Rest up!
Woah
Malaysia is not a wealthy country, but they can see that this sort of thing is the bare minimum required.
N95s and RATs are completely unavailable at any price, and the state government is now openly admitting that they are trying to make Covid “endemic”.
One of my neighbours has a permanently implanted tracheotomy tube.
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…and that’s in the middle of the capital city. In the regions, there is no queue to join.
Which, BTW, is something that they repeatedly denied that they were going to do when they were marketing the “reopening”.
It was presented as “now that we’re mostly vaccinated, we can afford to take the risk of an occasional localised outbreak, which will be traced and suppressed”. Not “let 'er rip”.
Out of a population of 500,000, we now have 20,000 Tasmanians in Covid isolation.
And that is under the newly revised “less than four hours doesn’t count as a close contact” rules, so the number of people who should be in isolation but aren’t is probably an order of magnitude higher.
This is the local picture in my state:
It was doing really well (relatively) until this winter. At least people are serious about the masks and vaccinations. We have the highest fully-vaccinated rate in the country.
Omicron’s no joke though. That spike in the active cases is serious.
So far my immediate family has avoided it, but multiple coworkers have been dealing with it, either themselves or their families. One of our work chat channels is now a discussion of recipes that people who had/have covid can still kind of taste.
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Murdochery:
…as well as the point that (a) their response was already totally inadequate pre-Omicron, and (b) Delta made it fucking obvious that there were more variants on the way.
And Mr. Charles got his info from Helen Keller.
(insert “I’m shocked. not that shocked”.gif here)
I talked to my ~85 year old Dad in Sydney last night.
He says that his clogged sinuses and bad cough aren’t Covid, it’s “just” the flu.
Getting a Covid RAT required him to drive around all day looking for it, and pay $30 once he found one.
The Australian right appears to be converging on a position of “Omicron is no big deal, just go and catch it already. Natural Immunity™️! Endemic™️!”
Meanwhile, the USA appears to be heading towards a position of “We don’t care if you have Covid, get back to work right now you lazy slackers”.