2020. Four syllables (or five, depending on how you say it, but no sane person would not say twenty-twenty, right?) that will surely for all time produce a deep visceral reaction in those that have lived through these 126 years 12 months. What a funny year. In February we were staying near Ronda in Spain on holiday and had heard something vague in a news article or two about a mystery respiratory illness in China. Shortly before flying home we heard news about the outbreak in northern Italy, which still seemed like a problem a million miles away both physically and mentally. Quickly it felt a little more real as we passed through the airport in Munich but it was still something very "out there" as opposed to, say, "next door". The day that schools finally shut down and my office was closed in mid-March had an obviously surreal feeling, and the days that followed were not as difficult as they would eventually become because there was not only a tinge of novelty, but a sense of togetherness in that we were all living through this crazy thing and we would survive together and it was kind of mysterious and different and strange having to venture to the grocery store. We discussed seeing people with masks which was so odd at the time, especially in contrast to now where if you see someone without one then you immediately know something about their politics and self-centredness. The summer brought about a calm before the storm where guards were let down and things actually weren't that bad -- at least in many places such as here in Germany -- with a bad day in virus news meaning a few hundred new infections instead of several dozen thousand like we have today. We were fortunate enough to spend some time at a mountain-top cottage in Austria and later in the summer we spent a week in Italy. On both trips the virus was never too far from our minds but it only passively affected us in that, for example, we wore masks in the hotel hallways and -- while the weather was thankfully beautiful -- made sure we ate all of our meals outside.
The second wave in the Fall is something that experts basically told us was a certainty but it seems everyone is still surprised by the seriousness of how bad things have gotten. It has perhaps never been so different from now but there is indeed a pervasive feeling in society that if something sounds contrary to what we want then we can just imagine a different reality and that will be the one that comes to pass. Unfortunately people's resolve have further crumbled with the length of this "thing", the amplification of ridiculous conspiracy theories through social media, and the in-vogue societal distrust of governments, experts of any kind, and international organizations. It feels so useless to even mention but the hypocrisy of populist right wing elected officials has helped a huge amount in bringing us to this point. Wearing a mask is tyranny but banning abortion is pro-life. Not being able to go to a bar is an unjust oppression but killing innocent black people is just a mistake by otherwise upstanding police officers. What can you expect when you have elected officials like these?
On the one hand, modern technology and modern society will perhaps help to make this pandemic short(ish) lived with up to 3 or more vaccines having recently been shown to be highly effective in preventing Covid-19 and being developed, tested, and brought to market in a timeframe that is near unheard of (while most vaccines require between 10 and 15 years to develop and become available, the fastest until now was the Mumps vaccine which required a little over four years). There is also the speed at which we learned about the disease, other technologies such as mobile-phone-based contact tracing, and newly-developed treatments that have kept death rates much lower than they surely would have been years ago. On the other hand, however, people are basically stupider than ever and (well, it's not totally their faults, it's the platforms themselves which are a huge part of the problem) will believe almost anything. If something is repeated to you over and over again in a Facebook echo chamber, evolution has given you no ability to overcome the inundation. Seeing conmen in movies sometimes might lead you to think "no way someone would believe this in real life" but there are literally millions of people -- including people dying at that very moment of Covid-19 -- who believe that it's a hoax. W. T. F. This is not a fringe really anymore; there are millions of people in the United States who believe Trump won the election and that it was stolen from him by fraud. Many of those same people believe that every single world leader (well, except Trump and Bolsonaro, I guess), every single corporation, every single doctor, nurse, public official, scientist, whatever, has somehow got together in a huge secret club to collude to invent a disease that they are suffering from at that very minute. And why would they do such a thing? Of course there's no single answer, but one of my very favourite conspiracy theories is that the hoax was created to force the world to accept taking a vaccine with an embedded microchip so people can be tracked. Imagine! The guy writing this conspiracy theory just logged into his smartphone using a fingerprint sensor, where he connects to a mobile phone network using a device with sub-metre accuracy GPS, has given all of his photos and social connections to Facebook, and all of his purchase history to Amazon, and he's worried about a tracking chip that could not possibly exist in a vaccine to help bring the world back to whatever normal sort of existed before. Un-fucking-believable.
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