Post by anaix3l on Feb 7, 2021 10:55:18 GMT -5
In New Zealand they locked down fast and hard. Life is now back to normal. [...] In Wuhan, where it all started, they had a huge New Years celebration with crowds gathering together. Here in the U.K., thousands more die each day, and the PM refuses to properly close borders, refuses to enact a full lockdown, because “business is more important than lives”
I'm afraid it all boils down mostly to money.
And in the case of New Zealand, a few other things I'd find shit in other situations.
They were fucking isolated before the pandemic anyway. And in case that's hard to grasp because desk maps make everything seem smaller, the distance between London and Moscow is shorter than the distance between Auckland and Melbourne. So no, the ditch separating them from Australia is definitely not the size of the one separating the UK from France, but more like the size of the entire continental Europe. If you go on the pages of their airports, you'll see that before the pandemic, their only two truly international airports (actually operating international flights, not just being called international, though even those two biggest ones only have one damn runway) had a total of exactly 25 international flights (including seasonal ones!) that weren't going to Australia. In case that wasn't clear, the entire country had only a small fraction of the international air traffic that a big airport like Heathrow or Gatwick gets. It's one thing to cancel 25 flights, it's another thing to cancel thousands or tens of thousands. And if it doesn't have much of a chance of getting in, it doesn't have much of a chance of spreading.
Their entire public transport is... well, kinda shit. But they never cared about fixing that because...
Who the fuck uses it anyway? They've aggressively kept poverty (ahem, anyone who seems poor... just like Monaco does!) out of their country for ages. Most of their population has access to their own fucking green spaces around their very nice houses. And they have nice cars to move around in. Biiig difference from the madhouse that public transport can often be in Europe - this is what an underground station in Bucharest looks like when people go to/ return from work.
Side note: I'd say this also is one of the reasons countries like Iceland, Norway or Finland didn't have such severe outbreaks either. They're a lot more isolated than the rest of Europe and they're fucking expensive places to... just be and breathe air in! I sadly know this because prior to the pandemic, I was exploring options of seeing shows. Iceland was 100% not doable - few flights and fucking expensive and not that many shows there anyway. I've never paid anything in 3 digits for a flight, I even did that stupid move of going for a fucking long layover in one of the shittiest airports in Europe just to avoid doing that. I considered the Inferno festival in Norway, but there was absolutely no direct flight from the northern half of Germany (where I would have been prior to it) to Oslo on that day. There was an option with a layover in Amsterdam, but it was pretty expensive and really tight (I'd be landing, rushing to drop stuff at the hotel and rushing to make it to the festival). I ended up dropping it. In retrospect, good thing I did that, one less festival to mourn (the money for). I did end up getting a ticket for a show in Helsinki. The flight to Helsinki was the most expensive one on that run and the second most expensive one I ever paid for in my entire life (5 months later, I finally got my money back from SAS after getting to bark at an actual human that their "we had to cancel thousands of flights" is bullshit, because if they had to cancel thousands flights, this means they were operating thousands of flights before, and it certainly never caused them to need 4 months to take my money after booking one). The flight out of Helsinki... well, good thing I had a three day buffer after that show and could afford to take the long and scenic route through (much cheaper than Finland, where hotel prices are a sheer heart attack, but I had worked my ass off in the previous months and was determined to splurge once in a lifetime) Central Europe. Because I shit you not, there were no direct flights from Helsinki to Berlin, where my next show was supposed to be. I swear, my brain errored when I saw that - how can you be a fucking European capital without direct flights to Berlin? Oh, wait, ask Oslo! All in all, what I'm trying to say is that exploring options to see shows in these countries was something like a cold shower for me. I had only been to shows in Sweden before that, where flight options were almost as good as those for Germany and, while accommodation was generally more expensive, I could still look and look like a madwoman for a few weeks and I'd eventually find options even slightly under 50€ (never discard truck stop or boat "hotels", they may actually be okay). So I really didn't expect the rest of Northern Europe would be so inaccessible on a budget.
Anyway, back to New Zealand. It must have been a fucking hard lockdown for people who had to stay mostly in their nice big homes and move around just like they did before, in their nice cars.
India also locked down hard and early. The entire country of almost a billion and a half people (that's almost 300 times the population of New Zealand) went into lockdown when they had a tenth of the number of cases Germany had at the time I (and others) were still going to shows there. Three months later, they were still extending that lockdown... and then I guess they just gave up on it. It ain't working when hundreds of millions live in overcrowded slums, you know? Plus, those people saw the same "rules for thee, not for me" we saw in a lot of Europe. I can tell you it didn't sit well with me when photos from politicians' orgies (and I'm not using that word lightly) or biking in parks that were closed to us plebes were leaked in the media. Just to be clear, I'm not completely dissing everything about India's response to the pandemic, I'm just saying they didn't have a snowflake's chance in Hell at a good outcome, even if the average age in the country is in the 20s and they have one of the lowest obesity rates in the world.
