The Coronavirus Pandemic - 5 Years Later

[Neon Ignition]

17 November 2019
The first recorded case of COVID is recorded. The 55 year man from Wuhan, China does not survive.

29 January 2020
The first recorded UK case of COVID is recorded.

23 March 2020
The first UK Lockdown began




Five years later the world barely even references a period of time in which over 7 million people have died from the virus. Normal daily life has resumed with remnants of an era in which the globe was confined largely to their households and to remain distant from one another reduced to to the occasional complaint about home working.

Looking back, what are your defining memories of the pandemic as well as your views of the situation and outlook for the likely event of another future viral outbreak?

[charlesr]

I don't really know what to say. Lockdown affected me mentally. On the plus side, met my partner on Match.

[MartyG]

How nice and quiet it was along with a golden excuse not to have to socialise.

[Dogg Thang]

Yeah, I definitely came out of the pandemic a different person. It led to a total rethink of priorities, of where I was at in life, and it led to the end of my marriage. I'm hoping that leads to better things ultimately but the pandemic wasn't good for me.

Upside was that I found a little group of art friends through Animal Crossing and we ended up messaging each other and have been doing that every day ever since. They became my support group during that time. It's been nice.

Mostly, I wonder what effect it will have had on our kids. It's so hard to pull apart what causes what but I'm pretty certain this will have long lasting repercussions, even if we can't see exactly what they are.

[fishbowlhead]

Lock down affected me in lots of ways. I make animal feeds so we stayed open manufacturing, my setup dictates that everyone was well away from each other so distance wasn’t an issue for working.

However, I had a cancer op that Jan and chemo, was super overweight and unfit due to 3 months laid up then lite office work, as soon as lockdown hit 2 staff running a production line up and quit. So I went from zero to 1000 doing 16hr days and pulled a mate in to help me, honestly we had a blast together for 6months of that 7 days a week.

Upside is i tripled turnover in 1 year and maintained great profit margins, and have maintained that plus grown each year since on top.
Downside is I probably knocked 5 years off my life to achieve it.

I consider myself lucky though and very fortunate, a lot of people didn’t do well at all, either health wise or financially.

[Wools]

Five years later the world barely even references a period of time in which over 7 million people have died from the virus.

I disagree on that, I feel all of us have a before, during and after terminology around COVID and the associated lockdowns.

I had a fairly **** one but got through it. A few weeks after the UK working from order was issued, my work put me on furlough and told me that me and all the others would not have a job to come back to, so start looking. This coming from a company I had worked at for 7 years, was a complete tech based company and we could all work from home easily... Also, they knew my Wife was a Nurse...

My Wife worked as a Sister at Frimley Park Hospital on their ITU Ward unity during the first few months and it was pretty bad. She was upset but also is a very proud nurse and knew this is what she was trained to do so went ahead, looking after the sickest patients and helping organise the ward as they transited to looking after COVID patients. It was harrowing, with 1 particular patient in particular leaving an impression. She was very poorly, had been inside the Hospital for weeks and family access was limited. So Mrs Wools helped wheel this patient out to their little garden, they held hands and talked about her life and what she had done. She died later that day.

As an out of work Husband, how do you respond to that with your existential dread? You don't. I just simply hunted for work each morning, done all the housework, walked to our local Waitrose and waited in line for an hour most days to get a small shop to walk home with and made sure the house was good for my Superhero of a Wife. When times were tough at the Hospital and the News told us what Scientists were discovering about COVID, we both started to worry. There were a few times I did think I'm going to loose her as she was truly in the thick of it but thank god, not only did she not die of COVID, but both her and me have never even got it. So thank the stars, she made it out alive.

It was a weird time, wasn't it? I remember going for a long run early on in the lock down and I was able to run in the middle of the road in my local town for the entire length of the main road, and didn't encounter a car, person, pet or sign of life. It truly felt like a nightmare. But I was still in my ****ing Nike running shorts. Not how it was conveyed in Resident Evil 2.

[fishbowlhead]

I miss laying on the grass at night that summer after a long day and looking up at the stars, an actual night sky, slowly clearing of pollution and human interference.

[QualityChimp]

Bit of a mixed bag, really.
My mom was getting cancer treatment as the social distancing started, so her immunity was low and I was being cautious from very early on, going round Morrison's wearing latex gloves and a decorating facemask. I knew if I passed it to her, it would kill her.

I felt like a lot of the hospitals suddenly shifted focus to this unprecedented modern pandemic and standard treatment got put on the backburner.

After a long string of NHS failures, she finally succumbed to the cancer and died.

We could only have a handful of people at the funeral, which made the later partygate scandal all the more enraging to me.

