Coronavirus II: Surf's Up

It's been about six months since I last updated. During the slightly optimistic update, I gave details about how the Czech Republic and IBM were handling coronavirus protocols, how the virus impacted the economy and border controls, and the constant changing and loosening of the restrictions. As I type this I had to pause because lol holy shit it's been six months. That being said, 

Ah, the second wave. If only the pandemics of the past had warned us of the increased dangers of relaxing restrictions that are ultimately keeping people safe and, I'll say it, alive. Since I've last written, the Czech Republic started implementing slight changes every couple of days, it seemed. The mask mandate was the first and probably most popular to be axed. Restaurants and pubs reopened as the days lengthened and the weather warmed. The borders, while still being monitored, turned out not to really be monitored at all. By late June, pretty much all freedom of movement had returned. There was even a "goodbye, Coronavirus!" communal dinner on the famed Charles Bridge to bid salutations to the stagnation we had all been experiencing for the previous three months. Our days of jerking off and watching Tiger King were over, and the pandemic was gone.

Due to the pandemic, Prague's tourism was disastrously uprooted by its old cobblestones. If you've ever visited Prague, especially in the summer, you're no stranger to the crowded hot mess it becomes. It's tough to navigate or have any sense of spatial breathing room. The hospitality industry took a huge hit, but not huge enough for Czech Airlines to introduce a tri-weekly flight to Ulaanbaatar in the height of summer. If opportunities like a semi regular flight to Mongolia was the baseline indicator of trying to get the economy to normalize, the Czech Republic had officially reached its benchmark of how desperate the country was to recover from the first wave of the pandemic. If you look at the clusterfuck in the photo above, Czechs are drinking and playing music and taking photographs and creating a congregation to revel in the close social contact they had been missing out on for months. I don't blame them, but again, if we had fucking learned anything from the very basic health science which is constantly being reported, we would have known this wouldn't be officially over. There was no ghosting the coronavirus. But if I suddenly had multiple options to fly to Central Asia in the next week, the pandemic must be over!

While a lot of people here were in a hurry to travel and soak up the remaining days of summer, I spent most of my time indoors. I actually don't even have tan lines this year, and I have now typed the word "immunocompromised" so many times in the last few months that my autocomplete now has a lil soft spot for it. Being Type 1 meant I had to practice social distancing and isolation regardless of the amazing send off from the Charles Bridge. My immune system is different and easily compromised. I was still wearing a mask on public transit and indoors even though it was no longer required. Sometimes I had some pride about it. I'm being the good example in a sea of bad examples! More than a few people back in the US have messaged me to find out how the Czech Republic has been handling the coronavirus. And it didn't matter how good our numbers were at the time; I always responded with "poorly." I'd like to not die, and I didn't need government regulations in place to tell me to stay safe, but apparently most people did. It was almost as if feigning normalcy and ignoring the presence of any virus was universally welcomed. Some people still experience an incredible amount of disdain when a mask policy is enforced upon them. 

Staying away from whatever transmission sources was made easier by IBM since they continued to keep us on home office. During the summer, there was talk of returning to the office based on the severity of our jobs and the amount of client-facing we would actually do per department. We were rumored to go back sometime in September, maybe October. It sounded reasonable. It wasn't so much the returning to the office I had an issue with. It was taking the one bus that went by my office during peak commuting hours. Have you ever people watched on a bus? Or just people watched? People are fucking gross, dude. If I could hide back in my corner cube with the desk open next to me, I was in a prime position to have minimal contact with any employees. I was okay with that starting in September or October. I'm sure I'd have to start sending Gossamer to therapy with my return to the 9-5, but he'd be okay. Just like people being made to wear a mask, he'd be okay. 

But then, school started. Entire throngs of families returned from their vacations while having contact with hospitality workers, airline employees, gas pumps, forks in restaurants that were only given a rinse over and not a full wash, a door handle at a post office, a toy unknowingly being shared, wedding guests who couldn't be bothered to not wear a mask or use hand sanitizer, a credit card reader at the pharmacy, the seat previously sat in by someone on public transit, and a whole slew of things people touch without so much giving it a second thought. I monitored the numbers for a few days in early September and started to isolate as much as I could while Czech health officials were hyper sensitive about the economy collapsing for a second time. I turned down a few comedy shows. I started limiting my trips out of the apartment to once or twice a week. I pretty much stopped taking public transit all together.

