitizer and extra food at the start of February knowing it would hit the U.K. soon. I’ve never prepped for anything before. I couldn’t understand why no one else, particularly the government seemed worried. I’m still angry that as a country we weren’t better prepared

Baffling, isn't it?

I had Covid in January 2020, I'm in the UK. I caught it from someone who works side by side with someone who returned from Wuhan in January 2020. All three of us were ill at the same time.

Listening to the UK government telling us last spring that it didn't arrive in the UK until late February made me buckle with laughter. That, right there and then, was all the proof I needed to confirm we are being governed by a bunch of complete and utter imbeciles.

The idea that while this was spreading all over the planet, that somehow the UK was a special case, and all those flights coming in here from various already infected countries just happened to have nobody onboard who was carrying the virus... until late February?

Absolute morons. I await the public inquiry eagerly, but I suspect it will totally ignore much of the blindingly obvious.

Yep, it was in Paris December 2019, can't see why London would be different

There was a date in early March i cottoned onto how bad it was going to be. I remember turning to DP and saying I'm going to get up for when the shops open tomorrow and get stuff. He looked at me like I was mad. We brought everything we could possibly need (yes including toilet roll to last a month and lots of pasta and dry goods - before panic buying started!!!) I came home and sorted everything out and made an audit. At that point everyone thought I had gone mad. Two weeks later I had family asking me for bits and pieces so it was a good thing I did!

Although I do remember in very very early January seeing Wuhan and saying to DP wow that looks serious can you imagine that here!

Little did we know!

When it was fist unofficially mentioned in various strange social media rumours back in mainland China at the start of 2020 probably half a year since it was a known issue in mid to late 2019. Italian news in March 2020 was the international confirmation that this was going global.

The pandemic impact in the UK and internationally was worst than I envisioned even though as we witnessed - living in societies with clueless don’t care not scared exceptionalism entitlement I do what I want and will not follow instructions blasé arrogant types. This is disease although not wholly unavoidable - much could have been done by an alert and proactive society to limit its negative impact with proper handling and respect for this disease and less pandering to snowflakes etc that exaggerated the problem for themselves and others.

This viewpoint from an old Canadian chap in mainland China seems to sun things up nicely:

We were also ill in early Jan 2020. We cancelled our NY plans. I called my DH to come home from work (not something easy for him to do) because I was worried my throat might swell shut or I would end up struggling to breathe. While I (usually fit, strong and healthy) eventually recovered my DH (cev) suffered much longer. Just found texts of him speaking to the gp in early feb and urging him to tell them how severe and long lasting his symptoms had been. We both lost our taste and smell, he also lost his voice for over a month and described his symptoms as if an elephant was sitting on his chest. I also remember speaking with various tradespeople around the same time and them all agreeing that there had been ‘something nasty’ going around over Christmas and NY with many saying they’d had to take time away from self employed businesses, also with the sense of their chest being crushed and struggling for breath

For me I think it was early/mid February 2020. We had already pulled D.C. out of school a fair while before they closed but was a very sobering time trying to fathom what this was and watching it pan out globally.

I was on a week of medical night shifts in the hospital clerking patients on the acute medical take. Every night we would come in to handover to be told a new PPE rule, or rule for swabbing (initially we were only allowed to do it if you had returned from Italy or Wuhan), everyone was very anxious and then on the 3rd night the medical registrar was called out of handover to be told we had our first positive case in the hospital.
Me and my partner had begun retreating weeks before then and making sure we had the basics in. We were new to an area with no family for hours so knew if we had to isolate there was no one who could help.

There were two 'fucking hell' moments for me. The first one was when everyone panic bought at the supermarket and I couldn't find any formula or nappies for my then 3mo daughter, it was a bit like what the fuck are we going to do if this gets worse. The second hit me hard, my DM who works in the local hospital rang me crying down the phone because of the pressure they were under and told me to stay safe and follow all advice.. their staff had been given extra training as they were expecting to see a mass amount of deaths in a small amount of time, they were offered counselling and they'd all been given the fitted ventilated masks. DM has worked in the same roll for nearly 30 years, nothing has ever hit her as hard as the first few months of the pandemic. It was a big wake up call.

[quote XDownwiththissortofthingX]@Pissinthepottyplease

A family member's workplace had nine specific individuals off at exactly the same time with some sort of serious respiratory ailment that the doctors couldn't accurately type, but eventually put down as 'pneumonia'. This was also November 2019, and it's a workplace with individuals who travel back and forth to China, Wuhan specifically.

Didn't arrive in the UK until February 2020, though, so that's all ok.[/quote]
I was working in an A&E department in the South of England around this time. I remember sitting at a desk in the middle of the department one afternoon, writing my notes after seeing a patient and being aware lots of people were coughing an identical-sounding cough all around me. Multiple cubicles, patients, visitors, staff, like a Mexican wave of coughing from one side of the department to the other. The sound made me look up from what I was doing and take it in. There’s normally a lot of noise in an A&E department, so it must have been quite noticeable for me to register it. This was November 2019.

I became really unwell with a respiratory illness in November 2019, so much so that I had to take myself home in the middle of a shift (the first time I’ve done this in well over a decade). I was unwell for several weeks. There were no reports of COVID at this time, nor local surveillance reports of anything out of the ordinary.

The out of hours GP I saw one Saturday evening assumed (quite reasonably) I was unwell was due to one of the normal seasonal bugs I probably encountered at work. I remember him saying he’d probably be sick on Monday himself as he’d spent all day seeing people with respiratory illness.

Who knows if any of this was COVID? We didn’t have a test for it or knowledge of it at that point. Winter 2019 was a worse influenza season than the previous year so that may explain it. Either way, I remember it being strange at the time.

For me, after the early reports from China it was like watching a car crash in slow motion. Except we weren’t just watching, we were in the car and it had broken steering, with no seatbelts or airbags.

For me it was when someone from the registry rang up and asked how much land we had on our church site for mass graves. The first Covid funerals I did were by the graveside. The weather was so lovely in April in stark contrast to the shock of the families who were grieving the deaths of people who had died unexpectedly.

I dontend to agree it was around way before Jan/Feb and that we were already in the eye of the storm by mid March. With hindsight I also agree the borders should have been closed two weeks before the actual lock down on 23rd March and that they shouldn't have been as freely opened last July (2020).

There were a few things that made me realise this was going to be something unprecedented.

On 6 March 2020 DH and I went for dinner in an Italian restaurant. The place was almost empty, even though it was a Friday night. The woman serving us said it had been quiet all week and she was scared for her job. I had been feeling uneasy for a while, but this really worried me.

On 13 March Johnson gave that speech saying that we should "avoid" pubs and restaurants, but wasn't closing them . It was so clear that he was putting off the inevitable.

www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statement-on-coronavirus-16-march-2020

As soon as that was over DH (who is CV) and I decided we were going to do our own version of lockdown and stay home as much as possible (we were lucky to be able to make that decision, I know). My SIL had a hissy fit when we told her ("it's just the 'flu!"). She soon changed her tune.

Then on 16 March, I watched this video of the Italians singing from their balconies and although beautiful, it absolutely chilled me because I knew lockdown was coming for us too.

When it delayed the start of my husbands (cancer) drug trial and they stopped me attending his appointments with him. He died three months later.

Honestly I only realised how serious it was when McDonald closed down

@PoppyDotx

Honestly I only realised how serious it was when McDonald closed down

Watching news reports in Jan 2020 of the speed that China, not typically known for its citizens welfare, was erecting hospitals.