More deathnews from Nepal, I've heard of fiveplus COVID-related deaths of people I knew in Nepal, twice that if I include news from friends. No close family or friend until now thankfully, lets keep our fingers crossed. What can we do, the government gave up completely two months ago right when the numbers actually started picking up, and now are actively pretending like it was all a big ole' misunderstanding there's no pandemic ravaging the country etcetera. I'm told the ICU's are full, the hospital beds are all taken for. They've stopped counting the deaths, the number of infections don't count anymore because everybody's given up. Call it the KP-virus, or the commie-virus if you must, because that's what it become in Nepal. It's the carelessness, corruption, and collapse of institutional trust that's gotten us here. Any hope I had remaining has gone.
Not that the US is much better in terms of cases, but deaths have gone steady and news of near and dear ones' infections have slowed down. Everybody is being extra cautious, the tests are helping quite a bit so you hear about covid scares here and there but they amount to nothing mostly. The surges have been in places that hadn't seen the rise until this point, the disease denying denizens are the ones suffering now. The coastal states and big cities have taken it seriously, apparently the 500-person party in the Upper West Side of Manhattan was broken up by the cops, and the organizers and participants charged with penalties. Infection rates in colleges and universities are minuscle thanks to tight testing and control of who the young folks are hanging out with, the numbers are remarkably better than any place in the world.
We're already in the middle of the fall surge like they predicted, now there's going to be a Thanksgiving surge obviously, which is going to go all the way to Christmas it appears. I was hoping things would be more manageable by then, it'd be nice to see folks in Philly or DC but the numbers being as they are right now with a good chance of going up, not going to leave Boston. No thank you, this year's christmas and new year's will be low-key if that means I don't suffer and potentially die, or be responsible for somebody else's illness.
The good news is, we're in the last stretch of the disease they're saying. The vaccines are coming out, great rates of success, they're handing out to the first-responders and at-risk folks soon. Six hundred thousand of them for MA by the end of December, the news says, not enough for the population of twenty-two million but enough for right now. Hopefully by March or April things will start getting more normal, whatever the new normal is going to be.
I'm worried about cities, white-flight and wealth-flight from cities, but they've always been hubs for arts, culture and innovation, not sure how things will turn around, seeing there's nothing else hurting them. The prices for dwellings and apartments have gone down, but significantly only for the very very expensive ones. Seems like it's only the richie-riches who were holding seven or eight places in the cities as 'investment properties' who are having second thoughts. Really hope that's the case. Don't want the MBTA to go bankrupt.
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