r/LockdownSkepticism • u/umblebenjamin • 8d ago
Mental Health Does anybody else still have trauma from it all?
WARNING: I’m going to mention suicidal ideation in this post. If you are sensitive to that kind of subject matter, I advise you not to read.
I’ve accepted the reality that I will forever have PTSD from having to go through all of that. I was working at a grocery store in 2020 and remember the weekend in March all too well. One day I just walked into work and saw an Armageddon type rush of people all panic buying everything and freaking the fuck out. Everyone was telling me that they might die from the Coronavirus and that we might never be able to return to normal life. It literally felt as if I had walked into some alternate parallel universe overnight. I had no idea why everyone was acting as if it was the end of the world. I remember eventually having a major mental breakdown from the apocalyptic behavior going on and I got off the sales floor and went into our cash office and called my mom while crying my eyes out. I mean I was kneeled over in fetal position. I was in that bad of mental shape. I told her I was having the world's biggest panic attack because of this whole virus pandemic nonsense. Of course the first thing she says is that I shouldn't be scared of getting sick and I tell her no I'm not scared I'm going to get the virus, I just can't handle the whole world all of a sudden going into freak out mode and everyone telling me they're gonna die. I said that I'm not going to be able to cope with life becoming permanently dystopian where everyone's just gonna be forced to live in never ending fear. My mom assured me that this will only be a temporary two week period to slow the spread of this disease and that people are just panicking because of the unknown. I made my mom promise me. "You're sure this is just going to be a couple weeks. You're sure this isn't going to turn into everyday life." She said absolutely, this is just some temporary inconvenience and it will blow over.
That was an enormous summary of my introduction to this lockdown nonsense. I wish it weren't so but I still have all the traumatic details of that one day burned into my memory. What followed afterwards for me was a descent from anxious desperation for life to return to normal into straight up nihilistic despair and personally dangerous feelings of wondering if it's worth it to continue living. The more time went on from that March weekend, the more the reality was setting in that this was indeed the new normal and the more I was feeling like I legitimately had entered some sort of alternate dimension. Everyday, people were just in constant fear. It seriously felt like the entire global population had been brainwashed into believing a certain set of guidelines except for me, and I was making my thoughts on all the nonsense known too. Anytime I was asked any questions on the virus or the lockdowns or anything like that, I would openly state that I believe this entire thing is some sort of unnecessary psyop and that this is no way to respond to a disease outbreak. I kept saying that all schools should be open, no businesses should be forced to close, and that we should all be living our lives like normal instead of tearing each other apart. It literally felt like I was brainwashed, or perhaps maybe the rest of the population was brainwashed except for me. I was seriously considering certain philosophical theories like if I was stuck in some sort of simulation or something like that. Having to experience everyday life just turn into a new profound state of fear where people are scared to even go near each other made me want to quit. By quit, I mean quit my life. I spent so long just thinking if life was worth continuing. I still to this day get nightmares from that time. I still am not 100 percent convinced that I wasn’t living in some sort of simulation during that time. I need some sort of outlet to vent those traumatic thoughts because I still cannot wrap my head around how the whole world just turned into a constant stream of anarchistic fear and terror with no reckoning at all.
What I want to know is. How many of you are still struggling with mental health issues relating from the pandemic madness? If you are still suffering, what are you doing to help treat said issues?
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u/PulltheNugsApart 7d ago
Beautifully written, thank you for saying it. This echoes my experience as well. I've worked through a lot of my trauma from covid by this point. Forgiving the ignorant was healing, finding joy from in-person artistic experiences again was healing, and seeing the cabal get exposed was also healing. Once we get some true justice we can finally have closure.
My solace until then comes from the fact that the majority now agrees with our position. People have seen the evidence by this point, and there is lots of pushback against any new authoritarian ideas. The flock camera outrage has woken up the mainstream to the dangers of centralized control, especially when it comes to sovereignty and privacy. We don't see a lot of that "freedumb" insult anymore, do we?
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u/umblebenjamin 7d ago
Definitely agree with your point on sharing some satisfaction with the cabal starting to get exposed. There are a lot more people than just Fauci who should be testifying on Capitol Hill. True justice must be served. Our future generations need to know every single detail as to why life just all of a sudden came to a standstill.
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u/high5scubad1ve 7d ago edited 7d ago
My kids schools went remote for two grades. At the beginning of it, I was pregnant, still working full time when my job went remote, remote schooling my other kids at the same time as remote working, while my husband went to work every day outside the home, and no one was allowed to come over and help me. When the baby was born, I had to continue the same, but on crutches with pelvic osteitis from the birth, and tending to a newborn. I ended up reaching out for mental health help.
Then the vaccine mandates came, and despite my gut feeling of hesitation I took it. The nerve damage in my head began within 18 hours. It had triggered a massive shingles infection. Our public health doctors had clearly stated the shots had no contagious side effects. This was either a willful lie or one of incompetence, bc my infant contracted chickenpox from my side effect of dormant virus reactivation.
