Coronavirus III: The Charm

Welp...

I honestly have no idea why I'm here, here as in this website updating this blog with that old email address. I realized I hadn't updated in a while, and I feel like that's how I always start these posts. It's been a few months since our second wave, and now we're into our third. Hat trick! If you have no idea what I'm talking about, welcome back! I have some tough news for you and you may want to sit down but please do so at six feet away.

The pandemic has left me feeling...laughably defeated. In one week it'll be a year since IBM sent us packing. Well, not packing, but they sent us home not knowing when we would return. In the beginning, there was a lot of optimism. We'll ride this out the best we can and be back in the office by September! It's currently March and I'm still very much isolating in my home, and it's because the situation in the Czech Republic has become a catastrophic failure. 

We've had rules and restrictions against covid in place the entire time, but last September folks began scratching their chins no longer covered by masks and pondered why our once very good numbers (which only occurred when we followed the steps of every other country in Europe) were now quickly becoming very bad numbers. The Czech Republic at one point was actually the last country in the EU without a covid-related death. Pretty impressive for people who don't give the flyingest fuck about regulations in place or enforcing them. That public Prague dinner send off after the first wave really caught us with our pants down, probably because no one was wearing pants anymore.

When the second wave started to gather strength in mid-August 2020, I was sheltering myself before any restrictions were in place. And honestly my situation hasn't changed because I still don't have a choice. Regulations didn't need to be active for me to observe proper social distancing protocols and limiting my interactions with others. I didn't renew my tram pass because I hardly ever take public transportation enough to justify getting one. I wore my mask indoors and outdoors. I had opportunities to leave and go be social and frolic or whatever it is we used to do, but I didn't. My new normal was having each day be exactly like it was the day before. Around 5pm each day, I switch to my personal computer from my work computer and stay in the same place, typing at the same speed and visiting the same websites. 

While many new regulations have been introduced, they largely haven't affected my day-to-day Liz stuff. I'm still indoors, I still show up to work on time, I still need to tire Gossamer out around 11pm. I did get a blender in January and that was a real game changer diet wise. I got new glasses on a wild crapshoot spawned from an Instagram post I saw at 3am. I bought an obnoxiously loud Hawaiian shirt I definitely don't need. All this was orchestrated from the same table in my same apartment with the same movie on in the background. 

However, the third wave regulations are fierce, fierce because we can't afford to fuck this up again. We had two pretty good chances, but we burned that bridge during the public dinner on the literal bridge to celebrate "the end of coronavirus." Each county border is patrolled by police and/or the military. To enter the adjacent county, you need formal documentation from your employer. The curfew was mostly abolished as our freedom of movement is extremely limited anyway and we're not supposed to be out unless we're gathering supplies. Pretty much everything aside from grocery stores, mini marts, pharmacies, medical facilities, banks, and the post office is closed. You need to walk your dog within 1km of your home. We also need to wear ffp2 respirators. No more cloth masks, and if you don't have an ffp2, you can wear two surgical masks at the same time. Again, all these changes by and large don't affect me as a health-conscious person. What does affect me is the covid vaccine and when I can get it. 

The vaccine rollout in the Czech Republic has been horrendous. The first inoculated were citizens over the age of 80 and healthcare workers. Supposedly my group of "high risk" was also supposed to be included in that starting 1 January. But it's 5 March. We didn't purchase enough vaccines and we don't have the capability to store them. Other European countries are even donating vaccines to us. If Trump was still president he probably would have thrown paper towels at us. The Czech government is in talks with China and Russia about procuring some of their vaccines, and of course there's been a lot of push back from the Czechs. Russia anything is bad, and like...I get it. You don't just become a Soviet satellite state overnight (well, actually you do). This trend of dismissing the Russian vaccine because it's Russian seems silly. Some could argue science has taken the place of god in the Motherland over the last 100 years, and time and again they proved it, you know with that whole moon thing or whatever. There's also a crazy amount of xenophobia increasing above the usual levels here because the Chinese vaccine is Chinese, home field advantage for racists and coronavirus. But our hospitals are maxed out. High school kids are doing shifts in hospitals and doing on-the-spot training because our healthcare system is exhausted. Poland, Germany, and Austria have offered to take in Czech patients because there aren't enough people here to care for them, and you know you're fucked when Poland is the one offering to lend a hand. Acute procedures are getting cancelled in hospitals and clinics across the country, and we still can't wear our fucking masks right. 

A friend took this TODAY. TUH. DAY. We are one year into this thing and this woman, not only is she sporting a nose dick, but she's almost going out of her way to not wear it and is refusing to observe the structural purpose of the metal piece in the bridge of the mask. That's the point of the mask. One time use! More effective! YOU'RE SO CLOSE. 

Of course none of this is enforced. Obviously enforcement means money and money means...something here, I'm almost sure of it. Maybe a bribe would work instead... I'm not trying to insinuate this woman will kill people by nosing around while on public transportation. It's the careless, lazy attitude that's easily in view and adopted by others is what will kill more people. This is why I don't have a tram pass. This is why I leave my home once, maybe twice a week if it's absolutely necessary. I know what I can't be around, and it's been like this for one year. 

The good news (hahahahahaha) is that the vaccine registration website has recently been updated with information that may prove to be factual! Supposedly I can have a GP or a care specialist register on my behalf as they're more official than me. Imagine that, a doctor being more official than me, the woman who bought a Hawaiian shirt in January for no reason at all. I emailed my diabetologist with the information on the website in both Czech and English to nullify any translation errors. I realize I did this on Friday at 6pm, and I have inadvertently created a minimum of 48 hours of waiting time for myself, but it's the first step.

And that's all I can do. A lot of times I feel ultimately helpless. A couple of weeks ago I entertained the idea to fly back to the US to get the vaccine, but after some reflection on the logistics of what would be needed for this to work seamlessly (vacation time, no missed appointments, appointments happen as scheduled, open and available airfare, crossing borders, going through layovers and transit points not in the Czech Republic and abiding by their rules and restrictions, getting the negative test to travel and hope that will get me all the way through to Seattle, waiting the weeks between the two doses, isolating between doses in a safe environment) was really overwhelming. 

I know it's absolutely not healthy, but I caught myself doing the "man if times were normal and I had a lot of money, what would I be doing?" imaginary thinking that makes us immediately depressed. And while it was very escapist, it was pleasant to take a momentary break and think about owning a ranch in New Mexico and having one or two horses and some really big dogs and Gossamer, a wraparound Roche Bobois Mahjong sofa and a big telescope on the extended porch, an art studio set up for photography, painting, welding, and sculpture, a kiln, sprawling carpets, only wearing caftans with big glasses and no shoes except for cowboy boots, amateur archeology, huge windows to watch the thunderstorms in June, roasting pinion and maybe marshmallows, writing in front of a fire all year round, trail riding after breakfast, sometimes owls hide in the eaves, collecting arrowheads, roasting jerky in the smoker...

...or something like that. 

In this alternate fantasy where Liz has her shit together, I can never tell if I'm alone. I think it's because it's very selfishly me and it doesn't take anyone else into consideration. There's a difference between self care and being selfish. Is collecting arrowheads selfish? The jury is still out and very socially distanced on that one. I'd like to not be alone, but in this fantasy I'm alone. 

The part that hurts is that even if all of this was available to me, I'd probably still be doing what I'm doing right now: typing on a computer wishing I wasn't alone.

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.