In authoritarian China you have to test negative for covid to do things in public places. It costs just over a dollar to do a test. Can you imagine the government shouldering such burdensome financial cost? What a crazy dystopia! :NOOOOO:
I see lots of people on HelloTalk frustrated with the lines to get tested, how frequently they need to, the loneliness of lockdown, etc. But the thing is, they all seem to accept that this is what you do during an outbreak. It’s not some terrible violation of freedom, it’s an inconvenience that will pass if everyone follows the protocols. Much more socially accepted.
One guy I didn’t believe me when I said that my state’s lockdown was only for around a month and we don’t even need to wear masks on public transit anymore.
We are now playing Russian roulette of eventually developing long covid. People in wheelchairs because of fatigue and heart problems. People almost starving to death because food tastes like rotten sewage. People developing fucking type 1 diabetes. All the while services and welfare are collapse and inflation is being used as another vehicle to abolish these things like in the old Ron Paul days.
I wonder how long that level of acceptance can be sustained. What if, for example, just as COVID burns itself out enough that China can reduce restrictions, there’s a Monkeypox variant that’s equally infectious that necessitates restrictions to remain?