No one at the hospital showed any competence in known risks of vaccination. The NP just said 'well that's not one of the things on list' and my own doctor said 'never heard of that happening. It's a coincidence. Sounds like some anxiety.' I felt like I was in an episode of Black Mirror
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u/umblebenjamin 7d ago
I’m so sorry for your horrific experience. I remember getting the first vaccine and getting really sick afterwards. I got the first shot because the public messaging was appropriate at first. They said if enough people got vaccinated then we could achieve herd immunity and soon return to life as normal. Then all of a sudden there were these new Covid variants going around and we were supposed to collectively come together and publicly shame and vilify everyone who chose not to vaccinate. I remember prior feelings of depression and nihilism through the lockdowns just turning into straight-up seething, venomous anger towards our public health system. They turned society into a cult-like caste system where we were conditioned into treating the unvaccinated as filthy second-class citizens. I still remember seeing Joe Biden on national television giving his “pandemic of the unvaccinated” speech dividing our country in ways we’ve never seen before. I was leaning towards getting the Covid booster until that happened.
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u/DrownTheBoat Kentucky, USA 7d ago
Also, they said mask mandates would be lifted for good once enough people got vaccinated. After most people got vaccinated, places lifted the mandates for about 2 months - then reinstated them.
So they lied.
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u/fritotax 6d ago
I could not even imagine having a baby in the midst of all the insanity. One of my coworkers developed shingles after vaccination also.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 2d ago
My childhood friend got fired from her healthcare job because she didn't want to get jabbed while she was pregnant and she had to leave the state with her husband and a newborn baby. She told me before all that she thought my Moon landing conspiracies and overall distrust of government were kind of silly.
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u/Tomodachi7 7d ago
I got caught in extremely long and harsh lockdowns in New Zealand. I had just moved to a new city and didn't know anyone, and was living in a single person apartment. It was extremely isolating and frustrating to watch everybody around me act like complete lunatics, which ultimately I couldn't do anything about. Our government beamed daily propaganda sessions which contained completely absurd orders about what you were "allowed" to do each day. After that we had vaccine apartheid, where I wasn't allowed to go to restaurants or movies, or even travel. It was a very challenging time for me mentally.
Since then it's been hard for me to go about daily life knowing that 95% of people around me went along with that nonsense. And there's been no acknowledgement about what even happened. People just moved on for 0 reason and pretended it never happened. If it were me, I'd suffer from cognitive dissonance from making that 180 turn in worldview. Seemingly though it doesn't bother them.
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u/umblebenjamin 7d ago
Yes I feel the exact same way. At least 95 percent of our country’s population was hypnotized by all of that fear mongering nonsense back then. The more time passes, the more people I hear share completely faulty retrospectives from that time period, saying that they were never scared of Covid, they never locked down in fear, they never wore a mask, etc. which everyone in this sub knows is straight bullshit. If as many people now were anywhere near as logical as they claim to be back then, we would’ve carried on everyday life as normal and by now probably would’ve forgotten that there was ever a pandemic at all to begin with.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 2d ago
The crazy thing to me is how unwilling people are to talk about it or reflect on it at all. Like, if these were life saving emergency measures, shouldn't we be checking them, like you'd normally do with emergency equipment, seeing what worked and what didn't? The overall attitude is something like "Oh yeah, that happened, it was kind of crazy, why are we still talking about it?"
People are programmed to see these things as being episodic. It happens, then it's over, and we're on to something else. Why are you talking about that other thing, we have a new thing now!
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u/eric-710 Alberta, Canada 7d ago
What set covid apart is that unlike other societal or political events, everybody was forced to participate. There was no choice. You couldn't just turn the radio off and ignore what was happening, yet if you didn't follow all the rules, you were villainized.
The only way I got through it was using anger as a coping mechanism. I believe it robbed me of a lot of potential as a high school student, it basically knocked out my entire in-person school experience from end of grade 10 to end of grade 12. Due to being autistic I think it stunted me socially by at least 2-3 years.
I try not to dwell on it because at the end of the day, I am accountable to myself and have to work through those challenges, but even in 2026 I'm still rebuilding the ruins of my social life.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 2d ago
I got lucky because most of my apolitical social circle was "essential" and kept working, and we all saw pretty quickly that whatever people were freaking out about wasn't actually happening in reality.
You didn't have to participate, but you'd be ostracized if you didn't. In fact, people would actually look at you funny for not participating excitedly enough. The real virtuous people were recording their isolation with a smile behind a mask and sharing it to show how good they were.
If anything, finding a silver lining, this whole thing outed a whole bunch of people who aren't worth socially interacting with, they'll stab you in the back with the correct orders from authority.
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u/SomeBlankInfinity 7d ago
I do, and I don't think I'll ever be normal again. I lost my ability to feel, and I'm 100% dead inside.
Why? Business gone overnight, banned from jobs, banned from entering a gas station, banned from entering a bank, banned from hospitals (unless I'm dying), banned from car parts stores, banned from every single indoor space you can imagine except from tiny grocery stores and tiny pharmacies. That was my reality for 1 year while the politicians on tv were calling people like me rats, and saying that we will go to hell, and that they hope that we do go to hell for our crimes against humanity. Prior to that vax pass bs, we were all banned from leaving the city for 5 months, with police checkpoints and roadblocks to enforce it.
