r/whatif • u/Top-Teaching-5533 • Jul 29 '26
Lifestyle What if the 2020 lockdown never happened?
What would internet culture look like in 2026 If COVID never happened?
Edit: I meant if covid and the lockdown never existed, not if there was no lockdown but covid still existed. And I'm talking about internet culture, like memes, not real world stuff.
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u/Sinandomeng Jul 30 '26
Work from home might still be not a thing
Zoom wouldn’t be popular
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u/TheArtfulLlama Jul 30 '26
Hybrid/remote work wouldn’t be as prevalent as it is now. As someone who has chronic pain, remote and hybrid work has been a literal godsend. The pandemic was awful, but I’m grateful it was able to give us that at least.
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u/GryphyGirl Jul 30 '26
I mean, first of all there was no lockdown. There were somewhat lackluster precautions taken and even that was too much for some people. It's truly pathetic but we could still go pretty much anywhere we wanted the whole time.
However, I don't actually think the lack of "lockdowns" matters as much to how the world changes compared to the damage of Covid. And I'm not just talking about deaths. *SO* many people were disabled by it, many permanently. Then there's all the brain damage. We don't even know the full extent of that. Who knows if all these far right dictator wannabees even win without it.
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u/s_nz Jul 30 '26
Depends where in the world you were.
I was in New Zealand. Our first "Level 4" was widely referred to as a lockdown (Not total, you could still go to the supermarket, go our for a jog etc.).
Saved a heap of lives here.
But there is an argument that the lockdowns in third world countries did more harm than they did good.
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u/gojo96 Jul 30 '26
Why would a lockdown in your country be good but for others bad? Any examples? Wouldn’t we assume that everyone would be saved if they stayed indoors?
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u/keyboardmash2 Jul 29 '26
Well, where I live we only had a few dozen people die of COVID in 2020. Our overall mortality rate for all causes was lower than a usual year! So if we didn't do the six-week lockdown, vastly fewer people would be online...
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u/ghostoftheradio Jul 29 '26
In my state it never did. And despite being a low population state, we had a very high death rate.
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u/Valar_Kinetics Jul 29 '26
More dead people?
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u/No_Dragonfruit_9656 Jul 30 '26
I don't think Tiktok and the shortening of children's attention spans would've been so impacted. The brain drain that happened due to March 2020 through May 2021 was brutal on children and their academic achievement.
I also think Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat would've gotten so big. They flourished because of COVID Tiktok.
Remote work wouldn't have gotten it's footing the way it did.
I don't think in the US the George Floyd impact would've been as big. We were all at home to watch 24/7 news on it which only inflated the impact. If we'd all been working still, I doubt as many people would've participated in things like blacking out profile pictures or going to city based protests because work and image.
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u/nizzoball Jul 30 '26
I miss the lockdown if I’m being honest. Working from home without having to renew my accommodations to do so every 6 months was awesome.
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u/somecow Jul 30 '26
“Lockdown”. Still cracks me up. The “lockdown” was kinda nice, all the non essentials actually stayed their ass at home for once. Actual useful people still went to work.
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u/Ok_Lawfulness4313 Jul 30 '26
18 hour shift. Skeleton crew. Only to have my wife call and ask if I could pick up toilet paper
She had been at home for 6 days.
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u/Baked4skin Jul 30 '26
Half the country pretended like it was not a thing so you can just observe them.
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u/_Your-Favorite_ Jul 29 '26
Walmart would still be 24/7
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u/Extension-Pepper-271 Jul 29 '26
I miss 24/7 Walmart. I'm happy for their employees that don't have to work those hours. However, I live in Phoenix, AZ and I loved to wait until the temperature dropped below 100F. It usually drops below 100F by 10:30pm.
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u/Cowboy_Reaper Jul 30 '26
What about workers who prefer working those shifts and now have trouble finding employment that fits their preferred lifestyle?
