I had covid, pretty mild, flu was worse.
Damage from all the lockdowns was devastating. My business and marriage fall apart, lost many friends, became alcoholic and now I have heart problems from overweight.
Damage from all the lockdowns was devastating. My business and marriage fall apart, lost many friends, became alcoholic and now I have heart problems from overweight.
I firmly remember all the army trucks sprinting around my home city carting dead bodies and healthcare professionals, and the local government commandeering the local ice rink to serve as a makeshift morgue to handle the huge volume of COVID deaths that all the morgues and armed forces makeshift equipment were no longer able to handle.
I also remember that only the lockdowns were effective in reigning in transmission rates, hospital admission rates, and more importantly death rates.
I feel your personal take is ignorant and uninformed. I'm sorry your life fell apart during the past year, but the things you're choosing to pin the blame on are the things that saved millions from their deathbeds in understaffed hospitals from a disease with no treatment or cure.
I also remember many media outlets using extremely emotionally appealing images of "scary" hospital scenes and the like (I assume, to prey on our fears and insecurities to drive clicks and ad revenue). I also remember a picture of a pauper's graveyard being used as a image of how "horrifying" the Covid death rate was, and other visceral but misleading stories.
How many people actually died of Covid in your home town?
I don't know under which rock you lived, but in my home town the armed forces had to commandeer hotels and an expo hall to have enough beds to accommodate all the critical COVID patients.
Do you believe health services didn't struggled to handle the massive inflow of COVID cases?
> I also remember a picture of a pauper's graveyard being used as a image of how "horrifying" the Covid death rate was, and other visceral but misleading stories.
You ignore what you wish to ignore. Commandeering ice rinks to serve as makeshift morgues and local morgues having to work around the clock with piles of caskets and body bags piled up in freezers to handle all the dead was something that affected only the poor?
Our city council commandeered a football stadium as an emergency Covid field hospital. It was practically unused.
>Do you believe health services didn't struggled to handle the massive inflow of COVID cases?
The data for the UK health service shows that, overall, hospital capacity was at around 70% for the duration of the pandemic.
>was something that affected only the poor?
You missed my point. The image used showed cheap caskets piled up, in they way that they are in the normal operation of a pauper's graveyard, and may have even been taken before Covid. The point was that the imagery was used for its emotional response, with no context given.
That didn't happen, but what did happen is that all the old folks gave each other Covid and died anyway.
I had covid early this year. It was the worst I've felt in the last 10 years. Waking up at night with 10 minutes of dry cough was one of those few moments when I wonder whether this is how I'd die. Luckily I didn't.
And second, I have never had these types of symptoms before - fever yes, dry cough no. Sure, I also have never been this old before, but if I get COVID and suffer the symptoms that health authorities say are typical of COVID, Ocam's razor would force me to discard the "it must have been something else" theory.
I used the extra time together with my wife to make our relationship better because we spent more time together and started doing walking for exercise. If you became a fat friendless alcoholic with a failed marriage that is completely and totally on you. Nobody made you trash your marriage. Nobody made you have that drink. Nobody made you eat that twinkie. The sooner you take responsibility for crashing your life the sooner you can get back up on your feet.
Second, yes, great, you improved your marriage, I am really happy for you. But many people had it really bad. I can tell you what my life was in 2020-2021. In the first lockdown I watched my gf at the time going into a full-scale psychiatric meltdown and slowly losing grip on reality. I believe it was mostly caused by the stress of lockdowns. It completely destroyed our relationship because I didn't have experience nor expertise nor resources to be a full-time mental health nurse on top of everything else. All energy I had at that time I spent on trying to keep her from suicide (luckily I succeeded).
There were also periods when I was alone, totally alone, not seeing anyone IRL for weeks. This soul-crushing loneliness (together with lack of understanding from literally everyone) was the worst that I experienced in my entire life. If I could swap this horrific time for having covid five times in a row, I'd have done it without hesitation. If you told me that would mean 10% chance to die, I'd have done anyway. The only contact I had was occasional video chats with friends. Many of them were having more quality time with their partners and couldn't really relate why I was so miserable. Almost all of them recommended me more netflix to deal with this. It built up an awful lot of resentment. I lost some friends over this. Getting over a good friend telling you with a straight face "it is your fault you were unprepared for a global pandemic, if you started a family and had kids, you would have had it a lot easier" was pretty hard, believe me.
So for me lockdowns were devastating. Covid? YMMV, of course, but for me it was just a bad cold.
On the other hand angry people like the prior poster comparing covid to flu usually leads one way. We start with it was just like a flu to ME to it IS a flu and all the doctors and scientists are lying to us and we can no longer trust science and if we believe people died at all either they all died of normal causes and were just labeled covid or as likely we pretend they were killed by the vaccine. Hey maybe we weren't going that way but we probably were.
Conspiracy theories aside nobody became a fat friendless alcoholic because of covid and I would in fact not hesitate to predict the alcohol was a factor in literally every other issue. User will not experience any kind of positive movement on any front until they take responsibility for putting the bottle down.
Some had it pretty bad and breached this altruism threshold. I personally flew past it very early. My life turned from "the best period of my life" in early 2020 into my worst nightmare pretty much overnight.
In early 2020 I barely drank at all. I had perhaps a glass of wine once a month or two. I remember I was horrified when I read a BBC article "try to have at least one sober day a week" early into the first lockdown. By the end of the third lockdown I realized I drank every single night for the last 3 weeks. While I feel hundred times better now than back then, I still find it difficult to not drink at all for a week. Alcohol isn't a cause of any problem, it is one of the most accessible coping mechanisms. It numbs emotional pain and distracts you from constantly thinking how much your existence sucks.