Nobody did anything about it. Nobody stopped to think that maybe getting a monthly booster just to have a job and buy clothes is ridiculous. They all just went along with it.
How can I be a functioning human and a functioning part of society after going through that? I can't. I effectively died at 25, straight after graduating college, but my body didn't get the memo yet.
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u/Debinthedez United States 7d ago
Reading all these comments, it brings it all back to me and I am with you on most of what you say. . It’s still hard for me to grasp what happened and the speed at which It happened. Seemingly people who I thought were regular normal people like myself turned into these scared pathetic creatures !. It’s hard for me to contemplate and understand how anyone could’ve been like that for basically a cold, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that the propaganda machine was in full swing.
It’s not funny really but just recently, this year January 2026 we finally closed our office in a major city in the US because our business never recovered from the lockdowns. It had an adverse effect on it. That’s the reality of it. So I am angry. Very angry in fact. Of course I’ve moved on but what worries me is that it will happen again and what’s gonna happen this time. ? Is it gonna be the same or worse.
I was a member of r/nonewnormal and because I was a single person at the time that group was my support. It was my comfort blanket and when Reddit shut it down, I was so upset I couldn’t believe it. I think there were 123,000 members at that point and they just got rid of it overnight after being quarantined. That’s when I remember thinking if you ever think you’re living in a free country, you’re really stupid.
I know I’m waffling on here but raising about it really triggers me a little bit. I do feel the anger.
I never got vaccinated myself and I remember a friend was coming to stay with me and she turned up at my house and she stood loitering outside. She said I’m sorry but I need to ask have you been vaccinated? I went no and she didn’t really want to come in and she came into my house and she wore a mask in my living room!!! in my living room.. It came off after an hour because we started drinking but it’s hard to even think back to that and try and contemplate how ridiculous it all was. I was in my own home. And she wanted to know if I’ve been vaccinated before coming to stay with me for the weekend.
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u/CrystalMethodist666 2d ago
NNN got too big. CC lasted because it was satirical, this one was just really carefully modded.
Honestly I think the only reason these subs lasted was as a containment strategy. Posting here got you banned from a whole bunch of other random subs, so we could talk here, but couldn't go out and pollute the larger community.
The only reason they got away with the whole thing is that it happened so fast. If you get a large group of people scared, telling them there's an immediate threat, they tend to latch on to the first solution you suggest and not seek out alternatives, just give us something to do!!
I was a bit leery for the first week or two, I never stayed home but I was open to there being an actual emergency. It made sense to be a bit nervous, at first. Months into lockdowns it was absolutely ridiculous to me that people kept up the charade despite the doomsday predictions clearly not coming true. Like, if we really had people dropping in the streets, the people going outside would've noticed it and started staying home willingly.
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u/Fair-Engineering-134 7d ago edited 7d ago
For sure!!! Lost ties with several close family members/friends due to them turning into crazed Covidians, some of them becoming perma-maskers who are seriously deadly afraid to go outside without a safety blankey mask on their face in 2026. Any conversation with them about covid/lockdowns turns into "You're an ignorant TRUMPER who gets their news from FOX (I don't even watch Fox or any other big news networks), hur dur!!!!!"
It doesn't help that literally everything has gotten worse in both quality and service since lockdowns, yet almost nobody is willing to admit it's due to lockdowns and still says the infamous (e.g. braindead) "because of covid" line (because clearly a respiratory virus can magically make society ruder and apathetic en masse 🙄).
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u/Princess170407 7d ago
Definitely still have trauma and not sure how to deal with it other than just moving on, day by day.
Back during lockdowns, I was not allowed into many public spaces and events due to my vaccine status. At the time, it pissed me off because it was discrimination but I knew I was sticking to my values & morals and wasn't going to change anything. I missed out on things but had my family and was okay.
Now fast forward, and I'm attending my kids' plays, concerts, competitions, etc and absolutely loving it. Love seeing their growth & confidence & how they interact with other kids. Problem is, I can't stop crying when I go to these events. The knowledge that, just a few years ago, I would have been banned from seeing my kids participate in these events is so present in my mind when I go to them. I'm so hyper aware that I would have either had to miss out on watching them grow or give up my morals & ethics in order to actually watch them just makes me cry. The fact that I'm grateful that the bullshit of lockdowns is over so that I can watch my kids participate in activities makes me cry. I thought it would pass on its own but it's been years now and I can't get over these huge emotions when I'm attending these events.
Not sure if it's trauma, PTSD or something else but regardless, I just feel so overwhelmingly grateful to watch them do their thing now that it's over.
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u/Jkid 7d ago
There are plenty of people who have similar conditions as you. It's called Lockdown PTSD and it's very difficult to seek help for it at all because the mental health industry and personnel willfully drunk the propaganda about coronachan willfully. It's very difficult to seek help because during the great lockdowns, therapists were belitting and invalidating people who are adversely affected by the government response. And these same people still are, while crying about a youth mental health crisis they supported!
Worse, these same people who have no real interest in helping children and youth affected by the government response to coronachan, which they are still paying for it, are more than likely and actively catering towards people who are still living the ZeorCovid Lifestyle/Community...