At one point in late March, the only country in Europe without a coronavirus death was the Czech Republic. We were also one of the only countries to completely close its borders with the exception of overland freight. Italy went into lockdown and after seeing their sudden decline, many other countries followed, and not just their neighbors. But the Czech Republic was praised in international news articles for our rapid response to the growing concerns during the first wave. We were clearly doing something right, and the little second world country was getting some big talk among the big dogs. At roughly 400 new cases per day in early April, our numbers were looking pretty good compared to those who were floundering under a collapsed health system.

But in September and October, our cases and deaths skyrocketed. Our peak resulted at 15,000 cases in one day. It was announced within IBM that we would be working from home until further notice since clearly there could be no estimated timeline to rely upon. At one point, 40% of the tests performed were coming back positive. Almost half. We've gone through three Ministers of Health in two months, and precautions aren't staying in place long enough to fully monitor the effects on the population. The restrictions also aren't as strict as they were despite the exponential increase in deaths, as seen below: 

As of now, we're supposedly in a plateau, probably because of the restrictions put in place. Weird how that works. For most of the pandemic, Europe has been using a traffic light system to indicate the severity of the virus in each country but also the precautions which need to be taken to successfully travel safely. But yesterday, the Czech Republic introduced this fuckery errrr system called "PES" or DOG to keep "better" track of the situation:

Someone thought an ample amount of visuals was required to illustrate the growing threat of coronavirus. Since numbers are no good and potentially a thing of the past, the country is using colors and the mood of a cartoon dog to convey the severity of the pandemic. You may notice the dog is a Doberman, and typically only Nazis and junkyard security guards rely on Dobermans, so it surprised many people when it appeared, and not just appeared, but appeared happy on a Czech Republic coronavirus infograph. Obviously purple (or seething anger) is the worst case scenario, but right now the whole country is red (heightened anger with minimal teeth). Because of this Doberman terror fiasco system, we'll probably have a new Minister of Health by the end of next week. Nine months into the pandemic and somehow the concept of numbers and the dark horse known as science are still being ignored. 

While I gripe about the situation here, idiots en masse in the United States are forcing their own political issues on people who actually want to be safe. Covid safety is not a political issue, yet many are making it that way as you may have in the second Borat movie, Glorious Nation of Oh God It's Something Like That But I Can't Remember Exactly So This Might As Well Be It. Lakewood, Washington and Olympia, Washington made appearances and it only seemed to bolster the underlying, but pretty obvious message of the mockumentary. There is a serious problem in the United States when it comes to doing the right thing for the safety of others. 

I realize nowhere in the US Constitution does it state "Conscionable physical distance must be given in times of war, pestilence, etc." But I didn't wait for the Czech government to introduce a safety plan to keep myself and others healthy. Citizens of both CZ and the US are highly skeptical of what the government is telling them, the US because Trump is a fucking idiot and the Czechs because their numerous regime changes throughout the 20th century led to some serious mistrust throughout multiple generations. 

Why is the idea of science combined with creating actions reflecting our consistently changing knowledge so hard to come by? How many sources or pieces of evidence are needed to convince someone in your Facebook comments that they're actually wrong? Over the last nine months I've separated the unscientifically hard-nosed into two groups, those who are consciously refusing to accept the outcome of a scientific study (or an election) and those who simply do not get it. They will not get it. Their biases impede them from taking all of the evidence and really digesting it into a new concept they hadn't previously thought about, and I don't have the energy for that anymore. I can't muster the energy to dissect someone's shitty grammar and their thoughts about masks being ineffective. I'm tired, so I'm going to do what is in my power to help myself and others: stay home. 

My days are very monotonous but I'm churning out more creative substance as I sit here. I'm drawing a lot, like a lot a lot. I've read more books this year than I have in recent years. I took another stab at poetry. The hardest time I'm having right now during this second wave is the lack of human contact. I live by myself and on the days I do leave the house for the grocery store or the pharmacy or drug store, I'm usually getting yelled at because my Czech can't be understood underneath my mask. Yesterday while I was buying toilet paper and shampoo at the drug store counter, a woman sidled up next to me hard as she was trying to put her basket down in the area where my items were as I was paying for them. I stood my ground and asked her out loud in English "What are you doing? What are you doing," and rolled my eyes. Even if there wasn't an ongoing pandemic, this situation would be uncomfortable, so here's my specific question: what does the death toll need to be in the Czech Republic or the United States before measures are actually enforced or taken seriously? 

We've been at this nine months now and it's getting infinitely worse, so your shitty dive bar comedy show dick jokes can wait. Don't have Thanksgiving or Christmas this year. Shop during non-peak hours. Minimize touching public surfaces. Isolate if you even feel remotely sick. And wash your motherfucking hands.