Right now, it seems as if most intelligent people are participating in a slow motion pandemic shutdown. The roads are less crowded than before I went on my cruise. Businesses are telling their workers that it is OK to work from home for another month or two. And people have again become wary of any activity where they would be in direct or indirect contact with a large number of people.
It seems as if everyone I talk to has come into contact with someone who has been infected by the Omicron variant of Covid-19. And they are afraid of getting sick - even if fully vaccinated and boosted. Some vaccinated people have heard horror stories about booster shots going wrong. Others are sick and tired of the virus, and decided not to bother with the booster. (My brother is one of these people, and he has gotten infected. What's worse, he would prefer to get sick than to have been boosted. Go figure.) As a result of all this, people are staying home in droves.
This has gotten in my way, as none of the people I might see on weekends are comfortable going to restaurants any longer. It doesn't help that our local governments are not comfortable instituting capacity limits in public places - they want people to go about their daily business with as few impediments as possible, as they don't want the economy to freeze up again. So, by not sending a message to be cautious, the people who would be cautious are overcompensating for the lack of informed guidance from our politicians.
As for me, I'm willing to take my chances. I've been vaccinated and boosted, and am not in the mood to go back to the mindset we had in 2020. The other day, I chatted with my ex-girlfriend, and she noted that it was almost 2 years ago that everything shut down. What she didn't recall was that I was trying to get her attention NOT to attend any public events her meetup group was having. It's amazing that we're seeing similarities in what we're going through now with a time that things were much worse. It'll be years before people have a "normal" reaction to events - this pandemic has over sensitized people to fearing the risk of illness. I just wonder what our (great?) grandchildren will be thinking when another pandemic is likely to strike....
