How are you all dealing with coronavirus and the restrictions... #2

I’m crazy about bonsai trees but I heard they require lots of care and noone of my thumbs is green, neither a little. 😂

Oh, @rechu
You see. I had news about the empty syringes.
Let’s see the research outcome.

The big news here now is the Indian variant, there are a few patches in the UK where it's growing and becoming the dominant strain, apparently it's 50% more infectious than the UK variant. Our area has some infections but not as many as others - so far we're still low numbers but the danger is if it grows exponentially. We've all seen how quickly that can happen.

I have heard they are bringing up 2nd doses from 12 to 8 weeks for over 50s/vulnerable people. There was some talk of the young being given vaccines immediately in some areas (we're still on 38/39 year olds) but I don't know if that will actually happen.

Personally I feel the young have really suffered with this, they have lost over a year in their development, and now back of the queue for vaccines - yet they can and do get sick with this especially as more likely to be in frontline service jobs.

So I'm back to worrying - and I disabled facebook again - so many horrible comments calling those of us who want caution 'bed wetters'. Some peole are just nasty.

And the UK strain was how much more infectious than the "regular" one? *sigh* that's just what we need. Luckily so far in Germany there's been a few cases but no big clusters.

Meanwhile back home the news is about travel agencies getting extremely busy because the travel advice for several countries has changed/is changing Let's spread some more different strains!

I'm feeling more and more stupid for being cautious. Not taking my chance now when we have some freedom coming back, in case it gets taken away again in a couple of months.

Poor Peru. If COVID has been a mess here, it's been much worse there. In addition to the syringe problem that is being investigated there was another scandal with well-placed politicians getting vaccines before the rest. They are still working on getting the elderly vaccinated there, unlike here. I read somewhere that nearly everyone in the country knows someone who has died from COVID. The official numbers from there don't show the true story at all.


Before all this started, we used to love to fly up to Lima for a week to eat good food and spend time along the coast. I don't know when we will be able to do that again.


Hopefully keeping the borders closed is helping us to keep out the Indian variant. The border closure has been extended to the end of the month. At least there are fewer connections between here and there, normally, unlike Brazil, which has been the most problematic variant here.

@AzulOscuro I see you are using your newly learned vocabulary.

Having a tough day don't know if it's the PMS or the weekend isolation or getting turned down for the job and getting slightly desperate for something better. Just feeling sad since last night. Watching the band that has gotten me through the last couple of weeks relatively cheerful now makes me miss live music. Hmpf.

Yes, I read the entire article and it seems there are people in the government there who took advantages of their charges and got the vaccine when they didn’t still correspond.
I keep on my thinking that coronavirus is not our main problem. There’s something up there in our heads that doesn’t work as it should.

Oh, @rechu, I made a mistake but I can’t correct it now. I’d wish I could edit posts for a longer period of time because there are so many mistakes I made.

But, sometimes I play with the language on purpose. 😀

We have family (by marriage) in Lima. It's a horrible situation. I didn't realise exactly how bad until I read that article. They can't come back to the UK because of red list status.

Yes I hope your closed borders will help keep this variant out, the UK was way to late to make India red list. We have trade deals with the country - say no more.

@AzulOscuro - I definitely think this pandemic has brought out the worst in people. We have a lot of Peruvians living here and I know several who are very concerned about family living there who haven't had the chance to get vaccinated.

@Discombobulated - Yeah, here the border closure was way to late to help with the Brazilian variant, but at least it should have an impact on the latest one. I imagine our President didn't want to piss off Bolsonaro, so they waited until it would look like it wasn't directed just at Brazil.

We are supposed to vote this weekend. There are elections for municipal offices and the people that are going to write the new constitution. From the ads I have seen, no one running has a clue what should be included in a constitution, so I was not inspired to vote initially. When you add in almost 7,000 new cases the last few days and over 300 active cases in my municipality, I have less interest in risking it. Here there is a map you can view to see where the active cases are concentrated. It superimposes squares over the map. White squares are zero cases, yellow and orange refer to moderate numbers of cases and red is the worst. You can also see exactly how many cases there are in each square.Where we are, it's white, zero cases. However, where we have to vote, which is several km away, the map is all red with double digit active cases in every square around there. The Health Minister said that by the election we should be seeing around 3,000 new cases a day. Boy, was he wrong, again! I feel another spike of cases coming on in a week or so.


Interesting, I looked at the area where we used to live on the map and there were quite a few active cases. 4 in the immediate square and areas to the north and west had 11 and 16. Yet, we are locked down and they aren't.

Well, I’m not vaccinated, either.

And to be honest, it’s ok. We have to pay our stupidity in dealing with this virus from the get go.

See New Zealand case. How they dealt with the matter to avoid their territory could be effected.
F@cling borders close.

