“Freedom Day” jayeless.net
@jayeless Congrats on your 'freedom'. It's all so complex. Like yours, our hospital and health system had been run down over the last few decades in the interests of 'streamlining' and 'efficiency' so we also have no real spare capacity in infrastructure or staff. Our case numbers are increasing, even while vaccination rates increase. It's concerning.
@Miraz Thanks, and it certainly seems like NZ is facing the same challenges that we are 🙁 I do hope it teaches our governments a lesson about underfunding health, but I fear it might be a vain hope…
@Gaby I'm not sure what I can suggest, because it loads for me 🙁 Is it still giving you a 404? If so maybe Vercel (my host) is having issues in the part of its network near you. In that case maybe try again later?
@jayeless We’ve been opened up here since July and face the same challenges: good but not huge vaccination rates and a crumbling, part-privatised health service.
I think we’re also starting to see the results of making any preventative measures a “personal choice”. Here in Ipswich we have the highest infection rate in the country – I, my wife and daughter have all had Covid, as well as several friends.
It seems living with Covid simply means accepting high infection and death rates. We’re seeing over 200 dying a day. I expect we’ll be reimposing mandated mask-wearing and other measures in the next couple of weeks.
Another effect is that Covid has become more divisive. Encouraging “personal freedom” has meant that there’s a fairly large proportion of the population that won’t wear a mask in any circumstance, or even get vaccinated.
@leonp Yeah, it's been awful to see from afar how bad the situation has been in the UK, and how much death and illness has just been accepted as the "new normal". I really hope we're not going to head down the same path, but we'll see. Thankfully, the militantly anti-mask/vaccine/etc. people here seem to be quite a small minority (albeit still a loud and obnoxious one) which gives me some hope. Not enough to relax, though! I hope you, your family and friends have all recovered well from Covid.