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!

Sigh

I work in school and it was being told school was closing indefinitely. We had 2 days to organise that. We are a small rural community and driving home that night there were army trucks moving in to set up a ‘base’ That’s when it really hit home that this was serious. It all felt very surreal.

The day i realised that we could only get morisson basic boxes of food and boxes of meat to eat. (We lived off these for about 2 months. We couldn't get fruit, veg, pasta, rice or dairy). The same day schools closed, my work went wfh, Boris told us we were in lockdown and all shops closed.

I'm not sure if was all the same day but it felt like it. I might have been wfh a week earlier.

Still feel traumatised.

The people in here who talked about buying chest freezers and ordering vast quantities of food, do you still think that was a good idea? Would you do it again?

The following week when my husband got covid and was told to stay away from the doctors and hospital unless he was having breathing difficulties.

And one month later after 4 telephone doctor's appointments he was finally admitted, sornt a week there and has permanent covid heart damage.

But I think trying to live almost solely off meat because I couldn't get any other food was a very scary, horrible reality. We were trying not to leave the house at all.

We had a departmental covid planning meeting on 2nd March, and I remember thinking that my colleagues had lost their minds.

I went on holiday on 7th, and when I came back a week later the entire ward was infected, half my team were off sick, and it was ripping through my dialysis unit.

When I read an article about the government adopting a herd immunity strategy I was terrified. I'm immunocompromised, not able to work from home but non-essential. Management phoned from home (some left the office weeks before lockdown) telling me to wash my hands. I constantly wore gloves and was regularly meeting large groups right up to the week of lockdown!

I only started to get scared at the end of February when colleagues came back from Italy into the office even if they weren't feeling 100% because "we can't have everyone who's been in Italy stay at home".

I started a thread on the Preppers section here about the 22nd or 25th January.

I remember reading all the info I could get my hands on and piecing it together and thinking...shit. This is the real deal.

I knew I'd be told I was scaremongering if I posted in the main sections so I started the thread in Preppers, I hadn't used that board before.

When the supermarket shelves and roads were empty. That was the scariest moment, because the potential of civil unrest (rioting/looting/stealing food) was realistic. Would people follow the rules to try to keep safe, or would they rebel against being told what to do, thereby adding human threat to the danger? These concerns are what first made me realise that Coronavirus was upon us.

Another thing too. Practically everyone on the planet has a mobile phone. The amount of Maths, science, technology and engineering that goes into inventing, designing and producing mobile phones is immense (understatement) and everyone appreciates that science has made that possible. And most people are oblivious to understanding a lot of science too, so they would not have the knowledge to build their own phone. However, in the face of the majority of biologist scientists providing calculated advice to help reduce the spread of Coronavirus, there are hoards of telephone toting hypocrits who think that their subjective opinions (via collective agreement) know better than science, and that science is wrong. These people might refuse to wear a simple facemask, or refuse to keep socially distant from others - all because they think they know better than the million trained scientists who are working hard to combat the virus. If everyone had self-isolated simultaneously and if they did so diligently, for a few weeks, then it would be nearly impossible for the virus to spread, and the Lockdowns could have ended quickly. Instead many people were complacent, some even arrogantly arguing with the science and via mass gatherings were complicit in helping the virus spread, thereby prolonging the need for lockdowns. These street politics also made me realise how pivotal are the decisions of individuals in our new Covid world.

First worry…… Mid Feb 2020, we were in a ski resort in southern France v close to the Italian border. Rumour mills started about someone in the village having it and I cancelled all our evening meals out and we only went skiing and then back to our apartment or a friends apartment for the rest of the holiday.

We then drove home (southern France) about 1.5h from Italian border, and people were asking on local Facebook pages about sending children back to school. Ie should they, was anyone not…. It felt like loads of people were rolling their eyes at concerns like that but I was worried. There wasn’t any info at that time about children vs adult infections…. I told a friend who had been to an Italian ski resort she shouldn’t send her kids to school just in case. She was so offended.

And then my husband had to go work in Northern Italy and restrictions were getting stricter and stricter there and I think when they were limiting people in supermarkets and insisting on masks and he said he queued for 1h to get into a supermarket…. That’s probably when it hit me properly. Would have been around the first or 2nd week of March maybe? French shut schools and locked us down 17 March. I had a full on panic attack and drank some whisky to calm myself during the announcement and cried for about an hour. No family around, husband away…. God, I’ve got all anxious again just remembering….. 😔 what a shit 18months.

When my DH can home from work (Hospital dr) and started to sort out will and insurance paperwork just in case anything happens. He's usually so calm, not prone to panic or hyperbole and that shook me terribly.