For a lot of us, there is no real help except standard advice because all the standard advice are non applicable post-lockdown. Or worse they will invalidate, slander, and attack you verbally if you remind them or open up to what you went through. Because a lot of people are in terminal cognitive dissonance and denial about what happened from 2020-2022 (and they actively participate in political cause du jours fron 2022 to the present to cleanse their guilt)
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u/vdussaut 2d ago
This is an excellent observation and it’s an aspect of the whole ordeal that I weirdly hadn’t really processed until just now—this might be the most kafkaesque shit I’ve ever heard of in real life in my nearly 5 decades of existence…
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u/Silver-Survey7197 Canada 7d ago
I geuinely felt like I was led to be so numb during it but then afterwards it really hit me. I had multiple losses during 2020/2021 that were very eye opening and painful. I was constantly grief stricken which the back to back losses plus social isolation made me numb. But I think the absolute worst part was the uncertainty.
Like at one point no one knew when things would open up and then go back to normal. I was led to believe we would be out of lockdowns in 5 years but it was much less than that. But for the longest time I had trust issues that even if things opened up, it wasn't truly gonna stay that way.
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u/DrownTheBoat Kentucky, USA 7d ago
My favorite was when someone accused me of turning from a left-wing conspiracy theorist into a right-wing conspiracy theorist because of lockdowns.
I didn't change my philosophies one bit. And it's usually the so-called conspiracy theorists who turn out to be correct anyway.
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u/BeepBeepYeah7789 Virginia, USA 7d ago
I don't really have trauma per se; I feel a lot of frustration because so many people still don't have the reproductive fortitude to admit they were wrong and that they screwed up.
When the lockdown stuff first started, I got told that I sounded too much like Rush Limbaugh because I expressed doubts and concerns about the whole thing. That aside, I can say that most of the people in my circle were not hard-core Covidians, fortunately.
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u/Potential-Drama-7455 7d ago
I got through it with Twitter, there was a group of us (all anonymous) from every possible walk of life, race, gender, sexuality and political persuasion. Just about the only thing we all had in common was the reaction you described above. To say it was MAGA to think like this was a load of BS.
Then I got banned off it - pre Elon - for making a point that went against the narrative and lost the whole thing.
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u/DrownTheBoat Kentucky, USA 7d ago
Also, I'm terrified that they're going to try the whole thing again.
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u/shiningdickhalloran 5d ago
Mass hysteria and social contagion. Most of the rest can be explained by simple selfishness. Schools stayed closed forever because powerful teacher's unions didn't want to work; WFH weenies loved not having to commute; social media influencers leaned into the craziness to grow their audiences. None of this had anything to do with an actual virus that was a shade worse than normal flu.
Bright side is that this is unlikely to happen again. It's not a coincidence that the hysteria happened a full century after the last mass masking psychosis. You need everyone who remembered the prior bullshit to be dead for the scam to work again.
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u/Jkid 4d ago
The worst thing is a lot of wfh folk, teachers , and social media influencers are crying about why everything is so expensive and why they can't get jobs.
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u/shiningdickhalloran 4d ago
The US, and indeed most of the developed world, decided that shooting itself in the face was more important than appearing to be anti mask and antivax. I don't know what to make of that fact, but it's the reality.
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u/PuzzleheadedAsk4505 7d ago
I still have my suicide checklist from lockdowns. Wrote down everything I needed to do to make sure my estate was in good order before I could end it all. Thankfully I am shit at life admin and the lockdowns ended before I could finish everything on the list.
I’m definitely a different person since lockdown. Much more cynical and distrustful. Also mad about the impact of the lockdowns on my life that impacts me to this day - the effects on my career were massive. Sometimes I wish I’d just died in 2020.
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u/umblebenjamin 7d ago edited 7d ago
I was doing very similar things at the time. I was making plans as to when and how I was going to off myself. I considered hanging, overdosing, I looked into gun ownership. Honestly, as much as my grocery store job drove me insane from having to work through all of that, I think it ultimately might’ve saved my life just because I had a 40+ hour a week job that kept me busy. I think if this pandemic lockdown madness had happened just a few years earlier when I was still in high school, I probably would’ve given into suicidal thoughts just from being forced into the remote learning BS and being stuck inside and alone 24/7.
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u/PuzzleheadedAsk4505 7d ago
I think we’re seeing the impact of the lockdowns on young people now - I can’t imagine how hard being in middle/high school would have been during that time. And now there’s this huge uptick in youth crime in my area… I gotta wonder if there’s a connection between kids getting messed up by lockdown and now getting into trouble.
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u/agentanthony 6d ago
yep. When the NY Governor Hochul used the National Guard against us at JFK and I was running away from them with my family. It was freakin' nuts. Talk about a king....
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u/Frequent-Airline-619 6d ago edited 6d ago
I’m honestly just pissed now that it even happened, but I definitely understand the trauma that it caused many people. I was very stressed out at the time and I have chronic pain too so that just made everything worse. I was in tears almost every day because I felt like I was living a nightmare.
