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Wildest memories from the COVID-19 pandemic period?

I worked from home through the whole thing luckily, ended up doing multiple different roles in those first few months due to my specific department having to effectively cease whilst new work plans were drawn up.

I suppose for mad things right before lockdown attending what was later deemed a super spreader event watching Liverpool vs Atletico Madrid. Bare in mind by this point Spanish football was being played behind closed doors over 3000 of their fans were allowed into the country (Madrid was already highly effected) to attend the match.

After that it was when things finally reopened in the summer and I remember having to fill in a form with my contact details at South Parade Pier at Southsea.

Something I'd have to repeat again at Dunes Leisure to the man operating the Miner Mike.
 
The Mrs cleaning all of the items of shopping with disinfectant will never be forgotten, I will make damn sure of that....
 
We were talking about this tonight and a couple of things came up:

Shops that had traffic lights on the doors. You had to wait for the green light before entering.

Secondly, how the pandemic has almost become an epoch. Memories and events are either from before the pandemic or after.
 
Alsty said:
Secondly, how the pandemic has almost become an epoch. Memories and events are either from before the pandemic or after.
Click to expand...
Yes, this is a good one! I very often refer to things as being “pre-COVID” and “post-COVID”, even though the height of the pandemic was 5 years ago now!

On a somewhat related note, is it only me who feels like the pandemic made it feel almost like 2020 and 2021… didn’t happen? Ahead of my upcoming visit to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, I was reflecting on the fact that my last visit to the park was 6 years ago in 2019… yet it does not feel like 6 years have passed since then at all. Ditto with other events of 2019 like my GCSEs and me starting sixth form… they do not feel like they happened 6 years ago!

I have a suspicion that the pandemic and 2020/21 being kind of mentally blanked out are a contributing factor in that; the pandemic years being so strange almost makes it feel like those years “didn’t happen”, for lack of a better term, which makes some of the final pre-pandemic years seem less far in the past than they actually are.

On a different note, another odd memory I have of COVID is just how paranoid I was about it. I was really quite anxious about COVID at the time… yet now, I look back and think “what on Earth was I so worried about?”.
 
Had a brilliant night out in Margate to see Blossoms at the Winter Gardens 9th March 2020. Things escalated very quickly in the following days and that turned out to be the last social event for quite a while.

I remember being in a bit of a rough patch that year and found furlough/lockdown a bit of a relief, despite all the fear and uncertainty. I guess it was a reason to be lazy and not feel guilty about it.

Had some friends in a similar situation and we played a lot of Call of Duty Warzone, which helped keep us all sane.

The first few months were pretty scary though with the constant death toll updates. Lots of people didn't take it seriously until it started to affect them personally (including that toff prime minister).

Massive respect to all the key workers during that time.
 
The Thursday clap for nhs workers seems like a really strange fever dream now. We only did it once or twice. Being honest I didn’t see the point in it and felt a bit silly doing it, but I would never have admitted it at the time because people got really weird and defensive over the weekly clap. Acting like you wanted nhs workers to drop dead from Covid or something if you didn’t do it. No it’s just that I didn’t see how clapping from my doorstep every week made any difference to the current situation and I’m not a fan of performative gestures which is exactly what this felt like to me.

Our neighbours opposite got really into it and would ramp it up every week. Started off just clapping, then the pans came out, followed by flags, music and so on. Fair enough, what ever gets you through a challenging time, but people shouldn’t have been judged negatively for not taking part. People had their reasons and it was often nothing to do with not appreciating nhs/keyworkers.

Most people I speak to now look back on the clapping as a wtf moment.
 
The whole 'Clap for Carers' thing just felt wrong from the off for me. In my mind, as others have pointed out, it seemed to quickly manifest itself into a metaphorical dick-waving contest, and I heard of numerous cases where people were shamed for not taking part. Erm, what if they're unwell? What if they have young children in bed? What if they work shifts? That just seemed so inconsiderate to me. Also, I should probably mention that I was still working during the pandemic (I'm very grateful for this, as I still credit going to work for helping me stay sane through actually seeing people who weren't my parents during the week!), and one of my shifts fell on what I call the 'Two Minutes Clap'. It was the random fireworks that set me on edge. I worked in a petrol station at the time. It's probably just me overthinking, but I was genuinely on edge whenever it was that moment each week, and I was ready to hit the emergency cut-off button and leg it out of the petrol station if a firework landed on the forecourt.

