Plea from a mum (not me, shared with me by a friend)

Your post was very carefully set out, compassionate and kind Tillybelle.

At the moment I am not really in the vulnerable group but I am a 64 year old who suffers badly when catching a cold or flu with very bad coughs that take me weeks to get over. So I’m a bit nervous of this virus as are my children are for me. However i live alone and although I don’t work I’m only going out when I need food. I think I am being socially responsible but the attitude of some people is leaving me aghast! We have to try and stop this spread for the NHS alone! They will not cope if too many of us are really in need of ventilators all at once and lots of people would die!! Government's do not give out billions of money for flippant or unnecessary reasons! Surely that must ring alarm bells in us all! Stop going out if you don’t have to and think of it as saving a life. It’s not just about you it’s about everyone whether they are in the frontline or are vulnerable themselves, (& how can you be 100% sure you’re not?) The sooner we all take this seriously and do as we are asked the better the outcome will be. Stop thinking I’m alright I’m healthy I’ll be ok. 1. You don’t know if you are 100% fit and 2. At least think about those who are vulnerable you owe to them not to spread it! Get it!! Good!!

Who is going out against the rules?

Anyway, guidelines start tomorrow.

Not responding to any posts, just saying what we are experiencing. We live in a large market town and have one of our children, SIL and 2 very precious, only grandchildren in the same town.
My husband has Vascular Dementia and Parkinson’s disease and COPD. I have, fortunately, been able to shop online, so , while our meals are not exactly the same as before we are
eating well!

Our daughter is a Business Manager at a primary school and, very fortunately, the Head Teacher has said, any member of staff who has vulnerable dependant relatives should be socially distancing. Tge school has now closed for the foreseeable......!
Today, as I was preparing a meal, at least 4 or 5 teens passed our bungalow, shouting, having fun but obviously not in the least bothered about what they should be facing up to!!!
Lots of family groups, walking, chatting to others etc.,
We have, In Leicestershire, a most lovely old park, Apparently, today, the car park was heaving, families enjoying the fresh air but not caring a jot about social distancing!!
The very same people who will throw up their hands in despair when the lockdown is introduced (as I’m sure it will be!!).
What will it take for people to understand the enormity of the situation and how they SHOULD be responding!,

pinkjj27
Please fear not!! It is I who finds it hard to be succinctly clear and to the point!

Actually I was trying to say what you just said:

The poster seems to "belong" to 3 separate places where the adult in the picture is known to somebody who says they know the picture comes from their region because they are in some way connected to her!!

I hope that's ok!

Complicated but it got more so when I looked up the mother on fb before she had taken this picture down. Apparently she's from London?? That makes place number 4.

I think we can see a bit of fake news when it appears before us. Particularly the dodgy clinical info and the non-matching pictures without evidence of such clinical features.

It is an attention-seeking piece of unashamedly inflammatory drama, using her poor son's experience, he too young to give consent, to make a popular rant about bad people as if they made her son ill and to get a lot of replies on fb oohing and aaahhing to her. That is why I printed her fb picture. So nobody will mix her up with anyone else of the same name.

Callistemon The little boy all dusty is a false news picture. It was proven and the people involved came out about it. Might be on YT. I saw it a long time ago with the fake hospital pictures of school children and the exposure of the woman who was in the photos of everything acting out the scenes. Fake news and fake bombs etc are very common. You need to be in touch with those "in the know" to recognise the problems in the pictures. It's the same with UK events. I only get sporadic contact now, but it's first hand.

Yes, I have contacts but only second hand, Tillybelle, through a charity based in Turkey in touch with the White Helmets.

And, of course, from firtsthand news reports live fro brave reporters there.

Tillybelle Thank you, such kind reasoned words that everyone can take comfort from.

I don’t think there is much more to say only that all the hurt this post has caused says it all really, that is all such emotive posts ever serve to do.
I don’t know if this child was ill or not, but ask yourself if he was as gravely ill as suggested why was his mother left waiting in what looks like a public waiting room with health poster above her head? I think he would have been taken straight to a sterile ward .
If he is as ill as she says why does she keep removing the post on Facebook every time anyone questions if it is genuine then putting it back up again minus these comments ? She is alternating the post of her “very poorly” child with post of herself pouting, very odd indeed.

Judgey, Judgey people. The FB post is true, and she is from the Midlands - not Kent. It never mentions that he had those treatments in the ambulance - but got worse in the hospital.

I believe most people are following guidelines - but many, many are not! Not just young people either.

knickas I think people may be sceptical because they do not know mothers who would put photos on social media of their child who could possibly be extremely ill, could in fact die, from COVID19, although he does not look that ill yet and I hope he recovers fully. I don't believe either that a case of suspected COVID19 would be put in the normal waiting room where he could possibly infect others.

It's the mother's strange behaviour which is being questioned.

If you know her and/or know more, perhaps you could tell us and reassure us that the little boy is recovering, please.

Gagajo, please let us know how the little boy is. I do hope he gets better soon.

I don't think Gagajo knows them, Annaram
I think she was just reposting something from social media.

I was hoping that knickas may know?
Is he all right?

I don't understand, though, if he is in an isolation pod, his mother was allowed to be with him

Chewbacca Thank you. You are very kind. It helps so much to have reassurance.

Keep safe everyone.