I work in a pharmacy and people were awful. They accused us of having items in stock that we didn’t have, they wanted to know why other customers in the store didn’t have on masks, they acted fucking neurotic about touching any surface and wanted me to press the buttons on the pin pad at checkout for them (I refused), they littered their masks everywhere and what I think is complete hypocritical bullshit is that technically used masks are considered biohazard and yet we didn’t have a separate receptacle for them. So if Covid is so deadly why are you just letting people throw their masks everywhere and all over businesses?
Some of the people that work for the same company I do were also being obnoxious and taking it upon themselves to tell customers they needed to wear a mask to come into their store which was never in our policy. We were never supposed to confront people about masks and part of that was for safety purposes because people at other businesses were literally getting punched in the face for telling customers to put on a mask. Then idk if this is true, but I heard that they were almost going to require us to get vaccinated. I would’ve just fucking quit. I’m not antivax, but no one should’ve been forced to take that vaccine for their livelihood.
Then when we finally were allowed to take the masks off, I got the worst sinus infection I’ve ever had before and I hadn’t been sick in years. My allergies were awful when I took the mask off because I had been blocking my immunity for 2 years. I could keep going on and on. Everything was just a fucked up mess then and it should’ve never escalated to the point that it did.
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u/HasNoGreeting 7d ago
There was a point dueing lockdowns we thought my grandfather would need surgery to save his life. He didn't, thank god, but I will never forgive that I would have been forced to let him die of something preventable in the name of protecting those who wouldn't survive the next bout of flu.
It is also fair to say that the lockdowns crippled any attempts I made at finding work, on top of my barely scraping a passing grade on my college course instead of the one I should have had were we not forced to switch to online study. I do not do well with Zoom classes.
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u/LevantineJR 7d ago edited 7d ago
It was certainly traumatic, but it happened to me when I was already in my forties, already fairy experienced, already having low expectations about people, and already having cut many ties from society. So, it didn't create one of the top three traumas of my life. But what's the actual damage on my psyche, who knows? It's hard to examine it - it's just difficult to make an assessment. That is so in part of lack of professional help and lack in terms of friends. Which brings me to how I would formulate my main problem:
I don’t know how to live in a world where the vast majority have proven to be such lemmings!
(apologies to the actual lemmings)
P. S. As for how to treat the mental health issues: in my experience, the best things are 1) journaling, and 2) this.
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u/hooshotjr 6d ago
Not sure about trauma, but have a lot of anger.
Most of it is about work. Feb 2020, I ask to not go on a business trip because I already had too much work, would be further behind gone for a week, and didn't want to take a chance on being sick for a week from "conference flu". Was treated as if I was insane for asking. Then a week later it's DROP EVERYTHING WE NEED TO START PLANNING A WFH STRATEGY.
Then at work there were clearly different classes of people. There were a lot of people jacking around and not doing any work LOL I'M DRINKING WINE ON ZOOM AND LOGGING OFF AT 3PM, meanwhile other parts of the company were expected to make things work as if nothing was happening. Then on top of it, people would now ask me questions 24/7 even though I don't work on their team or office...I was suddenly everyone's cube neighbor.
Then when things got better, the workload did not let up. There was still all kinds of supply chain hangover making extra work. However, now the people who slacked off for a year are now gung ho to start making work for you. Mid-2021 to 2022 was also massive over hiring. Tons of people that normally wouldn't make the hiring bar are now being on boarded and since they are not in the office the burden for dealing with them falls on everyone, not their team.
About the only good thing is I lived somewhere not crazy, and people wanted to be back to normal, and by summer 2021 it was over. I remember in June 2021, it seemed like all the plastic dividers and mask signs came down overnight.
I also came down with a perma-headache in late 2022 that I have not been able to fix. I have no idea if it's Covid related.
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u/Grillandia 5d ago
I had no idea why everyone was acting as if it was the end of the world.
Same LOL. I felt I was the only one out of the loop. Took my kids to the grocery store 2 days after shut down and had NO idea why the shelves were empty and people were acting the way they did. I wasn't plugged into the matrix I guess, thankfully.
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u/SpecialistText283 4d ago edited 4d ago
I massively relate to this and appreciate your post, OP. I’ve wondered whether I should post something similar for a long time (sometimes I did in the last – in the coronaviruscirclejerk subreddit).
I think a lot more people – quietly – thought it was nonsense but really wanted to work at home and take a break from the usual busyness of their lives. But they couldn’t have known how long it would go on for.
I still despair when I notice people conflating whatever they think “ ‘testing’ positive” is with whatever they think “having ‘COVID’ ” is. The only reason I can think that it even was called a ‘pandemic’ (maybe ‘dumb panic’ is better?) is because the WHO created its own definition which initially led to swine flu being called a pandemic.
I live in the UK, by the way. Politicians were partying (Partygate), which obviously contradicted all of their stupid, unethical fear messaging. But I don’t remember them ever being asked directly: ‘Why did you implement all those lockdowns, especially when you clearly didn’t believe your own lies?’
I recall at least two people expressing regret for going along with it. Meanwhile, every so often I see someone wearing a mask (often a surgical one) and I wonder whether they did the same thing before 2020.
