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!

So mid Jan whenever Chinese New Year was

I went into a pharmacy and said to them 'I know this sounds a bit crazy but is there any chance you have hand sanitiser and they said the whole county was out and on the way home the news was practically apocalyptic telling people to try to stay away from hospitals if they could

When I talked to a friend who told me how bad things were in their hospitals in Madrid, and that doctors weren’t able to treat everyone who needed treatment. This was about 10 days before we locked down, and I kept my children home from school, which I thought was a bit OTT at the time. A week later schools were closed. I can’t believe our government, who must have known more, earlier that we did, were so casual about it. Remember Boris telling us he shook hands with everyone at a hospital.

The week before lockdown. I had to travel to a course for work. I had to go by train as i don't drive. I had to make several changes. Masks weren't a thing, it was all about wash your hands etc. I was fucking petrified and spoke to my boss the following day and said i wouldn't be doing that again. I had until then dismissed it as media hype a week later we went into lockdown and i was furloughed. Definitely surreal, i knew then it wasnt going away

@PostMenWithACat

I don't think the seriousness has hit us yet. That will come when it becomes evident the country is bankrupt, interest rates increase, inflation increases, unemployment increases. Then the increased cancer deaths will hit us, increased MH issues, etc., a generation of young people deprived of GCSE, A'Level and university experiences. Time will tell us whether locking down caused more or less damage. Personally I don't think the roller coaster ride is over yet.

I'm still slightly in shock that the three week lock down in March 2020 extended until July, then we locked down again in November for another month, then after Christmas and until 12th April, and that we are all still wearing masks.

Of 1000 employees I am aware of about 20/30 who have had covid; all recovered, although one was ventilated. I know three people who have died: a 97 year old man who had had multiple TIA's and caught it in hospital and died within 28 days at his care home - after another TIA; a young man in his early 40s who had stage 4 cancer, who caught covid, recovered but died within 28 days; a neighbour with complex health issues who caught it from her carers and who was on end of life care.

I think the last 17 months have been surreally dystopian but Covid has killed a tiny, tiny percentage of people overall and who have contracted it and I have grave concerns about how statistics have been disseminated to us and the extent to which our human rights and freedoms have been eroded.

Before vaccinations covid hospitalised 7% of infected people. 7% of 50 million. Is 3 million. Also known as a health care disaster. HTH.

I was watching the news from Italy (100km away) and then saw the news about the first French cases, a bit closer still. I don't think I realised properly until Macron announced in his speech on the 16th that on top of the strict national lockdown, the Schengen borders would close for the first time ever. We are frontaliers and all my ongoing medical treatment was in Switzerland. The rules were very unclear and people with legitimate reasons queued for five hours to cross the border the next day.

When my dad died of covid. Up until then I was ignorant regarding the seriousness of it. Wish I had of kept him out of harm's way😕

It was when there was a sudden urgency to send my son and his colleagues back from mainland Europe. They were told at breakfast and at an English site by the afternoon. Then they were all ill but had no way of telling if they had caught Covid or something else.

They stayed there for a week or two then there was the same urgent rush again to get them home. A colleague drove him to the Midlands and I drove there to pick him up.

They had been cocooned really and my son was talking about being back in England unexpectedly and that he would catch up with all his friends. He wanted me to stop at McDonalds!

We got home, put the news on and were straight into the first lockdown.

I realised when it hit Italy (I live there).

I started posting updates on a UK talkboard, where people still weren't taking it all that seriously.

Name change for a obvious reasons.

When I was invited to a cryptically worded meeting to “pitch innovation ideas” and it slowly dawned upon me while listening to people speak that the ideas they wanted me to pitch were disaster-mitigation things like how to rationalise supply chains, ramp up mass testing, organise food rationing, maintain civil order. They expected ME (and some others) to come up with ideas and the best ones would be put into play. It was like a disaster movie dragons den. Terrifying to me that I could somehow be important enough to be involved (and ludicrous in retrospect).

On a more mundane note, I felt like I was living a dual life through Feb. I ordered laptops and desks for the kids, an extra freezer, seeds for growing our own veg. All while still routinely flying around Europe trying to convince myself it was all in my head (all of this before the weird meeting).

@namechanged984630 could you provide the source for that statistic please?

@Backwards31

I'm so sorry

For me it was when the pictures and news reports started coming in from Italy.

I remember the feeling of helpless desperation for the government to do something.

I can't even remember, but maybe when DS1's hospital said he shouldn't leave his house, which was March last year.

Had an email whilst at work on the afternoon of March 12th 2020 telling us to pack up, take our laptops and chargers and WFH for 3 weeks. Here we are in August 2021 and I am still WFH with no change on the horizon. The other distinct memory is the absolute mayhem in Tesco that same night when people were literally stripping the shelves of everything!

Valentine's Day 2020.
That's the day I started my Coronavirus spreadsheet to log the numbers.
Looking back the numbers were very low then (64k worldwide) so I'm not sure what made me start, but I do love a spreadsheet....
The first day I started tracking the UK figures was 02/03/2020 and there were only 40 cases at that point

I use the figures from the Johns Hopkins dashboard: www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Today, the worldwide cases are over 202m and the UK figure has exceeded 6m....
Unbelievable really....