Living in NZ. Our first lockdown was 4 weeks of compete closure. Couldn't go out except to supermarket. Shortages of essentials. Remember hearing about a few early community cases and stocked up on flour etc in a paranoid moment. So glad I did.

When I was sorting out library cards for Chinese students from Wuhan in early Feb 2020. I made a comment about how I had heard of a virus from there and they then suddenly no longer spoke to me. Just shut down and left quickly. Then I knew something was serious.

I remember being in a small supermarket I picked up a cleaning spray for the kitchen (last one) an elderly lady asked where I'd got it from as she needed one too. I put it in her basket she thanked me profusely. A kitchen spray made that lady so bloody happy! . Being in a shop looking for hand sanitizer then realized I had no chance. Went to three shops before it dawned on me I was risking my health for something that wasn't there, teatree handwipes and wound spray was all I could get. Hording cat food! 😻

Early in March, I met up with a friend whose husband is a Liverpool season ticket holder and a retired dentist. So has a bit of medical nous. He said he would not be going to any more games due to the virus. The next game was the infamous home game against Athletico Madrid that saw 1,000s of Spanish fans in Liverpool.

A few days before the first uk lockdown was announced, we decided that I’d no longer go running in the woods, and that DH would stop his two days a week at his office and wfh full time for a while. Just to see how things went. And we were told that DS had ASD - over the phone because face to face appointments were cancelled. DS was at preschool so DH and I went to the pub for lunch afterwards to process it all. And felt like we were taking a risk being in there. Very strange feeling. Then Johnson did his big speech and I remember crying to DH that I didn’t want to die and leave him and DS alone - the thought that they might die was too awful to even contemplate, but I was so scared of how they’d cope without me there, of what DH would do trying to do it all himself.

As it happens, a few weeks before that we’d all had some horrible virus - awful coughs, feeling a bit short of breath, DH lost his sense of taste, I got chilblains on my toes, DS got a weird rash on his chest… we thought it was a really awful cold. But we did start to wonder a bit when the lockdowns started to be announced. I guess we’ll never know for sure. But we would definitely have caught it in the community - we hadn’t been overseas and hadn’t knowingly been in contact with anyone who had. DS picked it up first at preschool. There’s a selfie on my Instagram of me taking my first run after feeling better, looking pretty pasty and saying something about getting over the child plague, from 24th February. 🤷‍♀️

And on a lighter note, the time that I went a bit mad cleaning all the light switches with bleach and gave DH an electric shock And DS thought it was so funny that he wanted to see it again! We had to use a wooden spoon to turn the light off again, until it dried out. DH has not let me forget it yet

A few days before the first uk lockdown was announced, we decided that I’d no longer go running in the woods,

Without being rude, what made you decide this?
I thought that would be one of the few things that was either allowed but minimal risk in terms of the virus.

Well with hindsight of course it is, and I go running in the woods all the time now! But back then a lot less was known about the virus and it felt safer to stay close to home. There is a holiday village in the woods too, and lots of people travel there to walk, so not knowing what we know now, it seemed like a risk.

Well with hindsight of course it is, and I go running in the woods all the time now! But back then a lot less was known about the virus and it felt safer to stay close to home. There is a holiday village in the woods too, and lots of people travel there to walk, so not knowing what we know now, it seemed like a risk.

Oh ok, that makes sense. I run but I found the "well known" footpaths around the town got really busy during lockdown with bike riding, walking and dog walking so I preferred to use country lanes or more out of the way routes.

I’m lucky, we’re on the outskirts of a village with some nice footpaths that only the locals really use, so I could run there and not meet many people. But I tend to go to the woods as the soil here is heavier, so it gets waterlogged in winter, and in the summer the paths often get very overgrown. The woods are on sandier soil and the paths are generally well walked which keeps the nettles in check (mostly!). So it wasn’t a massive sacrifice for me, although doing the same two or three routes pretty much every day (as if I wasn’t running I was dog or child walking them) did get a bit repetitive after a while…!

@wonkylegs

When my DH can home from work (Hospital dr) and started to sort out will and insurance paperwork just in case anything happens. He's usually so calm, not prone to panic or hyperbole and that shook me terribly.

Heard this a lot from hospital staff

Mid December 2019, I was chatting to someone at a party who had recently come back from a month in Thailand. He had a cough and looked a bit warm, and I remember showing my concern. He brushed it off, saying that he always caught something on the plane.

Of course I came down with a viral infection about a week later, and was very unwell for weeks. I isolated myself, as I was so breathless that I knew that my dd and dh may not survive it if they caught it. Dd was later classed as CEV and shielded (dh strangely wasn't). As I recovered, the news started to report more of what was happening in China, and of the inevitable spread of Covid around the world. I realised how serious this would become from the beginning.