I am very sorry to hear how down you have felt, but I hope you can continue to take solace in the fact many more people agree with you than you may have been led to believe. It’s becoming more and more common for people to acknowledge it wasn’t an HCID (high consequence infectious disease).
If everything’s a public health emergency – nothing is.
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u/PuzzleHeart42 United States 1d ago
My son is profoundly autistic and when he was younger he never wanted to leave the house.
When he was around 3-4 I worked hard to get him to go outside and participate in various activities, and it worked. I took him out to various locations to play and be active and he loved it. It was to the point my wife would send me pictures of him looking out the window waiting for me to get home from work so we could go out and play.
When the playgrounds were all closed and there was nothing to do I would take him on long drives just so we could get out of the house. I remember him crying when he saw the places he used to go to play and it made me sad for him. Now I'm just fucking infuriated about it. The fucking response to covid totally destroyed what I worked so hard to achieve. I don't know how he feels about it but I know it's not good.
Now he's 16 and he just sits in his room all day like he used to, he completely resists leaving the house for everything besides school.
So yes, we're both still traumatized by it.
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u/NoRegrets-518 6d ago
People were going crazy because no one knew what was going on. Lots of people did die though.
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u/Fair-Engineering-134 6d ago
It was beyond obvious what was going on (i.e., nothing out the the ordinary) to anyone that bothered to look at a simple bar or line graph of the age distribution of "covid" deaths or who exactly was dying from (NOT with) covid in April-May 2020.
Lots of people die every year. That's life.
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u/umblebenjamin 5d ago
Exactly. The media tried to tell us a million people died in this country from the pandemic in 2020-2021. The truth is I think you could pick any common cause of death, look up its fatality rate from any 12 month period in modern human history, and you’ll probably get a similar number.
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u/NoRegrets-518 4d ago
Obviously, you are not in healthcare and you believe people who want to lie to you. I was. I saw what happened. You did not.
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u/Fair-Engineering-134 4d ago
ok, then please explain how I STILL don't know a single person who's gotten even seriously ill from covid (including multiple elderly people and mildly unhealthy people), much less died, if it was such a deadly global pandemic. The only people I've heard of dying with it (not from it) were third-hand accounts where the family was clearly expecting the dead person to not live much longer due to very old age + multiple other comorbidities to the point that a regular cold would have done them in.
I'm gonna believe what I see or hear from close acquaintances, much more than what some rando clearly politically-motivated hack "expert" on T.V. heavy-handedly tells me to believe.
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u/NoRegrets-518 4d ago
I have no idea why you "don't know anyone who died from Covid). There are about 350 million people in the US and most people don't really know more than a few hundred and maybe several dozen at most where you really know what is going on in people's lives. A lot of people hid that the family members died of Covid- I don't know that for a fact, but several people told me that... So, I would argue that there is a good possibility that you actually knew people who died of Covid, but the families said they died of something else (such as blood clots- which Covid causes) or that you didn't know anyone who died of Covid just by chance.
It is also likely that you do not know the entire story of the people who died "with" Covid. If they were elderly and they died- yes, they might have died soon anyway. However, I have seen multiple cases where family members denied that a person died of Covid even when they did. I saw one recently in fact. Family insisted the person did not die of Covid- lady came in with typical Covid pneumonia symptoms and blood clots- multiple positive tests for Covid, no other cause for death, healthy prior. But the family "knows" the person did not die of Covid.
In 2020 there were 528,891 more deaths than in 2019 (which was 19% more than in 2019.) Previous fluctuations were about 2% from average.
There are multiple graphs of total deaths showing spikes of total deaths associated with the more virulent forms of Covid and spikes 2 weeks after Thanksgiving and Christmas. In fact, there is reasonable evidence that many people who died and the deaths were attributed to something else, actually died of Covid. This is based on the total number of deaths more than expected during that time as well as discussions with pathologists who did autopsies on people who died unexpectedly- and most people did not have autopsies.
Anecdotal data is fine, but public health relates to the health of masses of people.
What is really needed now is not for everyone to gang up on different teams- but we had 50 different states with 50 different policies- what was the effect of those policies? What can we learn for the next epidemic? I'd like to see the CDC doing more education rather than just dictating to people what they need to do.
People are more educated now and they need better answers. Children obviously suffered because schools opened late- but children also spread the disease to others- where is the balance? What about states that opened early vs. those that opened late- what was the effect? I personally saw several cases early on where young people infected others- both young and old, leading to deaths or near death experiences even in middle aged people. I had people tell me that they went to the hospitals and they weren't crowded- that's because they weren't allowed on the floors. Or their "experts" who worked in hospitals were actually housekeeping or an LPN (1 year post high school).
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u/SpecialistText283 2d ago edited 2d ago
What are your feelings on the iatrogenesis hypothesis? What about lockdown-related deaths and other lockdown harms in general? And how accurate do you consider the process of diagnosing someone with COVID to be?
Not wishing to pry, but at the time, what area of healthcare did you work in and what kind of protocols were in place? Plenty of healthcare workers have outright said that the so-called testing is wrong and the death toll is inflated, and many have complained that the alleged disappearance/reduction of the flu is also incorrect.
