That’s exactly it. Spoke with my cousin in FL yesterday, and he said the news was full of stories about the impact to tourism. Port cities are very eager to get back to “business as usual.” My aunt was talking about a cruise that leaves from Ft. Lauderdale early next year, and the rest of us keep hoping it will be canceled.
12 Likes
Being really behind on a new learning curve for serious medical issues in IRL is bad. My guess is even if some research funders are throwing money and time into early days of pandemic survivor longitudinal/cross-sectional/case-control/cohort studies, it’s gonna be a while before we understand WTF is going on.
Being a parent trying to glue handles on her child’s health problems sounds like a nightmare, esp. the part where they are not being taken seriously while advocating for treatment for their kids. No idea if long-haul symptoms mean shorter lives for the kids mentioned in the article. It certainly sounds like their lives are more painful.
I wish every anti-vacc anti-mask bozo (I have some in my neighborhood) would be made to be a carer for these kids, every day, between 9pm and 5am particularly… but I wouldn’t want such people near children at all.
16 Likes
Exactly! I have a few friends who haven’t really followed this whole “pandemic story,” and I totally get that for a lot of people it boils down to making decisions that best support their own mental health (while still being safe.) But to me, the idea that we are living through a time that will be more than a blurb in the history books has made me want to pay a lot of attention.
11 Likes
Ontario 
's case rate remains stubbornly high, and the 64 cases in my neighbourhood this month (about a km square) puts our case rate over 200/100k. In the latest round of barn door slamming, what with the vague whiff of horse still detectable if there’s no breeze, the provincial government has allowed “hot spot” residents over the age of 18 to book vaccine appointments.
A friend of ours, trying to book for her stereotypically somnolent teenage son, found herself in a queue behind 192,000 people. It seems she was not alone. 
High demand is not a bad thing…
12 Likes
14 Likes
I just cannot grasp the mindset that would get someone to board a cruise ship at this point in time. Just cannot grasp. 
22 Likes
There is certainly enough research to say that it certainly exists. We don’t fully understand it, and don’t know how to treat it, although the vaccine seems to help, which is really weird if it is all due to immune system overdrive. Research is ongoing, but anyone suggesting it is not a thing is months behind the times, which is like decades in Covid time.
13 Likes
i’m with you. i was never quite able to grasp the mindset of cruises, period. even in the before times.
i’ve been known to describe a cruise as cramming together the population of my hometown onto a floating platform with all of the good bad and ugly that was my hometown and then travel around alaska, or greece, or italy, or jamaica with all of them. ick! and never being able to get away from them. yuck!
no, i say. n-o-o-o-o-o . . .!
15 Likes
As if norovirus wasn’t bad enough in its own, then add Covid to it.
Nope nope nope
16 Likes
Nope-ovirus.
17 Likes
Right now, I’m gonna blame Smooth Jazz. Some of it’s already like the Muzak of jazz, so it wouldn’t surprise me to learn there’s some subliminal messaging in there. When we pointed out the dangers of going on a cruise, my aunt said, “But it’s the Annual Jazz Cruise.” Like that made all the difference… 
It took everything in me not to scream, “Jazz doesn’t kill germs!”
Ugh, at least we’ve got the rest of the year to put the fear of Covid back into her head… 
19 Likes
I’ve seen them called “floating nursing homes,” which is a little over the top
but for demographics that are looking at “assisted living” as their endgame, might as well have that same experience with the scenery changing rather than stuck in one place
14 Likes
I always visualized cruises as taking the old Holiday Inn from the Vegas strip and setting it out to sea.
Not enticing at all. Land or sea.
4 Likes
Guess what Kiddo is getting for her birthday?!!?
17 Likes
It’s smooth like mayonnaise. Mayonnaise that’s been sitting in a buffet table for hours while the ice is melting away…
12 Likes
9 Likes
11 Likes
It’s that fourth bullet point that makes me agree with those dire herd immunity predictions. Variants are given every opportunity to spread around the world.
16 Likes
16 Likes
