this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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It's so surreal to see posts about masks and Covid.
I live in Denmark. At the beginning of last year, the government decided that Covid was no longer a critical threat, and all restrictions were removed on February 1st, 2022.
I have not seen a single mask since. I've heard Covid mentioned here maybe twice in the past year, with maybe one family I know getting infected in that period (that I know of...).
My wife and I were Team Restrictions, in the aggressively cautious (and scared) end of the spectrum. Two young daughters; those of you with kids (especially little ones) will probably know the crippling fear of losing your children.
Then one day the government decides it's just over, we can't be bothered with this anymore, and there was nothing we could do about it. Most of the country seemed very happy with the whole thing, certainly most people we know (and most of them had received our secret scorn for their borderline indifference to caution and protocol).
And then time passed, and some more time, and I went from checking in on the hardcore epidemiologists on Twitter daily — the ones constantly (and correctly!) pointing out that the decision to "cancel Covid" was insane, 100% political and in complete denial of the available data — to completely forgetting Covid happened.
2 years of hell, and for more than a year it's been completely out of my thoughts. It's absolutely mind-blowing. Especially since this is not the reality everywhere else. I don't think about Covid anymore, at all, unless something like this post reminds me it's still alive and kicking.
I'm always blown away when i see people who have long term covid symptoms because they picked up covid at some point and refuse to wear a mask and get vaccinated and call it a hoax.
Well, where did they get the symptoms from?? It's all a hoax, so what's really wrong with them??
/s
Yeah, the Surprised Pikachu Faces are baffling; everyone, on the entire planet, was warned, but the inconvenience was simply too great.
And anyway, "That will never happen to me, and it can't be my responsibility to be inconvenienced just to protect strangers, and from a made up global hoax, no less!"
[Picard Face Palm]
It's great that you get to live your life in ignorance, but people with autoimmune diseases, cancer, transplants, etc, don't.
COVID can, and does, kill us. Not having an immune system is rough.
I think you've misunderstood my meaning. I wasn't bragging, looking down my nose at the rest of the world who still has to deal with Covid. I was trying to convey:
How messed up it is to live in a place where something like "cancelling Covid" can become a political decision, and
How adept the human mind is at blocking out trauma.
A ridiculously high percentage of the population here was vaccinated, so at least that vector is dampened.
Personally, I do my best to still stay at home if I'm sick, keep my kids home if they've got the sniffles, and if we're feeling particularly unwell, we get a Covid test, unlike the vast majority of the country. We haven't tested positive in the past 2+ years.
There isn't much else we can do. It's not like we're fighting a rag-tag group of anti-vaxx retards here. It's the entire country. Almost everyone vaccinated, no masks or restrictions in sight for a year and a half. There's no fight to be had.
I understand completely that being compromised sucks tremendously, which is one of the reasons we (my wife and I) took the restrictions extremely seriously, to the point where both our families rolled their eyes at us. And we didn't give a fuck, we did our best to do what we thought was right, and we kept doing that for as long as it was doable.
I have no idea what the numbers are today, if people here are still dying. I doubt it, because people would talk about that, but I don't know for sure. I was trying to convey what it's like living in a post-pandemic society, even if it is so by choice.
The numbers are available. Official count (by the WHO) is a few hundred deaths a day globally and dozens of deaths per day in the EU.
Keep in mind those numbers are probably not accurate, since they're coming from unreliable sources (I would think the EU number is more accurate than most of the world though).
Several months ago there was a wave that peaked at 41,000 deaths per day. We definitely need to keep a finger on the pulse incase another wave like that rises up. In the height of the pandemic restrictions the death rate was more like a hundred thousand deaths per day (and that wasn't a peak of a single wave, it was around that high for a year).
Look, I get it, but there's a big difference between a hundred thousand deaths per day and a couple hundred deaths per day which is where we are now with covid (according to the WHO).
Covid is nowhere near the highest risk anymore, even people who are especially vulnerable to it are far more likely to be killed by something else.
Doesn't mean covid should be ignored but the precautions we took in recent years just aren't necessary right now.