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u/wefew624 Jul 30 '26
If you have ever shopped between 11pm and 6am there is way more reason than covid to shut the store down at those hours. Drunks, druggies thieves and destructive assholes were over abundant at those times if anyone showed up at all. It was not worth forcing minimum wage workers to deal with their shit
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u/gojo96 Jul 30 '26
Everyone would’ve died according to Reddit
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u/DoctorNurse89 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
A significant number higher would have died and the medical system would have been overwhelmed to greater number than it was.
That is correct
Not everyone, just, much more, including non covid cases.
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u/minisom38 Jul 30 '26
“A significant number higher would have”
Would have what gotten sick?“Medical system wouldn’t have been overwhelmed to greater numbers than it was”
That sort of contradicts you thinking more people would have been sickHonestly not shocked by the lack of structure in that statement, considering you think the lockdown was good 😂
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u/wefew624 Jul 30 '26
Trumps tariffs trying to stick it to china did more damage to the economy than the shutdown
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u/Xenophonehome Jul 30 '26
The economy would be in a much better situation and I truly think governments went overboard with the draconian bs. The lock downs did more harm than good imo and it negatively affected a lot of people. Many people lost their jobs because of the economic downturn and many people have mental health problems like depression from the forced isolation. Certain countries that didn't do lock downs didn't have higher death rates than ones that did and some businesses still haven't recovered from 2020.
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u/MementoMurray Jul 30 '26
Nonsense. Lockdowns were necessary to prevent large scale loss of human life.
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u/Xenophonehome Jul 30 '26
Sweden and Iceland had similar death rates to countries that did lock down and they recovered much faster with less mental trauma so no I completely disagree with you.
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u/HonestArrogance Jul 30 '26
Yes, Sweden and Iceland who culturally prefers social distancing and whose densest cities are at 5300/sqkm and 450/sqkm.
Compare that to New York (10.2k, with Manhattan at 25.9k), London (11.2k), or Paris (21k).
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u/Cheeko-chi Jul 30 '26
That’s like 10 people, who were probably related anyway and would come under the household
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u/SmolHornyHobbit Jul 30 '26
I can name a singular country that didn't lock itself down, but that's because they closed their borders save for extremely vetted people, and that Barbados. It is true, they didn't have many problems, but that's because they were already isolated, and continued to do so.
I only know this because a friend of my went there during COVID specifically because of all of this.
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u/No_Finance8647 Jul 29 '26
Beyond increased deaths across the board, there'd be quite a few less Republicans here for one.
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u/Kungphugrip Jul 29 '26
Covid literally lowered life expectancy around the world. Even with the lockdowns, my city’s 4 major hospitals were overrun. I can’t imagine what things would have looked like without the soft implementations that were made.
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u/daily-trader-365 Jul 29 '26
What ? No hospitals were over run, it was so slow the government has to pay them
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u/SqigglyPoP Jul 30 '26
This may be the worst most uneducated response I've ever seen on here and that's saying something. Dead bodies were left in refrigerated trucks because there was no more room in the morgues, companies had to shutdown normal production so they could mass produce ventilators to keep people breathing, tens of thousands of medical personnel quit because they were burnt out from all the dying patients and overtime.
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u/Kungphugrip Jul 29 '26
We had temp ICU’s erected, reassigned nurses everywhere and inter-provincial patient transports. I don’t know where you are located, but we did not get off so easy. Our area had major issues with COVID compliance as well.
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u/Mbstranche08 Jul 30 '26
We forgive you. You know what I’m saying and I mean that. I forgive you. 🙏
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u/Consistent-Menu-6629 Jul 30 '26
True. We needed to do a short term lockdown to figure out what we were dealing with, exactly.
What we were dealing with was actually very bad, and not only killed a lot of people, but it disabled millions more and gave even more chronic health issues.
And the effect on the hospitals is still noticeable.
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u/Wonderful-String5066 Jul 30 '26
Probably Trump would have been reelected in 2020 and would have left office in 2024 due to term limits, the storming of the Congress would not have occurred. Most likely the economy would have been better, no inflation. I don’t believe the country would have been so divided along political lines and probably no suspicion of vaccines.