One thing the pandemic made me realise is just how little value some people put on personal space. I'd often be putting something on a low shelf, only to suddenly notice someone reaching over me to grab something off a higher shelf with zero warning. Struck me as completely disrespectful, even without the pandemic taken into account, but when we were supposed to be practising social distancing? Seriously? It really wound me up.

I remember one particular shift at work where I was on the verge of a meltdown for most of it, and I'm grateful to my colleague that night for trying his best to help calm me down. Got home, went into the garage to my wine cupboard, grabbed a bottle of Greco di Tufo, and finished the whole thing that night. Didn't even care that I was due back in work at lunchtime the following day - at that moment in time, I really needed a drink. Looking back, that point scared me, and I've tried to be more careful in how much I drink since then.
 
At one point in Berlin there was a rule that bars and restaurants and such were allowed to be at least partially open but any customers were required to have a negative Covid test from the same day. Naturally by the point this was allowed we'd been so starved for human contact by the earlier lockdown that we were taking every opportunity to go out and see friends and eat food in places other than our own dining room table. This meant getting tested more or less daily and it simply became part of our routine. Whenever we left the flat we'd take a short detour to the closest "test center" (read: a local wine bar that had been quickly reconfigured for this purpose) and get stuck up the nose by one of the two young people working there. 10 minutes later we'd receive a QR code via e-mail and that was our ticket to anything fun that evening.

Glad that's over.
 
They made Liverpool lift the Premier League trophy to Coldplay 🫠

Remember like 100 people stood in the spot the year before there had been thousands, all with football scarves wrapped around our mouths and noses 😂
 
In the very early days, when the virus wasn't properly understood so we didn't know how contagious it really was, how it was transfered, or exactly how lethal it would be, but we still had a job to do so kept doing it.

The first few sudden deaths that were suspected covid related, there was a huge amount of nervousness going in to that with just a pair of gloves and the crappy ill fitting rectangle mask. My first one was in a caravan, having to search and move the body in a tiny cramped space where the deceased had been coughing and spluttering over everything for a few days. For all we knew attending that was a suicide mission. Crazy really.

Then later, in lockdown, being out on patrol in towns and cities that always have life and movement even in the middle of the night but it being completely still. I could do a whole 8 hour shift and encounter literally noone. Earie but strangely beautiful sometimes too.
 
Very early on, the meeting we had at work when we had the first case in our area. There must have been 80 of us squeezed in a room, people were spilling out of the doorway, people stood practically on top of each other,
Everyone was desperate for information, everyone was scared. At this point there was no social distancing and we hadn’t been using any PPE.
I remember them saying that anyone over 60 would not get an icu bed. This actually didn’t happen in the end but I remember being really upset because it seemed we were just writing off anyone over 60.
Probably a week later, all our office space had been taped out with 6ft squares of yellow tape and you’d get yelled at by a matron if you stood in the same square as someone else.
It was daft because 30 mins later you might be out on a clinical visit working practically nose to nose with the same person you’d just been told to stand 6ft from.
In the end our area wasn’t that badly hit and the worse thing was the constant daily changes to the rules and policy. Most of this wasn’t based on any scientific principles, but purely based on what PPE we happened to have on any given day.

The saddest bit was going to see end of life patients in care homes and their families weren’t allowed in to be with them. That was heartbreaking.

Personally my biggest non work memory is standing queuing outside B&Q in the blazing Sun for about 45mins being so happy that I could go in and wander round the garden centre bit.
 
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Captain Tom and deciding fairly early on that his daughter was a wrong’un.

Not only clap for carers but ‘clap for Boris’ when he was hospitalised with Covid.

The evening government briefings being must watch tv and feeling like you knew the likes of Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty, Jonathan Van Tam as if they were film stars.

Becoming a really good runner in the absence of anything else to do, and now being back to 2/3 stone overweight.