Peru had a lockdown that was as draconian as the one in Wuhan/ Hubei (not China, because China as a whole only locked down 5% of their population). Only allowed out at most 3x a week to buy food, army on the street to enforce it, all that package. And yet, the outcome was dramatically different from the one in Wuhan. But China also could afford to test the entire fucking population of Wuhan (over 10 million people). China had the money to pay for accommodation of those suspected positive so hey wouldn't keep on living with their families. China had the resources to make sure they get food and medical care in isolation and all their basic needs are met and don't have to set foot outside. I believe Denmark (oh, look, another country with money, do you see a pattern here?) eventually ended up doing something like that too, offering free accommodation for those who did not have big enough homes to isolate themselves from their families. By contrast, you have a large part of the population of Peru living in overcrowded households. One gets it, three fucking generations living in the same shithole get it. More than half the population of Peru doesn't have access to a fridge (the country is located at the tropics, btw). But hey, let's cut their access to water and fresh food!
Oh, fuck, I wrote a novel. Here it is in pictures:
New Zealand
Peru
India
Spot any differences?
Bonus: my environment. Can't complain, still better than Peru. And I don't have to share my 3m x 2m room!
Also, speaking of China: they're treating everybody who comes in like they're radioactive waste or something. Too bad they couldn't warn the rest of the world to do the same for those coming from there a year ago, eh?
Bottom line: if you as a politician just lock people up without helping them in any way, you've failed. Most countries didn't have the resources to provide that help. Some had the resources, but not the leaders who'd care. But there's this very noticeable pattern: rich countries where you have no poverty or the government stepped in and didn't let anyone sink fared better.
I do understand it's important to be careful and not kill grandma. Personally, I've been wearing a mask since I've returned from Germany last March and I'll continue to do that, just like I'll continue not to set foot outside for anything other than basic shopping, cemetery and bank once a month and perhaps pharmacy if I can't shake off the drug addiction I was 100% free of for only a little over a year before the pandemic hit... after 17 years of spending money on this habit, following Kreator on tour in 2018 somehow forced me to completely break the cycle. But I'm lucky. I can work from home and I don't feel like going out anyway. I actually didn't eat for a couple of days this week because I was out of stuff and didn't feel like going to a supermarket. Closest one is literally two blocks away, but I didn't feel like it. I just don't care about stuff anymore. I'm talking to friends in Germany and they tell me about going into the forests outside the city and I'm amused because there's no way I could still be in the mood for that anymore. We literally have a mountain in the middle of the city, mountains and forests to the east and south, but there's no way in Hell I could be bothered anymore. But I do think more accent should be put on educating people to be fucking responsible (in whatever way you find fitting) than just setting their ability to survive on fire and then walking away without looking behind.
By the way, summary of how things have gone in Romania: we had a strict lockdown in the spring, nobody allowed to step out without filling in paperwork for it, long live bureaucracy, fuck the poor trees, factories were closed, so people working in them replaced going to work with queuing outside pawn shops, then restrictions were lifted and most people just went all "well, fuck you too!" (well, the more Romanian "să moară și capra vecinului!" and why not, when they had seen how the very people who turned their lives upside down kept on partying in their fucking nice villas throughout the whole thing) and numbers started rising. And rising. And rising. And rising. To about 30-40 times what they peaked at in the spring. But we had local (September) and general (December) elections coming and nobody dared to even suggest a second lockdown before those for fear they'd be voted out into obscurity. So in late November we had over 10K cases/ day (with pretty piss poor testing), over 200 deaths per day, lots of people in hospitals, a lot of them old, it was getting cold. And our hospitals have extremely poor thermal insulation (they say a picture is worth a thousand words). And old people are just more sensitive to the cold. So you end up with electric heaters to keep them from freezing to death, but there's just so much you can plug in before shit hits the fan and... yeah, we got hospital fires and a bunch of people with covid who didn't become covid statistics because they were found charred, and if you burn alive but you happened to have covid, that's not a covid death, you know? In the meanwhile, all our politicians were saying was "vote for us this December!" so, dunno, maybe that managed to send the "you're on your fucking own, suckers!" message loud and clear because numbers have started dropping since the first hospital fire and we're now at late September numbers, about a quarter of what they were at the peak in November. Now I hear people bitching about how we have such a low vaccination rate compared to Israel and how we're going to have a third wave because of the new UK strain. Time will tell... for those who'll still be around.