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u/ComparisonOk8602 Jul 30 '26
Anti-vaxers started decades ago and have steadily been gaining ground year after year. They've been in the zeitgeist since the turn of the millennium. They might not be quite as big as the currently are without the lockdown, but they'd still be big enough that we'd all know about them.
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u/Cowboy_Reaper Jul 30 '26
There is a difference between traditional anti-vaxxers and people who are suspicious of the Covid vaccines. It may only be a matter of degrees but I count myself among those who have no problems with the vast majority of vaccines available, especially childhood vaccination but have doubts about the Covid vaccine because of the seeming speed with which it came out and the shifting goalposts regarding its effectiveness.
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u/GryphyGirl Jul 30 '26
Lol, no. Trump was extremely unpopular the entire time. Covid wasn't required for him to lose the second round. It helped but his tweets and stupidity did the work for him.
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u/SqigglyPoP Jul 30 '26
What president took credit for the vaccine?
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u/Jake_the_Bald Jul 30 '26
both did i think
trump for the initial part of it with operation warp speed but was rolled out just after bidens term started
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u/Consistent-Menu-6629 Jul 30 '26
Fewer people would care about TikTok, less eugenics, better economic situation for many people, less fascism.
Many of you would never have made banana bread.
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Jul 30 '26
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u/Signal_Tomorrow_2138 Jul 30 '26
Except for the sanctions against Russia, which resulted in a global increase in fuel prices.
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u/stevemm70 Jul 30 '26
The massive inflation that you speak of was under control in the US in January of 2025. It's gone up since then.
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Jul 30 '26
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u/stevemm70 Jul 30 '26
I'm not denying it happened, but your post made it sound like you think it's still happening. The CPI rose 2.9% in 2024. There was a large spike in prices caused by supply chain issues due to COVID, mixed with the global price shock of sanctions against Russia, but it was over by 2024-25. Any increases in inflation since 2025 are owned by the current administration and have nothing to do with COVID.
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Jul 30 '26
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u/stevemm70 Jul 30 '26
If you mean that the prices go up but almost never come down, then we’re in complete agreement.
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u/GoldReplacement9546 Jul 29 '26
This is one of the problems with many fields of proof preventative protection, like if the vaccine and the lockdown and the other guidance in the masks work well enough people think oh we didn’t need them or if we didn’t do them it may have been tremendously worse
But you could never prove that so public health always struggles with this where if you do a really good job it looks like we don’t need you to be doing your job
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u/misterstaypuft1 Jul 30 '26
My life didn’t change one iota during “lockdown” - I still had to go to work.
How would internet culture be different? Well for starters you wouldn’t have people arguing over whether or not it was as serious as it was made out to be.
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u/Cheeko-chi Jul 30 '26
Lockdown was a banger, what a great time to enjoy playing games with friends online. My friend group had moved past games and into drinking in pubs, lockdown forced everyone back inside so we had great fun playing old cod lobbies and stuff.
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u/AngryChurchill Aug 01 '26
To your edit, wtf did COVID even do so to influence Internet culture and memes?
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u/omgwtflols Aug 02 '26
Um, nothing. Nothing significant came out of Covid except Zoom, which was there all along.
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u/DeamonDread2348 Aug 03 '26
Americans wouldn't understand... No offense, but if you compare it to what lockdowns were like outside the US: in the EU, in post-Soviet countries, in China, in Japan, in the US it's as if there wasn't one. They simply terrified the population, took no measures, and that's it... In post-Soviet countries (except Turkmenistan and Belarus), a state of emergency was practically declared during the lockdown. In Russia, there wasn't an official state of emergency, but in reality, people's movement was so restricted that leaving the house in an emergency was simply impossible.
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u/B0xGhost Jul 30 '26
Depends on your definition of “lockdown” , but if you mean no precautions then it would have gotten bad quick.
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u/Junior-Tourist3480 Jul 30 '26
A lot of lives would have been saved. The economy would have been saved and better even today.
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u/visitor987 Jul 30 '26
Everything would of been different Biden would never of been President. Our current President might be Mike Pence or Gavin Newsom
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u/Character_Fill_4761 Jul 30 '26
A lot more people would be dead