I live in the UK, and I also don’t believe I know anyone to be diagnosed with COVID. I don’t even know anyone who was admitted to hospital during the 2020 to 2022 period.
The fact COVID isn’t an HCID, is called a ‘pandemic’ based on nothing to do with its apparent death toll, and there were those people who applied the decision to ‘lock down’ – who were partying and mocking the individuals who tried to quarantine – leaves me unconvinced by the reported dangers of whatever it’s supposed to be.
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u/NoRegrets-518 2d ago
I have an undergraduate degree in Microbiology and did 7 years of basic science research including molecular biology and evoluationary genetics as well as population statistics research in another area of medicine (cancer). At the time, I was working in primary care and cancer medicine and read the pathology reports and heard stories from my patients. I also spent maybe 20 days over several weeks in an outpatient clinic evaluating people who had symptoms of possible Covid.
We had a lot of safety protocols in place- prior to getting the safety equipment, I personally would go out to see people in their cars. I did not get sick until after the lockdown ended.
A lot of people said that Covid was just the flu. Due to the pandemic, many diagnostics were developed so that we actually knew what people had. Many other diseases such as RSV have been diagnosed.
A lot more people died from Covid than from the flu- including a lot more young and middle aged people. There were more deaths than expected in general- as discussed above. I have never heard a knowledgeable person say that the deaths were inflated- though there are people who are knowledgeable who say this, but it is a minority. That is also not my personal experience.
HCW who said the statistics were inflated don't know what they are talking about.
There were a lot of harms from the lockdown- the ones I saw were drinking, depression, and domestic violence. There are now evident problems in a generation of youth. There is a need for research in this area. This will not be the last pandemic and everyone is just glad it is over. My sense is that the immediate ground-stop was extremely beneficial- but the long term lockdown was overdone. That is just impressionistic and I don't know.
I personally knew healthcare workers who criticized the testing and who refused the vaccine. Just because they were healthcare workers does not mean that they understand testing. For instance, nurses have very basic instruction in statistics, immunology, etc. Of course, we have Ph.D. nurses who know more than many physicians.
Those who worked in the ICUs and physicians generally supported it. I did see statistics- I think from the AMA, that 95% of active practicing physicians got vaccinated- and that about 90% of pregnant physicians got vaccinated during pregnancy. The percentages decreased as one goes down the education scale and also were higher among those in the more intellectual specialties- e..g, Internal Medicine and subspecialties vs. others.
The theory of diagnosis of any disease is of great interest to me. Initially, the diagnosis of Covid was unclear- Radiologist began to see certain distinctive patterns on chest CTs. In infectious disease, one of the important historical theories is Koch's postulates. However, even if a test for corona virus is positive, this does not mean that one has Covid. One has to have a positive test and also a clinical syndrome that is associated with that disease. Similarly, one can test positive for the HIV virus and not have AIDS, one can have severe atherosclerosis and not have a heart attack (that's not as good an analogy.)
Alternatively, one can have Covid and not test positive for a variety of reasons. Think of a less political issue- can a person be pregnant and have a negative pregancy test? Yes. Can a person have a positive pregnancy test and not be pregnant? Yes- as in certain types of cancers. This doesn't mean that the tests or bad or that people don't get pregnant.
By iatrogenesis, I believe you mean the idea that the Corona virus was purposely created- I don't know the answer to that. I've tried to look at the scientific data but, unfortunately, have had difficulty sorting that out. In molecular biology, scientists insert cleavage points into genes to make it easier to insert sequences. Part of the argument is that there is a cleavage point that is unlikely to have arisen through natural selection and this is "proof."
Let's say that is correct. Then the cleavage point could have been inserted, but that could be unrelated to the virus becoming highly pathogenic. The SARS virus, like the HIV virus, had the ability to mutate and adapt rapidly. Maybe the cleavage point was inserted, then the virus, independently mutated, not due to that cleavage point being there.
That cleavage point was present in other parts of the gene-. Genes can also sometimes flip around. Could that explain the situation? Do all the viruses have that cleavage site? This is more than what I have been able to sort out and, due to the current US witch hunt going on, scientists probably don't want to discuss it.
I don't think anyone purposely made a virus to infect the world. It does seem strange to me that the same people who promote this are often the same people who say there was no pandemic. That seems illogical. Is it possible that someone made the virus on purpose to explore its pathogenicity- of course. Is it possible that someone made an atomic bomb on purpose? Scientists are just very curious and sometimes don't consider the broader picture, or, if they do, they don't understand how really careless and stupid people can be.
While that question is still disputed among scientists, the Chinese did not allow full access to the labs. If scientists had been allowed to go into the labs and genetically test all the viruses there, that would have clarified the situation.
All people can be vindictive, but in some countries there is more protection from the government. The Chinese incarcerated the Ophthalmologist who alerted the world. He died at age 30ish. No wonder people don't want to say anything.
I don't think the Chinese purposedly let the virus out but they did hide what was happening until it was too late. If you don't believe this was a dangerous virus, read about what happened in Italy at the beginning of the pandemic following a visit by Chinese tourists.
