What is your State / Country doing? How do you feel about it?

**KnottyAuthor** · 08-16-2020, 06:37 PM

Florida is stupid. #that'sall

**Scribetastic** · 10-31-2021, 06:53 AM

I hope everyone is safe and sound.

California is doing well, but, even here, we've got lots of stupid happening.

I was terrified because I keep up with news coming out of Asia and was in South Korea during SARS and left when MERS was starting up. It was easy to see that the rate of infection was something we've not seen in our lifetimes, so I figured this would going to be closer to the 1918 flu than SARS or MERS. Layer on having a chronic disease, type 1 diabetes, and looking for a new job at the time, and I was absolutely terrified.

I literally cried when we sheltered in place. Then I just watched it all go down from the idiot president that was leading the US at the time to all of the mask protests and vaccine misinformation. It's been a year and a half of a whole lot of "wow". I was hoping we'd learn from history and science and do better.

Since people can move about freely now, it's going to circulate. A silver lining to the fires we've had over the last few years is I came into the pandemic with N95 respirators. I always wear an N95 or KN95 mask along with a washable cloth mask. I'm vaccinated and just ended a vaccine immunity study, so I'm clear to get a third shot. I know I'll travel both for work and for pleasure probably at the end of the year and into early next, so I'm going to wait a bit on the third shot. I still mostly go out for errands and medical appointments only. I've done some social stuff mostly with co-workers as we're a 100% remote team, but I'm being very careful.

Last I looked, California's rate of infection was bad, but it wasn't as bad as the rest of the country. It's definitely going to become endemic because people just don't have the discipline or the will to modify their behavior. FWIW, I also heard sexually transmitted diseases are up too. Go figure.

I'm just glad that Gov. Newsome defeated a recall election. All politicians have their issues, but he's been handling this pandemic pretty well.

**deecoily** · 12-10-2021, 02:52 AM

My country Australia locked down hard in 2020 and continued until a few months ago. Closed international and state borders. It kept the numbers low but it was difficult. You weren't allowed to leave the country without a permit either. You had to apply and if rejected you could not leave if you were a citizen. If a permanent resident you could leave but you would forfeit your return visa.

The feds didn't order enough vaccines so we were way behind the rest of the world until a few months ago. Now we are at 95% vaxxed and opened up more.

I wish the individual states could agree on COVID safe rules like mask wearing and social distance requirements. It's so confusing.