I think it’s starting to sink in that this isn’t going to be ‘all over by Christmas’. Hoping for a vaccine is an exercise in wishful thinking and when the official tracing app doesn’t work on most people’s phones, hope that we can manage our way out of this is looking forlorn too.
I’ve decided I’m not going to be too judgemental of people craving their holiday or a trip to the pub. It’s just wanting normality and reacting in different ways to stress. And normality seems a very, very long way off.
My parents typically spend the winter in a beach condo in Antigua. They were due to go back to the UK in the spring right at the time that things started spiraling and so I tried to get them to take a moment to think about their options rather than rushing back to the UK and getting caught in a worse situation than they left (especially as they live in a rural and remote part of Wales that has had its services fucked by austerity, meaning they are probably an hour and half from a hospital that could have dealt with any covid related symptoms anyway).
They rushed back anyway and have basically just pissed away the last 6 months, but now are preparation to go back. Yet nothing has really changed from the time 6 months ago when they decided they needed to be in the UK. I think you can only really see this decision making process as being a result of just being fatigued and no longer giving a fuck.
Had a proper laugh reading this article. Like an ethnological report of some exotic custom of a recently discovered tribe - when it’s about opening fricking windows.
I was flying 50% of my time for a number of years for my work before Covid hits so I really do crave getting away on a plane for some holiday or just to go somewhere. But craving for something and actually caving in with disregards to the bigger picture here is the problem. I will not comment on other countries but just using Singapore as the example. There are people here who has attitude towards the government and the situation that reminds me of a tripadvisor review I saw many years ago. Apparently, this person went to a resort with a private beach and left a negative review with one statement saying “the waves are too strong and fierce for swimming”.
To me, this reminds me of this situation because in Singapore, people are finding every and any reason to blame the government. Some blame the government for shutting down. Some blame the them for not reopening some sectors. But they forget, there is something called common sense and there are things that are beyond the government. What can the hotel do about the waves being too strong? And if the waves are too strong…don’t swim…just because you could not swim, that is why the hotel is bad? That is precisely is happening. Because people cannot go on holidays, people cannot eat in big groups at a restaurant, the people are blasting the government here for highly paid useless people. I keep saying this over and over again to people around me, the government can only do so much. Even a government with the best intentions will and can get wrong with this virus, they have no clue about it. They will try to enforce and implement laws and rules to the best of their knowledge and if us, the wider society is only concerned at this moment to challenge their rules and laws and break them just because you do not believe in them, then guess who is going to lose out in the end?
Not to get too off subject but a coastal resort is totally linked to thier beach. Might not be under thier control but it is absolutely part of their review.
Otherwise I could open a coastal resort in the local industrial estate
Yeah, this is a bit of an eye-opener. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been wondering about these wildly differing patterns in terms of tranmission and mortality. The overdispersion factor makes it understandable.
By the way, The Atlantic is a real pearl imo. An in-depth, well-written, understandable article on one precise topic… generalist journalism, but not afraid of going a bit more into detail… this is becoming a rare commodity nowadays.
Edit: The Japanese case explained in this article is highly interesting. They seem to have found the right way on how to react to the virus, by identifying the overdispersion factor very early and tackling the issue as soon as in February. The result is impressive, without imposing any full lockdown at any time, and without being too restrictive in general. It’s just that they are very restrictive on the points which can cause overdispersion. For instance, people can gather in stadia now again, but aren’t allow to sing or shout without wearing a mask.
That should give us hope that eventually, societies all over the world will be able to tackle the virus more efficiently as is the case now.
Yes maybe the cleanliness and ensuring safety measures…but how could the resort control how big the waves are? And anyway I was using that to illustrate the point that there are people in Singapore who just use anything and everything they can to throw shade on the government’s efforts whether fairly or unfairly.
Just reading a newsletter that says that a Liberum Health Analyst thinks we wont get a widespread vaccination programme underway until Summer 2021 at the earliest (Autumn 2021 more likely). Add in the number of people who may not take up a vaccine and we may continue to see restrictions until well into 2022.
Maybe we are both barking up different trees, but i am merely saying its nonsense for someone to say that a place or someone sucks due to conditions that are beyond their control. You can make a statement of fact which is the waves are too strong, but what is not a fact about the resort is that it does not necessarily suck just because there is strong waves which is not in their control.
I will leave it as it is because I think there is nothing further I can add.
Great read. I particularly liked the comments on targetting super-spreading events with cheap and fast testing, not to completely avoid the spread during these super-spreading events, but to manage and reduce the spread. I thought I have had it all wrong this time thinking the only solution was complete extermination. Then I got to the last couple of paragraphs and the mention of high community transmission resulting in the propensity of more super-spreading events to occur anyway due to the sheer saturation (sorry to use that term in yet another context) of the population. Read: We are fucked whatever we do.
I think this also goes some way to explain the puzzling gap between the death rate we saw in March-April, and what has been observed since. Only a few places, Hidalgo County for instance, have come close to replicating the conditions in Lombardy and parts of Spain.
It all builds on the idea of needing to keep it under control to some degree - reduce community transmission, and you can minimize those killer clusters. But the strategy of how to get there has a lot of nuance. The discussion of Japan was particularly interesting.
