What were the dumb things you did in 2020 to prevent COVID?

I hate that people will look back on this behavior with derision, rather than taking sensible precautions during a time of uncertainty.
- I think a lot of that depends on your viewpoint and attitude. I will admit that I got grocery delivery for a few months and would actually sanitize the packaging before bringing it inside. I chuckle about it now and think I was maybe going a bit overboard - but like you said, the times were so uncertain for many - especially during the beginning.
  
  For a few months basically no one knew how it spread. I look back and think about how it could be seen as overboard, but being cautious and careful is more important in a time when something like Covid was quickly spreading and had these wildly different experiences for people. Especially the first alpha variant which seemed to either kill people, or cause them to not smell/taste and have memory issues. I wasn’t going to fuck with that, and still don’t want to.
  Also, some forget, but there was a lot of videos coming out of China where it started with people running around seemingly trying to infect others and felt very zombie-esque.
  
  It's funny to look back on is my point in posting this, but at the time we were just trying everything we could.
- I got to work from home, I got to actually invest in my living space. I started tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive. I cooked more. I invested into learning new skills. I spent almost zero time communiting anywhere. I prioritized my health, getting enough sleep. I didn't even get as much as a runny nose for like 2 years.
  Honestly, one of the best times of my life.
  
  tailoring my buying to businesses that I wanted to survive
  Generally I don’t shill online but my town just gots its first microbrewery when COViD hit so when I found out they were doing takeout, you better believe I spread the word far and wide. It worked: that business survived.
  Of course I accidentally spread negative word about a great Pakistani kebab place, so I shut the hell up and went there every week for the summer. It became a thing with my family, when you couldn’t go places with people and restaurants were closed. We’d walk down to the center of town, order through their app, send one person in to pick up, and have dinner outside on the town common
  
  Yeah I'm pretty nostalgic for it too, sans the whole potential death part haha. I cooked constantly, worked from home, and played classic wow with my homies. It was awesome.
- Seriously, this is just peak hindsight and at the time things people did where the most appropriate application of better safe than sorry.
- Maybe because they are not sensible precautions?
  Meet less people, wear a mask, wash your hands - please yes
  Wash your keys, buy delivery but then put it in the oven (including packaging) - I won't stop you from having fun, but it was not exactly required to stay safe.
  
  Yeah, you didn't know this back then. Maybe you did if you were a healthcare professional or a specialist in virology. In the US, all we had to go off of was the CDC, who are supposed to be the apex specialists, fighting with Trump who just had gut feelings about drinking bleach to kill the virus, and a literal ocean of misinformation and horrifying lockdown/mass casualty stories coming out of China.
  It was clear that nobody actually knew what was up, and that public safety advice was biased through this filter intended to get people back to work to save the economy. Someone at some point decided that X number of people might die to save X percent of the economy and apparently we were supposed to be okay with that?
  Hmmm.
  
  We know that now, but at the time there was less information about how the virus spread and, I believe more importantly than the short term dangers, the long term effects of infection.
  Of course one could think that it is silly to go to the extra effort of sanitizing your take-out when cooking at home was an option, but I don't know their situation enough to make that judgment.

The first 6 months when we were too scared to go anywhere or do anything, we saved like $1000/month. I proceeded to learn nothing and we went back to max spending as soon as scientifically acceptable.
- One of the biggest lessons I learned was just how much goddamn money most people spend eating out and stuff. My finances did not change because I budget to the bone.

I went to the expensive grocery store. I had to keep working the entire time. When I went to my usual store after work, I'd have to wait in line to enter the store just to find out the horders bought everything again. The horders didn't go to the expensive store, so I didn't have to wait in line and most of the time I could find everything I needed.
- I bought a house 6 months before lockdown.
  I bought a super huge pack of charmin toilet paper at BJs. My ex bought a super huge pack of charmin toilet paper at BJs.
  We had a laugh about all of our toilet paper.
  As a joke I bought 2 more huge packs, because we had room and it was funny and had basically become an inside joke.
  Then lockdown happened.
  Toilet paper became a commodity.
  I JUST (December 27th to be precise) ran out of the pre-covid toilet paper stocks we had.
  
