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!

Admitted to hospital to be induced and me and DH had to wear PPE as they suspected I might have Covid. I couldn’t leave the room, the staff would be wearing more PPE every day. The rules were changing daily - they didn’t know if I could use gas and air because of the airborne transmission risk.
After giving birth and having a negative Covid test, the only person who could visit me was DH. At home I didn’t see a midwife or health visitor in person (except for the heel prick test at 5 days). There were no support services available.
I couldn’t register DD’s birth for 3 months.

@JanglyBeads

When I started reading Worried about Coronavirus on MN, including links to what international scientists were saying - before Feb half term.

Lots of people thought I was panicking unnecessarily.....

This. I'd say January or February and everyone thought I was over reacting.

I emwmber the furore on here with posters saying others were scaremongering.

I’d been following the threads on here and had quietly stocked up with the odd tin, jar, packet etc every time I was in a shop. DP thought I was nuts.

The weekend before lockdown I was at the hairdresser and as I was getting ready to leave she said to me, “I hope we see one another again soon, stay well” and we both sort of laughed hysterically. DP met me for coffee afterwards and we noted how quiet everywhere was. When I got home I ordered some expensive pro hairdressing scissors from Sally’s because I had a feeling I might need to trim my own fringe…

@LeeHarper5

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.

I'm so sorry.

@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. I definitely saw several unwell A&E patients with respiratory symptoms and negative swabs that winter. Frustratingly, we couldn’t access COVID testing in the early days after testing became available unless the patient had returned from a high risk area or been in contact with a known positive case as per the PHE testing criteria.

I remember spending two hours on the phone to PHE in late February 2020 trying to get permission to test a traveller returned from an area not on the ‘high risk’ list who had transited through several airport hubs. They needed admission with COVID symptoms and had negative standard viral swabs. Nobody from PHE would give me permission.

Our A&E department was the local COVID testing centre at the time.

emwmber = remember

It was the Friday before my birthday weekend in March 2020. Until then it had all been speculation.

First a restaurant I'd booked to celebrate with friends in another county called to say they were having to close. Then our back up plan called to say the same. By the end of that day the schools had announced closure and our local food shops were decimated.

I went for a walk with family on my birthday and had a massive panic attack (never had one before) on the drive back and my DH had to pull over and call an ambulance. I was completely overwhelmed and convinced we'd all be dead by the end of the year.

Luckily after a week I'd got things into perspective and just got on with it like everyone else. I'll never forget that weekend though - it was just too much.

Ironically, while I sourced hospital grade masks in January in preparation for Covid, we all were sick with some viral illness in early December - including protracted cough and loss of smell/taste...
I had to have an X-Ray - I had pneumonia and a broken rib from the cough.
I believe it was likely Covid, given the rates in March it was certainly in the UK in November. Interestingly no one talks about it officially.

@LeeHarper5

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.

I am so sorry, LeeHarper5

I was following the news in Wuhan from January. I'm not normally a worrier in the slightest, so when I was texting my friends saying it was coming here, they pretty much ignored me.

The week in March that culminated in schools closing. DD had already been sent home to isolate and we didn't have much food in, and couldn't get a shopping delivery. Then all the talk about mass cremations, mass burials, ventilators and PPE - it started to feel like the end of civilisation...and this is far far from my personality to believe in those kinds of things.

@Chosennone

Working in a school and seeing it all unravel. Kids it coming in and self isolation meaning partial closures before the full one. Weirdly, and I know this sounds stupid, but when I heard that Coronation St had only enough episodes to last until summer and they were being rationed. It's a national institution in my eyes and it was a signifier that society was unravelling 😬

Yes I'd forgotten about the soaps all stopping ...I think that was the point where I stopped watching the news for a little while as is was all just so overwhelming with every normal thing we took for granted being put on hold

I also remember checking the Worldometer stats religiously every day throughout April 2020 after they were linked to on Mumsnet.

For a good while the worldwide ratio of deaths per cases was increasing rapidly. I had to stop reading it eventually as it was so scary.

@Ticksallboxes oh yes! It was a specific time every day wasn't it, and everyone got twitchy if it was late!

It was around late February, when things were just happening in China. I was very tipsy and had that ‘enlightenment’ moment, when you’ve had a few and suddenly you get those amazing ideas in your head like ‘I could start my own business and be a millionaire’ type of thing, but also you sometimes realise things that are obvious and right in front of you but you haven’t noticed them before.
I just thought shiiit, people are dropping like flies there, something’s amiss.

I suppose end Feb/beg Mar 2020 when things started to get a bit out of hand with infections and deaths. Until that point I believed it would be a bit like the swine flu and bird flu epidemics.

We run our own business and decided to move everything from the office to our living room the week before lockdown was announced. Staff work remotely anyway so it was a case of business as usual, just us working from the living room. We rent offices at an innovation centre - the manager just about laughed in our face when we said we were moving the servers out and wouldn't be back for a while. Told us we were being silly and the Government wouldn't lock down

Not when it hit Brighton because I remember staying at a hotel and not talking about it much at all on around same date

Maybe when Italy started showing scenes

Definitely when Spain got hit and 500k figure came out

When Boris announced the first lockdown...I watched it on TV feeling sick. My DD was at her dads for the week and I was terrified she'd have to stay there for lockdown and not come back. Such a surreal feeling.

Oh and the first time I went to do a big shop and seeing the queues outside the supermarket and everyone standing with their masks on waiting to go in. I sat in the car and cried. It was like something out of a film.

When McDonald's closed

I knew as soon as I heard China had locked down multiple cities

The first threads in late Jan are interesting to see again

A few very insightful posters, who talked about overwhelming healthcare here

When I initially heard about it, I thought/hoped it would be like SARs and not really affect us much here. Then I saw footage of the Chinese building a hospital in 10 days and people in HazMat suits cleaning the streets. To all those people (on here and in RL) saying it was scare-mongering and "just another type of flu" I would ask how come we don't deal with flu in HazMat suits.
The bbc news would mention it in passing early on, and bit by bit they devoted more and more of their news bulletins to it.
Yet STILL people tried to ridicule those of us who were concerned about it by accusing us of being hysterical.
I can measure it by Chinese New Year, I think, whenever that was in 2020.

Reading the Mumsnet Worried about Coronavirus threads in February 2020, mostly during night feeds. A poster was kindly monitoring media worldwide and posting case numbers in different countries. At first, they were very very small - one or two sometimes for some places. But it was the number and geographical spread of the countries. I thought - that’s it, it’s everywhere now. Then Italy took it up a notch. Then the week before lock down I was beside myself- just couldn’t understand why we were just sitting in our hands. Weirdly I was calmer once lockdown was announced.

For me, the stand-out moments when "shit got real" were:

• Family member who works in FMCG told us on the QT to make sure we had enough supplies in the house, because she could see from behind the scenes that supply chains were starting to unravel

• Going to the supermarket and finding the place stripped bare of pretty much everything. I had sleepless nights worrying about how we were going to feed the children

• Work sending us home, pre-lockdown

• BoJo's announcement that we were going into lockdown

Chinese New Year in 2020 was 25th January. 23rd January was my dd’s last day at school before the new year holiday; she never went back as we could not get back into China.