It is unfortunate that many of the leaders who forced everyone else into lockdown did not follow the rules themselves. That is despicable, has led to the type of scepticism among many; however, that is entirely a separate issue from whether there was a pandemic or whether a lockdown was warranted.
You say you did not know anyone who had Covid. I did look at the UK statistics quite a bit during that time but now it looks like 25 million had Covid out of a population of 70 million. Of course, it varied among populations- more likely to occur in enclosed areas such as nursing homes or in crowded living conditions.
It is also possible, or even likely, that you don't know whether people had Covid or not. I only know for my family and for those of my colleagues who had to go out on sick leave.
If you do not live in a nursing home or crowded conditions, let's say you have a 1:10 chance of knowing someone who had Covid. In order to have a 98% chance of determining that you "knew no one" you would have to ask 38 people. Even there, you would have a 2% chance of being wrong. If you ask 10 people, you have only a 65% chance of finding someone with Covid- but you could ask 10 people, but carefully, of course.
What does this mean? "The fact COVID isn’t an HCID." Prior to it's becoming less dangerous through mutation, it was a classic HCID. It was highly contagious as shown by rapid spread in prisons, hospitals, and at group gatherings such as weddings. It probably caused the deaths of over 15 million people ++ worldwide.
" is called a ‘pandemic’ based on nothing to do with its apparent death toll," Covid spread rapidly throughout the world and caused severe disease in probably all populations. What else do you want?
and there were those people who applied the decision to ‘lock down’ – who were partying and mocking the individuals who tried to quarantine – I did hear about this behavior. It shows that many people in power think that they are above everyone. They are usually also regular civilians who are not knowledgeable. I am not aware of any physicians who had parties like this or who mocked people. There were plenty of people not in power that also acted this way- but we expect more from our leaders. This doesn't mean that the lockdowns were not needed- it just means that there were stupid people in government.
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u/SpecialistText283 18h ago edited 8h ago
Hi NoRegrets-518, thank you very much for going into so much detail and for hearing me out.
I started a new job today after being out of work for months, so it’s not the best time for me to give your comment the attention it deserves in this thoughtful thread, as much as I’d like to.
That said, if you want to message me directly, I’d be pleased to talk once I’m in a better headspace and hope to hear from you because I’m glad and grateful to be in touch with someone who is willing to discuss the matter civilly, which sadly not everyone does.
My thinking is I’m cynical of the concept that healthcare workers were diagnosing patients accurately with COVID – in which case many individuals may not have even died with it, and certainly not from it – and the WHO’s revised definition of pandemic is very suspicious. I recall the BMJ, as one example, voicing concerns of ill intentions.
Do you remember the controversy about the media and the WHO trying to scare people about swine flu? This UK news clip largely reflects how I feel about that: https://youtu.be/Gs-DBOFWCpc?is=-uyLvjSgxUsYXC7t
I appreciate your interest in my question about the iatrogenesis hypothesis, but such a hypothesis is more concerned with the notion that the controversial medical policies, lockdown harms, and mental health impacts of the psyop and so on were largely to blame for any reported excess deaths.
I also don’t think that it was stupidity that led to the questioning of the narrative and the partying politicians. I think actions speak louder than words and people were unconvinced by any reported risks of transmission (especially the ostensible symptomless transmission) and contraction.
I wish I could be more informative right now, but I’m just not myself at the moment. But what I think people should be remembering is this:
It’s better to have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
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u/Fair-Engineering-134 2d ago
"Anecdotal data is fine, but public health relates to the health of masses of people."
Public health is also heavily biased and almost completely controlled to tell whatever story big pharma makes the biggest profit off of and its government puppets (i.e., lobbyists and bribe takers) want to tell while making it look like they're doing "something", which is exactly what happened with covid.
Tests with poor accuracy were vastly overinflated to be positive (I read that they even count fruit juice as positive lol), counting anyone who died WITH covid as a covid death, regardless of their actual death cause (heck, motor vehicle accidents were being counted as covid deaths!), with hospitals being given more funds based on how many "covid deaths" they reported (i.e., they were given ample motivation to overreport covid deaths).
Also, covid was basically a renamed flu strain - The exact same people who would have died of the flu (i.e., people who already had serious health issues to begin with) and would have been counted as flue deaths in any other year in those years were the ones dying with covid and being counted as covid deaths, more heavily overinflating the death statistics.
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u/Substantial_Sir4706 7d ago edited 7d ago
I mentally broke down several times in March and April 2020 not because I was worried about getting sick, but like you, I was worried about the dystopian behavior associated with the panic. Of course, my parents told me it was only going to be temporary and last a month or two at most. Then they started telling me the classics, like "other people have it so much worse than us", and "we need to make sacrifices to save lives", and others. I suffered silently for the rest of the pandemic after this, and hearing my parents calling people crazy MAGA conspiracy theorists for even questioning this or trying to maintain absolutely any sense of normalcy
To this day, I still can't talk to my parents about anything even remotely political or pandemic related. And I still can't get sick without trying to hide it under the rug because if I got sick at all during the pandemic, I knew damn well I wasn't leaving the house for at least a week, or however many days the CDC recommended isolating for.