  Bulk non-perishables is always the way to go. I think my family buys tp, garbage bags, light bulbs etc maybe once every two years.
  
  My folks were freaking out about no sanitizer anywhere. I have OCD. I just calmly went to my room and brought out my massive 1 L jug of sanitizer
  For once, that pain in the ass disorder came in handy
  
  That's amazing!
  I mock threatened my friends that if I couldn't buy toilet paper when I needed it, I was going to come over to their house and scoot my ass across the rug like the dog does.
  
  I had signed up for a tp delivery service the previous September, and got 48 rolls every eight weeks, which was the “light use estimate” for a single person household.
  I don’t know what the rest of y’all are doing, but I had used six rolls when the second shipment came in November. I passed it around to all my friends and forgot to cancel it, so I received a third shipment January. Of 48 rolls.
  I now had received 144 rolls of toilet paper in four months, and I use it at a rate of 3.5 rolls per month.
  I set a phone reminder to cancel it, and donated 48 rolls to a shelter. Then, in march, when my cancellation alert came up, I realized another shipment might not be the worst thing.
  Then in April I got a bidet. I did manage to cancel my subscription, and left rolls on all my neighbors front steps, and I still had enough to last until may of 2021, when I moved and donated the rest.
  
  I’ve always gone to Costco and gotten the big packs of toilet paper, because it was easier. However I had just screwed up the shopping list and got the big pack two weekends in a row. So I was set, in my bunker, for the TP wars
  Cleaner and sanitizer were another story. I bought late, at scalper prices because that was the only choice. And that was for mostly normal use
  
  I thought this would be the story of how you made your first million as a pandemic toilet paper baron
- That's how I got turned on to expensive Alfredo sauce. It was the only thing left, and now I can't go back.
  
  Same with us for Rao's marinara.
- Thankfully we just happened to have just bought our regular six months worth of toilet paper package at Costco just before the great TP shortage of 2020. We use a bidet anyways, so TP goes a long way in our house.

I remember that I got to wfh so I had no commute, and people left me alone to actually do my job. All the orgs I keep busy with were shut down, so I finally got to rest.
But my anxiety was through the fucking roof because every 2 weeks, either my work or some other group would be like “let’s plan a get-together now that COVID is almost over!”
I was an Animal Crosser.

Constant hand sanitizer - I still haven't dropped this habit. I see hand sanitizer, I use hand sanitizer.
- This is a habit you should keep!
  My church bestie and I always sit together and when we pass the peace and hug and shake hands, she always immediately puts sanitizer on my hands and hers after without even asking. She's the best.
  
  It’s not great for your skin though. Especially in winter time my hands get dry AF and hand sanitizer undoes at least 3 lotion applications.
  Also some bacteria is good.

this is so fucking wild to me, here in sweden we just put up hand sanitizer bottles in stores and plexiglass in front of the cashiers, and told everyone to pwease keep their distance and not use public transport (and then acted surprised when the public transport use decreased)..
- All sorts of dumb shit happened in North America. A favourite of mine was people leaving their mail in the mailbox a few days so to ensure the germs died before picking it up?
  
  My favorite was all the bullshit companies pulled "because covid".
  Like "sorry our phone representative wait time is longer, it's because covid". Like what?
  Or grocery stores closing all doors except one, thereby forcing all their customers into the same narrow space lol
  
  Some of us were microwaving it 🙄
- I mean tbf swedes were already social distancing long before the pandemic...
  
  there was a very common joke along the lines of "man i can't wait until the 2-meter social distancing is over, so we can go back to standing 3 meters apart!"
- Which was also dumb because the virus was airborne, not contact based
  
  But we didn’t know that for sure at the beginning, hence the precautions
- The Swedish approach was highly politicized here. Showing how it was "all about control".

Masks were hard to come by so I 3d printed them and added filter material from furnace filters. They were super hard to breathe but I felt more comfortable shopping with them. Probably inhaled a lot of micro plastic.
- I'm rather impressed by this though! Clever.
- I didn't print a mask but I did join in on a city wide effort to make 'ear savers' and give them away free for hospital and other essential workers. I do wonder how many of the ones I made got used, I wasn't too fond of the design and found a better one a month later but by that point they had tens of thousands and weren't accepting more.
- I remember I'd just happened to buy a resin 3d printer, and so had bought a few masks to use for that. I got into printing and painting Warhammer because of the pandemic. Still have a a small army that's entirely printed and about 3/4 painted from that time.