So easy! If you don’t have the measures or the will to trail people who are already contagious. F@cking close the borders.

Officially there is no more priority for vaccinations by GPs from tomorrow, meaning anyone who wants it can make an appointment.

Practically though, there still isn't nearly enough for everyone so I assume my doctor will keep giving more vulnerable people priority. And I don't want to be one of those people driving the nurse on the phone insane - I bet plenty of people will be calling trying to make an appointment :/

@BreakForTheLight - yeah, in that situation, I'd probably wait a bit. You just know the first days after an announcement are going to be chaotic with a lot of people calling. I hope you can get in for an appointment relatively soon, though. Fingers crossed!

@AzulOscuro - I definitely think that here we missed a huge opportunity to do what New Zealand did. We didn't see the first case until March, when it was already causing trouble in other areas such as Europe and North America. Still, they let people in without a mandatory quarantine, knowing the virus was spreading around. All they had to do was fill in a form about their travels. The first case here was a doctor who was in Asia and Spain on vacation. He waltzed back here, went back to work at a health center in town and gave the virus to something like 8 or 9 co-workers and family members.

It took them over two weeks more for them to restrict entry to residents and citizens only. Arrivals were required to quarantine at that point, but it was pretty much an honor system. They could come to your house and check, but there is no way they could check everyone. I remember a case in those early days where another doctor that was supposed to be quarantining at home after returning from abroad was discovered in a supermarket. I'm not sure how it was determined that she wasn't supposed to be out. They shut down the whole store to sanitize it!

Yes the borders were not shut in the UK until far too late either. Yet we could see what was happening in mainland Europe, why we didn't act is beyond me. I read much of the 1st wave came via the ski resorts (they sampled cases to know this).

Our borders are open for non essential travel again from today, this time we have requirements of a negative full test (they are expensive!) and vaccine certificate proof and proof of quarantine arrangements. Already there are counterfeiters and it's going to take border staff so much longer to examine these documents. I pity them.

I don't even know if we're going to do official vaccine proof in the UK, I downloaded the NHS (public health) app and sure enough it's in my records, it would be easy enough to spoof.

My vaccines are already in the government system. Here we have a password that works for most government accounts. You sign into the "Yo Me Vacuno" site with that and it pulls up the vaccines, you had - brand, location where it was given and date. You can download a certificate with a QR code. I do wonder, though, if there is some sort of requirement for vaccination proof from other countries, how they are going to figure out what is real and what is falsified.

I bet they won't be sending your digital vaccination proof by post though *coughGermanycough*

Ugh, lockdown renewed again. We are heading towards nine weeks of this crap. FML. In theory the Health Minister, Public Health Undersecretary and that bimbo, what's she? Undersecretary for Crime Prevention say they know that these long quarantines don't work because they are hard to enforce and people get quarantine fatigue. But they STILL insist on imposing them anyways.

Speaking of which, the Undersecretary for Crime Prevention, she has been the victim of two attempts to steal her car. She was only saved because she has an armed escort car following her.


The elections had a bunch of covidy-events. I think it was the right decision not to go. I'm not sure how it was known, but there were many reports of people that were supposed to be quarantining due to positive tests or close contacts who showed up to work the polls or vote anyways. Various voting places had to close down temporarily due to this. At one polling location, a guy showed up with covid-like symptoms, apparently coughing all over. They had to send the poll workers home to quarantine, disinfect the area and obligate some other voters to fill in to work the voting station.

@rechu I was reading about the results of this election, it was reported as a positive outcome, how are you feeling about it?

2nd day of released restrictions and so far things feel calm. Although things are much looser now people are being advised to use common sense from a government who have shown very little common sense themselves IMO.

I don't plan on going indoors in cafes etc just yet - our son is not vaccinated so don't want to chance bringing anything home to him.

One thing I am planning on doing is going inside my parents house (not been indoors since last Sept although we did go in their beautiful garden last month). Just for a cup of tea and maybe some cake. They've had both their vaccinations and I'm almost a month after my first so I think it's as safe as it'll ever be.

@Discombobulated - As far as the mayoral, regional governor and city council elections, it is being portrayed as a progressive vs. conservative divide. I see two different things going on, however. There definitely was a rejection of the conservatives, some mayoral incumbents that are closely aligned with the President’s center-right coalition lost and I am sure that is related to his very low approval ratings and handling of the pandemic. At the same time it did feel like a wider rejection of traditional political parties with many younger independents without much political experience winning.