The Alton Towers tv documentary about reopening after COVID.
 
Mick said:
Captain Tom and deciding fairly early on that his daughter was a wrong’un.

Not only clap for carers but ‘clap for Boris’ when he was hospitalised with Covid.

The evening government briefings being must watch tv and feeling like you knew the likes of Patrick Vallance, Chris Whitty, Jonathan Van Tam as if they were film stars.

Becoming a really good runner in the absence of anything else to do, and now being back to 2/3 stone overweight.

The Alton Towers tv documentary about reopening after COVID.
Click to expand...

Ah forgot about JVT - he came across better than the others
 
I worked every day at a "white goods" warehouse that didn't handle the pandemic at all well.

Office staff still came in. Spread the thing like wild fire. Staff were told not to inform the testing staff or the app of where they worked. (They told the BBC instead. Our MD looked very uncomfortable on Look North) I had to sack staff for coughing. Whilst a manager got off Scott free when he came in FOR 3 DAYS. coughing. I was sent to another warehouse.

No gel dispensers available to staff. Yet they started selling them.

We did however receive an attendance bonus.

On captain Tom. I think he knew more than he let on.
 
We weren’t allowed to tell the app when we tested positive either. If we had, it would have contacted all the people (other staff) we’d been near to and they would have had to isolate and lo and behold in the blink of an eye we’d have had no nurses working.
I’d forgotten all about that!
And the daily flipping lateral flow tests before going into work. The four times I had it, I knew before the lateral flow test showed positive.
 
If any of you fancy any entertainment, here’s TST’s 2-year, 435-page thread in Corner Coffee regarding the whole saga: https://towersstreet.com/talk/threads/coronavirus.5379/

It’s really interesting to see what was being said at the time and how people’s predictions played out. I think some in the early stages of the thread were potentially overly blasé, but at the same time, there was also a lot of doom-mongering that didn’t come to fruition either!

Having a read through this, another odd COVID memory comes to mind for me… and that’s just how paranoid I was.

I was 17 years old in 2020, and I had no severe health conditions… yet I was relatively scared of the virus. I was, for the most part, compliant with the restrictions, I was quite pro-lockdown, and I was quite unnerved by the whole saga. I wasn’t quite as militantly COVID-anxious as some, and like most, I’m sure I’d be lying if I said I militantly followed the rules to the letter at all times, but I definitely had a level of health anxiety during the height of COVID that I’ve never had before or since. I remember getting really quite upset and anxious about my first vaccine being delayed, for example, and if you look back through that thread, I took the government word as gospel and was quite reticent about opening up towards the end of the pandemic period.

I genuinely think living with my parents, particularly my dad who strongly believes that “the media frenzy around the whole thing was the true deadly pandemic” (he’s not a COVID denier by any stretch, but believes that the media greatly exaggerated the threat posed by COVID), was the thing that kept me from going insane during the lockdowns. Me and my dad would have chats while we went for our daily exercise, and I would discuss my worries and my dad would say something reassuring and tell me about how the media was whipping me up into an unnecessary frenzy. Those daily lockdown walks and chats with my dad are probably some of the COVID memories I look back on most fondly!

In hindsight, I do wonder; was all that anxiety really worth it? Should I really have been so anxious to so much as spend time with family, or go out and live my everyday life? I’m not so sure. I think there is definitely a valid debate to be had about the effects of COVID policy in this country, and while I maintain that most governments in the world were simply doing their best in the face of an unprecedented situation, I do wonder whether some of the calls made by our government were necessarily the right ones, with the benefit of hindsight.

One thing I think I learned from the whole series of events is to be more sceptical and critical of authority figures, and not to just implicitly trust someone because they are in a position of power. If you look back through that thread, I was quite defensive of government policy and very much parroted the government lines throughout the pandemic period… but I then felt like a complete mug when the headlines about Partygate came out and it turned out that Boris and co had been flagrantly flouting their own rules the whole time. And we’re not even just talking “they had 7 people in a room instead of 6 on one occasion”, we’re talking multiple full-on raging parties here! It was definitely an eye opener in terms of revealing how the government of the day viewed the rules they set!
 
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