Just in case it turns out that I really am a witch and that's how I knew it was going to get bad, I've just checked and I only filled in the dates until 15/12/2022 so maybe that's my unconscious prediction of when it will all be over

I think the last 17 months have been surreally dystopian but Covid has killed a tiny, tiny percentage of people overall and who have contracted it and I have grave concerns about how statistics have been disseminated to us and the extent to which our human rights and freedoms have been eroded.

A tiny, tiny percentage of an enormous total is still a significant number of people.

Last February Chinese and Italian doctors were telling us Covid was killing roughly 1% of all people infected. Our own government told us in March that they expected 85% of the UK population to become infected, but they were content in the meantime that doing absolutely nothing whatsoever was a perfectly sensible approach.

Population of the UK is 69million, give or take, so figure out what 1% of 85% of 69million is, (586,000 or so). That is how many UK citizens that complete idiot Johnson was openly telling everyone last March that he was content to see killed.

It's only because that point was hammered home to him over and over that he finally twigged that wasn't a good look and took the bare minimum steps to try to mitigate it.

So you may believe that the resultant death figures are inconsequential, or what we were told throughout this doesn't bear scrutiny, but the Chinese and Italians were not lying about what Covid was doing to unprepared populations, and Johnson was seemingly happy for exactly the same thing to happen here. That's the measure of what a criminal incompetent the fool is.

Valentine’s Day: I went out for lunch in an affluent area of London. Decided to pop into pharmacy for hand sanitizer/masks and was told they’d run out weeks ago: I realised I was being slow on the uptake

I headed home, but my instinct kicked in and took a detour to do a massive food shop realising what was coming

Week of the 16th March was really stressful: I think many Londoners thought we’d lock down a week before we actually did, I was convinced it would be during the school day to stop people running away across the country

Obviously now it’s clear lockdown a week earlier would have been so much better

Very Early March, we were away in a caravan
Watching news night and after that, decided we would come home and lock down

Would not in a million years of thought we would still be in the situation we are

[quote PostMenWithACat]@namechanged984630 could you provide the source for that statistic please?[/quote]
I am sure whatever source I quote you will pull it apart as you do not want to believe the lockdowns were necessary but I've gone with this one as Australia know about ALL of their cases, they obviously know their numbers hospitalised, and their population is largely unvaccinated

twitter.com/louichristopher/status/1423125257724907521?s=21

When I popped into Tesco for milk a few days before lockdown. DS (10) had been seriously ill for two weeks with what we and his drs presume to be Covid. We thought it was meningitis. He was so unwell I hadn’t been following much news and when he was discharged from hospital I went into the supermarket for some things to tide us over. The shock at the empty shelves and walking around like a zombie, I actually laughed it was pure hysteria. That feeling of horror and dread stayed with me every day for the next 6 months.

Going to the supermarket and seeing the empty shelves. Such a weird experience.

Then a friend of mine in her mid-30s caught it and was very ill. Ended up in intensive care but luckily she was OK.

The compressed time video of workers in China turning a bit of wasteland into a hospital in a few days. The urgency was palpable.

I don't know if there was ever an exact moment I thought it was very serious. I have a background in public health so was watching with interest from early on - I thought it might be a goer but equally thought it might fizzle out with good luck or an early public health response (this optimism was in early January 2020).

I was travelling in East Asia transiting through Singapore in and out, with a few days there each time. On my way towards Asia (before Christmas 2019) there were rumours floating about, taxi drivers saying they were back on the jobs after a bad flu etc, whispers about a disease coming out of China. At this point it was all rumours and it's not clear even now whether this was covid or simply another virus circulating.

On my way back through Singapore in mid January we knew it was serious, both for what was in the news and what wasn't. When you live in certain parts of the world long enough, you learn how to read between the lines! By then Changi airport had brought in their temperature controls.

By late January I was convinced it would be a pandemic. Why would China close highways, airports and train stations for a mild illness? Why would they start expedited construction of a 10,000 bed hospital? That all happened in January 2020.

It beggared belief to me that in late February 2020 people still thought this illness couldn't spread in the west. You can be almost anywhere in the world in 48 hours and there was no indication that any population had any form of natural immunity. It was being detected in various countries.

I can't remember exact dates from then on, but I was remember reading daily updates about the Diamond princess and feeling antsy about what I felt was a slow border response. In February I was moving and did a big pantry stock up for my new place. I remember deciding to shop in my hometown as the new city I was moving to was already experiencing panic buying and reportedly was short on toilet paper. This would have been late February as that was when the first case was confirmed in my country (New Zealand).

Italy and Iran were already in a bad way and there was a real sense of anticipation in the community. All eyes on the government. Various measures were introduced but at that point we were 3 weeks from border closure and 4 weeks from total lockdown.

My friend is a funeral director. I saw her one day and she just broke down in tears. She said they had stacks and stacks of coffins just ready and waiting.

It gives me goosebumps even now.