There were a lot of strange candidates that wanted to rewrite the constitution. In some cases, you would just scratch your head and say why does this person think they are in any way qualified to write a constitution? In the end, there were a few outlier weirdos chosen, but there were a lot of lawyers (the greatest %), along with educators, doctors, sociologists, journalists, etc. I will have to find the breakdown, I know I saw it somewhere. It’s going to be a while before we see what the new constitution will look like. Then there will be a vote to approve it. Basically, we won’t know for a while what it’s going to look like. Even so, our currency has fallen as has the stock market here, so I guess investors and the world at large is concerned about what might happen.

Just my 2 cents 😊 . . .

I know everyone is in the same boat, but ocassionally I get the feeling that I'm the only one whose life is completely on hold. I guess part of it is also living alone.

And vaccinations going so slow here, still not knowing when I will get mine. Scared that I will miss out on summer again. That I'll have to spend my birthday stuck here in the city, won't get to go home when I have 2 weeks off. I know it's not the end of the world but.....

I'm exhausted. Still haven't had a good night's sleep in months and not had any time off work besides weekends and bank holidays. I need a break but I can't deal with sitting at home with nothing to do.

Living alone probably does make it worse. I at least have my husband around, but we are not having any picnic here either. I just realized that we recently passed May 16th. May 16th was when lockdown started in my area last year, "just for a short time to flatten the curve of hospital admissions." It lasted 132 days or 4.3 months. Now we are going to hit two months of the second lockdown tomorrow. The Health Ministry has even said things like they know that longer lockdowns lose their efficacy and had indicated that they wouldn't use lockdowns for more than four weeks. They lie. When asked about this in press conferences, they just evade. All they talk about is the successful vaccination campaign, but where are the results? I read a good comment on a news article saying that instead of just repeating numbers, they Health Ministry needs to give us some real answers about why their promised improvements from the vaccinations have yet to be seen, of the serious cases, how many people were fully vaccinated, what vaccine did they receive, etc. The problem is there is no discussion. Reporters sometimes ask in press conferences but are never given straight answers.

Something I have noticed is that the president and Health Minister have stopped with the positive pep talk about herd immunity, light at the end of the tunnel or that we would see improvements in deaths/hospitalizations in late March, early April, mid-April, late April, mid-May etc. Do they no longer believe it or do they realize that no one else believes them? Or maybe it is both. I wonder.

I am sleeping poorly as well. It's part the anxiety from my situation, but also we bought a mattress that didn't turn out to be very good. Then I have a little dog named Helmut that insists on using my shoulder as a pillow. I ordered a mattress topper that is supposed to help with the mattress situation. It's cheaper than replacing the mattress and I don't have to figure out how to dispose of the old one in the middle of lockdown. It arrives tomorrow. I may try a herbal sleep aid again too.

Thanks @rechu it's interesting to read your opinion on the elections - I'm so glad to 'know' you on here!

Well there's a bit of a development here in that our area has been named as one of 5 areas of concern because of the Indian variant. Of all things they have been testing sewage water which is apparently an accurate method of tracing outbreaks. Cases are still low but they've nearly doubled in a week. It really does seem this Indian variant is more contagious and of course we are now socialising more.

One of the outcomes of this is I may get my 2nd vaccine a bit earlier than expected as they want more people fully dosed as quick as possible.

Funnily enough I just read a report saying the 3 month spacing of doses results in a higher level of antibodies rather than the 3 week spacing. But they're now shortening it to 8 weeks because of the new variant.

I really enjoyed my afternoon indoors at my parents house and my niece was there too - they've all been fully vaccinated and my niece had even taken a lateral flow test the night before! So we went maskless which felt good! Tbh I think I'm going to keep it pretty small scale, close family only indoors for quite a while until things are clearer!

Apparently the Indian variant is now also spreading in Germany good news: the third wave seems to be broken. Bad news: Indian variant. It feels like it never ends :/

I read that the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines are also effective against the Indian variant. But what about AZ? Isn't that the most used in the UK?

Sounds like a lovely afternoon!

There's some plans for going back to the office on rotation from July on. But I don't think my company is going to offer vaccinations to its employees (larger companies in Germany will). So I doubt everyone will be vaccinated by then or even have had their first shot.

I think my former company was planning on offering vaccinations to its employees *sigh*

I read that the WHO said all vaccines have an effect against the Indian variant which is good news - although I would imagine it will vary from vaccine to vaccine.

Of the people hospitalised with the Indian variant in the last few weeks, many were either unvaccinated (through choice) or had only 1 dose. Apparently some areas have had many people who did not realise how important it was to return for their 2nd but also of course we have this big 3 month spacing between doses.

Ah that sucks your former employer is offering doses to employees. Hoping you can get yours soon if they are taking priority off. It seems Germany are vaccinating in a very different way to UK. We are still strictly age based, and over 35s only so far. I feel so sorry for the young who are waiting so long.

Do you have to have vaccination before you return to your office?