We didn't dare eat take-out. We cooked every meal we ate for over two years. That got old after a couple months, so two years kinda sucked. We spent so much money on take-out after we got vaccinated!
- Remember people washing groceries and leaving them outside?
  
  I did this, lol. But I learned that produce tastes so much better after soaking in water with a dash of vinegar, and still do this with all of my produce.

Masking outdoors with no one around. I heard on a podcast that it was still good practice so you'd remember not to touch your face, but it was mostly just hot and miserable.
- I know a few people who still wear surgical masks outside when the pollen levels are high because it helps with allergies. Not perfect, but the masks reduce enough of the pollen breathed in to be helpful without the sweating problems from n95 masks.
  
  Yeah, I moved from the US to Europe in 2021 and wore a mask daily everywhere outside of my bedroom (I had eight housemates, including a very nutso Q person, who was trying to get covid to hasten his natural immunity and who did not shower for the ten months we lived together- he was the second worst roommate) until probably June of 2022. It wasn’t until then that I realized I have allergies to things that grow on this continent that I never encountered at home.
- This is the reason I will now always fly with masks. Just to keep myself from touching my face and getting sick at the start of a vacation.
  
  I always fly with masks now because I’ve realized how many people are harbingers of disease in the airport.
- Me too! I also had special touch screen gloves my husband insisted I wear everywhere in the dead of summer so I wouldn't touch anything with bare hands. I looked ridiculous in summer short sleeves wearing gloves. I also had safety glasses.

Hmm. Individually washing the eggs in the carton before they went in the fridge, maybe.
Finding out it was definitely airborne was such a relief.
- I like this one!

I didn't change much. On the other hand I was already pretty socially distanced before. I honestly loved how society came down to my level. It's much more stressful again now.

The only thing that really changed for me was that I wore a mask when going to a store or something. I didn't need one at work since I worked alone and outside at the time.
The one time I thought I had caught COVID, it turned out to be just a gnarly case of strep throat. Never once lost my sense of smell or taste from strep throat before, but 2 home tests and 1 actual doctor test all showed negative for COVID so... 🤷🏻‍♂️
I then had an allergic reaction to the amoxicillin given to me for the strep throat so that was fun.

I manage a produce department at a grocery store and was always front and center with the hordes of people coming in. At the start of the pandemic my wife and newborn were stuck at home, so even if I wasn't worried about myself, there was always this background anxiety that I was going to bring it home and potentially cause the death of my wife or daughter. Any illness we did get was especially weird or aggressive, and always thought "Ah, shit, this is it.", but somehow never was. To this day we've somehow never tested positive for COVID, though I know statistically we've probably had it.
Those early days were bizarre, though. I remember ominously gathering in the stockroom at work shortly before things started getting weird. The owner explained what was going on, how it would change things and what we would be doing differently going forward. He predicted all of the shortages, especially toilet paper. Funny enough, we always had a huge supply of that shit downstairs, but idiots would buy it up so fast it always looked like there was a shortage. You can only fit like 3-6 packages in a large shelf space at any given time. People would show up before the stock guy could get more out and wind up depleting all of the napkins and paper towels instead. Bet their assholes felt great.
The best were people who bought up a bunch of Lysol, thinking that shit was like a convenient and instant disinfectant. Yeah, if you want to spray down every inch of your home and leave it sit for thirty minutes..
Strange days.. Though I suppose at the heart of it, stupid or not, everyone was just worried about their families.
- Yes we were just doing whatever we could think of doing in the hopes something would help. I'm glad you've stayed a NOVID though!
- At my grocery store people would put everything they bought into one of those thin plastic produce bags and then just pour in hand sanitizer and shake it all over everything in the bag.
  Weird time, but I’m glad they took it seriously… some customers angrily did not

I remember using ATM's for the first time ever (because bank branches were closed) and using our stock of nitrile single use gloves to touch anything.
I also remember still going to work as a machine operator and being forced to wear the paper mask on top of my existing eye and hearing protection... my safety glasses would fog almost constantly and I scrapped at least a few parts cuz I couldn't see what the fuck was going on and they wouldn't let us take any safety gear off (even for a second) unless we left the shop floor. Good times.

