All the time I have people come in to work wearing a mask, which is fine normally, good for them, but they are wearing them on their chin, chin diaper style. Not covering up anything. Or at best just their mouth, sometimes. Nobody is making these people wear a mask anymore, so why are they doing it at all if they are just going to do it wrong? Is it an attempt at a political statement? A lack of education? I end up baffled for a while every time I see one of these people.
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).