tomorrow509 t1_j13cudv wrote on December 21, 2022 at 10:58 AM

Reply to comment by Rumple-Wank-Skin in Hearses queue at Beijing crematorium, even as China reports no new COVID deaths by Niflheim-Dragon

Yes, things get eerily quite during infection surges. I'm in northern Italy and it was like the world was standing still when the Covid surge was raging in early 2020.

samplebitch t1_j13z2aa wrote on December 21, 2022 at 2:33 PM

Man... I'm from the US and the time you're talking about is when it really hit home that we were all truly fucked. I remember seeing videos out of China around this time of year in 2019, wondering what the hell was going on over there. Then saw articles that it had spread to other SE Asian countries.. a few weeks later Italy got hit hard and I remember seeing videos people were posting of the obituary section of the newspaper which was pages long. That's when I realized there's no way in hell this thing wasn't going to hit every corner of the globe. And you're right... there was a period in time when the entire world just shut down completely. At the time I was working on a program for my TV (raspberry pi) that would rotate through different webcams around the world. It was bizarre to see Times Square, the plaza in front of the Vatican, beaches in Thailand, and even Mecca completely empty.

Such strange times.. and unfortunately it doesn't feel like we're past it, either.

tomorrow509 t1_j14llq5 wrote on December 21, 2022 at 5:04 PM

Yep, now we're about 3 years in and it is still a big problem globally. Good thing we have vaccines to mitigate the impact on individuals. The wife and I were able to avoid it up until about a month ago and then we both tested positive. For me, I've had worse flues. I've been vaccinated twice but the last was about 9 months ago.