Not much, I'm already kinda germophobic so it was easy to treat every surface as dirty. And now that people stopped cleaning everything, it's easy to see that everything IS dirty. Still haven't caught it lol
- I still use my sleeve or elbow to open every door to this day. It doesn't hurt anything to do.

I was working remotely and not receiving stimulus checks.

Basically the 2nd week of the pandemic they announced that fomites were not a vector of infection.
- The early weeks of the pandemic, before it was out of China and declared a pandemic, I was assured by health and safety officers that we could only get it if we touched a surface someone with COVID had coughed or sneezed on.

I didn't do none of that shit. I worked outside, so I never even stopped working.
- Same. I'm from the UK so people used to come out at whatever time to clap for the NHS workers. The fun bit was there were no NHS workers near us but I would get home just in time to be applauded by my entire street for working like normal.
  
  Thursday nights at 8pm in my neck of the woods. There used to be one excited happy clapper who banged pans or pot lids together in half an hour sessions
- I worked at walmart and was therefore 'essential.' The only way my life changed was I had to wear a mask, got screamed at a tiny bit more and people would look absolutely HORRIFIED when I sneezed.
- I too never stopped working. Went in every day like "we ride at dawn removed"
  
  I work in commercial buildings, electrical maintenance. They all shut down...except hospitals. I worked nothing but hospitals all of 2020. Covid wards and all. I had scar tissue from the nose clip on the n95 masks.
  It was really fucking frustrating with the conspiracy theorists claiming there were no viral cases when I just got back from Stanford Children's Hospital where half the building had been converted into a covid ward, new patients were arriving every few minutes flown in from regional ICUs, and nurses and doctors were sleeping on the floor from exhaustion.
- I push carts
  I have OCD and even over a year prior to the pandemic would wear gloves and use sanitizer constantly
  It was hilarious when the only change I needed to make was wearing a mask, meanwhile everybody else had to adjust

If I had to eat out, favoring hot, greasy food over cool, dry food. The logic was that the viral walls of Covid weren't actually that strong and were less likely to survive wet, oily, slightly acidic and hot foods. That's if I ate out. Really tried not to and just made healthy foods at home.
I also preferred conformable work/mechanic gloves over latex gloves. I figured being able to wear them the whole time would be safer then getting annoyed at sweat buildup and trying to take them off constantly. Same goes with wearing a full face shield over a mask sometimes. A lot of infections were from getting spite in the eyes without knowing it.
I work outside and by myself most of the time, so my day to day life didn't really change at all. Got vaxxed and boasted when available and never caught covid once.
edit: oh, just remembered what my friend's plan was. His wife was going to make fabric masks with pockets that accepted swiffer pads. I told him that it was a terrible idea and found him the SDS for those thing which listed skin irritation as a possible. Dumbass was going to be breathing that shit in and selling them.
- Masks that had a slot for replaceable cut up HEPA filter vacumn bags.

Ironically because of Joe Rogan I was among the first people in my friend group and family to take the threat seriously
- I live in San Francisco, where we shut down IMMEDIATELY. It was actually in Feb, not March. Everyone was like, well, that's probably overkill, but better safe than sorry.
  A month later NYC had mobile crematoriums.

My wife got upset with me for getting coffee at the drive thru.
I refused to stop though, told her if that thing was going to spread via someone passing a coffee cup thru a window we're all fucked anyways and I may as well enjoy my coffee on occasion.
- I used to make my husband text me pictures of him in a mask at the grocery store just slightly before masks became mandatory. I swiped some from work just before things got rolling and we began wearing them. Probably my best idea.
- Plus the whole companies going into overdrive with enforcing hand washing and sanitizer
  So the virus would need to also survive constant hand washing and sanitizer use, and if it did that, then nothing was able to be safely handled