Pandemic journal

Day 636

With me and my spouse being vaccinated and the infection rates going down in summer I thought perhaps it would be time to close this journal. But obviously, even if I’m personally not really at risk at the moment, this pandemic is far from over.

In fact, cases are soaring in Berlin. And as always, in the Netherlands, things are more than ten times worse. A few children in our daycare tested positively. Several close family members have been infected and got sick in the last few weeks. Some of them have already recovered, others are recovering. One family I know that didn’t want to get vaccinated also got infected. The whole family. As far as I can tell they aren’t the conspiracy theory type of antivaxxers. They were just being overly cautious. On social media there are these people laughing at antivaxxers getting covid, but I only find it sad.

So the pandemic is far from over, but like many, I’m getting tired of the measures, the distancing. I’m not against them—in fact as a benevolent dictator I would enforce a very strict lockdown for two weeks. No big gatherings. Shopping only with masks. But then at least we can meet socially without feeling weird about it.

Because that’s the thing. I want to meet people again, but every time I even approach someone to hang out I feel a bit guilty about that. Asking them to put their health and that of others at risk. At the same time we all really need more social contact and we can’t keep doing this forever. Because the corona virus is here to stay, that’s quite obvious now.