For me, I had to homeschool my daughter whilst my wife prepped online classes.
People were learning instruments or starting to paint - my days were a blur of feeling like I was unable to provide suitable education.

On the positive side, it made me and my wife appreciate each other a lot more - stuck in the house together shows if you really get on with them!
Me any my mates had a weekly lockdown gaming session, which we've failed to achieve since.
In some ways, now life has continued, if anything needs to be organised, it's me that does it and that makes me feel a bit lonelier than when I couldn't physically see people.

I hate the way the Tory government responded to the pandemic, failing to do a good job, looking after mates in VIP lanes and using it as a scapegoat thereafter.

I don't like the way that people have become sceptical, saying anyone who died in the pandemic had the death blamed on Covid, even if they fell off a ladder.
Even if this was true and just 1% of recorded deaths was Covid, that's far too many.

Now America has Trump returning who asked if injecting bleach would cure it on national TV and a vaccine doubter is in charge of health. Yay.

[Neon Ignition]

I'm firmly in the camp in which we were about as far on the light side of things as you get. Both me and my missus were still working at the same place at the time and because social care recruitment increases during major events such as recessions etc job security was never a question. WFH was nice, I don't mind being in an office though now I'm in full time again.

Literally a couple of weeks before lockdown began my Nan passed away from cancer and you're usually in the position of wishing they'd had more time but the pandemic brought some solice in its timing in that had she had more time it would have meant dealing with her illness whilst being literally locked in the toxic environment she was with my Uncle who lived with her. She passed never having to know about the pandemic or live with its effects.

The memories of walking or driving down a street with absolutely not a single person in sight? The stuff dreams are made of, it was amazing and I miss it massively. That's largely fuelled from the perspective that we were fine outside the normal concerns about the virus but the return of dealing with mass peoples stupidity/ignorance/rudeness/awfulness is even more brash to deal with now.

[eastyy]

I was working at a petrol station and i was seen as an essential worker so i was working through it...and it was quiet however, We had actually planned to go to italy and the day before we were to travel they had lockdown in italy so the holiday was cancelled. During the lockdown though not having to visit people was great,the knock on effect though was something i never expected.

Cos we were all social distancing masks and lock downs it seems like illness on the whole were reduced and it meant for me and the wife a long time before we actually got ill but what happened was after say about 3 years from the start we both got just the flu not covid.....but it was the worse illness i had ever had even worse then covid and it knocked me out for a week but worse it hospitalized the wife and the mother in law had caught it and sadly passed away. And the Doctor had stated to me the whole lockdowns and masks and precautions had actually caused the Flu/Influenza to be that much worse

[Asura]

My workplace (and basically most of that industry) moved to either work-from-home or flexible working, and even if you're in the office, because many people aren't, you have to do all your meetings etc. on Microsoft Teams anyway. I used to go on trips to meet clients, or entertain clients at other places... that's all a Teams call now. Everything's Teams. We're at the point where we hire people (and already had people work with us for years, then leave) who we've never met in-person.

My workplace (and many others) also shifted to a mode of working where work is less speculative (i.e. interesting) and more encapsulated (i.e. you're told exactly what to do), because that's much easier when working from home, people need to talk less, there's less collaboration. We're apparently just as productive but that's just numbers on a spreadsheet; the work itself is much less fulfilling than it once was.

I dislike working from home, I miss office working, and I'm almost certainly not gonna get that back. I just want to meet with real people in a room. I've adapted to it, but I definitely feel that I lost something during the pandemic and I'm honestly struggling to deal with it.

Admittedly others lost people and my concerns can't compare to that.

[Neon Ignition]

We're 100% now, the whole WFH ting unpicked completely. Lobbing down trees for paper printing left, right and centre - defying the digital age

[charlesr]

I miss laying on the grass at night that summer after a long day and looking up at the stars, an actual night sky, slowly clearing of pollution and human interference.

This. I remember sitting in my garden in the afternoon and the only traffic was horses and people out for a walk. It was so relaxing. Normally people shooting past at way over the 30mph speed limit (pretty safe road though), but just a comment on the noise.

[wakka]

The pandemic was **** honestly. ****ing waste of years of my life knocking about in my flat.

I was really lucky though, didn't lose anybody or have anyone in my family/friends get seriously ill or anything.

I don't like thinking about it really. Can't be arsed with it. Lived it for two years and that was enough.

[Brad]

I wasn't affected much apart from having to miss a snow season. The move to WFH is awesome though. My home office is a much better place to work than anywhere else I've ever been. I go into Bristol now and then, sometimes for extended periods but only when it makes sense to. I've had Covid about 5 times but only the first time really had any strength to it. I know it was, and still is, awful for some people. Our kids don't seem to have had any long term effects from having to school at home as far as I can tell.