Unfortunately, the message whether fake or otherwise is still being ignored - witness yesterday's situation at beaches and in my local park - Dulwich Park in the London Borough of Southwark which has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the country - despite all the entreaties it was full like a normal sunny weekend (I only saw the photographs posted by our local police) and one elderly lady (I am 70 myself) in my road had a huge family gathering. So, we may feel affronted at the challenge that we the older generation may not be respecting government guidelines but I do know of several older people who do think it's their entitlement to walk in the park irrespective of how many other people are there. Perhaps when they're competing for a ventilator with a younger and fitter person, those people will wish they hadn't.
However, I do want to take issue with the comment that we are the selfish generation so Gagajo can I just point out that we, the selfish generation, suffered measles and scarlet fever so that the younger generation could gain some antibodies, and we the older generation endured food rationing which as we can see is not something the younger generations have ever had to contemplate.
We need to forget the generational divisions in this awful pandemic, and all pull together, and thankfully the existence of newly-developed neighbourhood mutual aid groups is pointing in the right direction.

Goldenage
I totally agree with your post. My own dear mother aged 92 insisted that she would not try to dissuade my sister from travelling the length of the country last week, to visit her. Different members of the family tried to persuade mum to dissuade sister, but she refused. Both sister and mother were adamant. Sister arrived, stayed at mum’s, and then went in and out of mum’s sheltered apartment all week, shopping, even though my children offered to shop for them. My husband and I have gone into self isolation as advised my my daughter, a doctor. I have asthma, and we both take high blood pressure tablets. We’re in the upper sixties age group. My daughter says there will not be enough ventilators when this takes off, and difficult decisions will need to be made. One region in Italy has now said no one over sixty can be put on a ventilator. My mother is now very cross with me because I said sister shouldn’t have come the length of the country using public transport, a train. Mother will barely acknowledge my texts. And I was the one who simply gave her the correct advice.

Oh dear maddyone I'm sorry to hear that.
It's a clear case of shooting the messenger isn't it?
You didn't spend any time with your sister did you?
I'm sure your mum will come around in a while

Thank you Namsnanny we actually did agree to pick my sister up from the station, and so we did. We had said she could stay with us when the arrangements were first made, but then decided she needed to stay with Mum, even though she would be less comfortable there. So we delivered her to Mum. We advised her to stay in the flat, our children would do their shopping. My daughter was extremely cross with us even for just picking sister up, and so she had to have a taxi when she returned home yesterday.

@Gagajo, when I read your post, you were actually writing very much in first person, for instance; ‘I’ve had to watch my 5yr old son...’, ‘I watched him hallucinating and crying...’, ‘He lay in the hospital bed and asked me if he was going to die - as a mother...’, ‘As his mom...’, etc.

All stories as such are really distressing and harrowing to many, needless and are particularly hard to listen/read/hear when you are in the ‘high risk’ group. That includes myself, who now have to go through an entire twelve weeks of self isolation due to the fact that I have to have monthly infusions of an immune modulating(suppression) therapy. I already suffer from depression, as do many of my fellow counterparts. Quite how I’m going to cope, I just don’t know. I’m recording lots of television programmes that I wouldn’t normally watch? and written a list of jobs that I need to do(but I’m physically limited) and trying to remain positive. ‘Trying’, being the operative word. I’ve also compiled all of the lotions and potions that I’ve received as Christmas/Birthday’s, so I can pamper myself. However, twelve weeks feels, and undeniably is, a long time to be in isolation. I can’t access my Facebook account either since it was hacked in December. I’ve tried absolutely everything to overcome it, and I’m trying one last thing. I’ve had no one come to the door or anything posted through the door offering help of any kind.

However, I think that on the whole people are self isolating; it’s just the minority that are behaving recklessly. They are putting themselves at risk of contracting the virus, and more to the point, many others that they come up against, by their selfish behaviour. I also observed that many of those that were actually out, were also not complying with keeping the recommended two metre distance between themselves and complete strangers. I seriously wonder if some people don’t know what 2 metres actually looks like; maybe they were taught imperial measurements possibly??‍♀️?! Maybe they’re getting confused with ‘2 feet’, considerably shorter than ‘2 metres’...?! Having worked in adult education it wouldn’t (sadly) surprise me at all.

I had to go up to London for some immune modulating treatment in London last week. Whilst the hospital itself was like a ghost town, with the odd member of staff/public there.
What absolutely amazed me though was the sheer level of traffic?! The roads were really busy; so where were all these people going, when people were being recommended to work from home? Are that employers still expecting that many people to work?‍♀️?!? Yes, some would have been travelling to work in hospitals. But the rest? No...it couldn’t possibly be that that MANY?! Not people dressed like builders, or people driving very expensive car, etc.

I think that @M0nica’s post was rather insensitive and unnecessarily rude. I think that it could have been written far more sensitively. To call her a ‘holy jos’ was really unnecessary and rude, no two ways about it, IMHO. Her username is GagaJo, after all, nothing ‘holy’ but smacks of blasphemy. I do agree with you though that the OP’s first paragraph was very sweeping, and it came across as though she thinks that we’re all being renegades. Many of us aren’t at all, quite the opposite.

If we all stayed at home and complied with the government’s instructions, then this virus would soon die out. Unfortunately, it’s because of the thoughtless few that this virus is persisting.

God forbid, I truly hope that we don’t end up with a death toll like Italy’s.

It is rather disconcerting Ippydippybluesky, when someone lifts a post from the internet then posts it as if it is their own.
It has been done by other posters and then sometimes found to be fake news.
That is why some of us do take such posts with a huge pinch of sea salt and not at face value.

Please take care, I hope you don't have to go London for treatment again for some time.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/perfectly-healthy-boy-5-coronavirus-21748225 Just saw this on BBC 4 News and ....for all those who doubted the piece..