I have family all over Europe, Dad was one of 11 kids. Now have 40+ cousins my age (ish) who have kids in their 20-30’s, we have discussions weekly on all subjects cousins and their kids. Some of whom moved Canada. Currently I have numerous family members in Netherlands and Germany. Along with an uncle who spends a tremendous amount of time in Russia. I have some family in Denmark and well you get the idea.
Mom was one of five girls. One stayed in Europe the rest moved to Australia, similar situation to my dads side of the family.
My father and her family have had and currently have members in the military as do some of my extended family.
I spent five years working for Italian based company whose partner in the US was from Israel, moved here in the 90’s in his mid 30’s. Currently represent two mfrs based in Turkey, one from Cuba (edit: owner came from Cuba) and one from Columbia to go with the American mfrs.
It is why I said what I said about your original post.
Stating which country you are in doesn’t give someone a radar to where you are, who you are, or any other personal information that probably could be found by you posting here if someone really wanted to.
To assume that you are bringing some pearls of wisdom to someone or that someone on the board is in an echo chamber and you can bring them a new perspective is revealing in itself. While it may be true for some, it isn’t for all. Doesn’t make my perspective the right one either just a perspective based on my experiences over my 30 year career and family throughout the world.
Your assumption that there is a rush for judgement or need for an echo chamber by those on the board who have a different perspective than you is a judgement in and of itself.
i’m not sure they were rush to judgements the way worded. i know that the boards are fractured. i know that people are constantly searching for evidence to prove they are either right or wrong. i thought that taking out the need for all of this extra extraneous information which has often been manipulated and helps cloud topics would be a relief for some people. to just trust for a change. just share your experience and quit trying to be either right or wrong.
perhaps, the fact that you are fighting it is revealing in itself. just to hold a mirror.
is it that difficult to just let go and express why you think the states are in a different situation right now? you apparently have many contacts and experience in other parts of the world from which to draw from. none of which are where i’m currently at btw so maybe you might learn something new or not. i actually don’t understand the resistance.
people will spend hours in here week after week, on threads miles long that are just regurgitations of the sos.
It’s the way of America. If you disagree with me than you must be a bigot or a racist or a liar. Last election y’all got to choose between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. This election someone thought it’d be a good idea to replace Hilary with Joe Biden. Worst part is your society is so unintelligent that y’all will just blindly follow your party no matter what. It’s like watching children argue over a toy.
Pretty broad stokes you’re painting with there. I mean you do have to ride by stand by to get on the short bus in this country, but there are also many brilliant Americans.
I’d say that more so than unintelligent we’re gullible to trolling; shock jocks, cable news networks, etc. pissed off people generate revenue and I think Americans are passionate people that are especially prone to visceral reactions. Then as a result we act or think with our hearts (or asses) rather than our heads. Some of us do at least (and I admittedly do belong to that group from time to time.)
ok, for anybody that cares here’s the details of how things went down here.
right from the beginning of the year, people and politicians here were all scrambling to put together the puzzle pieces of the covid mystery just like everywhere else on the planet. we are much closer to the original outbreaks then the USA though, so people imho were more alarmed here and took it more seriously.
in march (and before the usa did), the federal govt here stepped in to enact a country-wide quarantine. the did not delegate this responsibility to the local equivalent of “states”. it was federal all the way and would be for the next two months (read on). the health aspects of this thing still dictate down from the federal level.
during the pandemic, info was disseminated to the public by a series of afternoon press conferences that were about a half hour long. they never went past 1 hr from what i understand. i never watched a single one of them. the first week they were every day, then went to weekly and then stopped at some point according to my local compatriots.
during these press conferences, the president apparently played little if any role at all, deferring to the health minister who then primarily deferred to the local equivalent of dr fauci. i never heard the guy speak and i don’t even know what he looks like but a compatriot described him as a very dry guy i know his name but it doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
we have only one news pgm in the country which comes on about the time you’re getting home from work and lasts only a half hour. that’s it! if you miss it you can replay it on your tv box without recording it (it’s just there). most people here get their news from that nightly news pgm (plus the usual dicking around on phones). it covered the press conferences so that’s what we relied on for the core initial info and for later infrequent updates.
my gal has a phd (perhaps doctorate???) in biochem and works in the field so i deferred to her for a lot of the really technical info. it freed up time for me to do more interesting things.
when the quarantine went out, everybody complied. there was no fuss or questioning about what should be done. the streets went dead just like that. the public transport ran as usual but was virtually empty for two months. they kept it running so that people could get to hospitals if they needed to but other than that people stayed put. in the city i live in nobody really uses cars. why would you?
quarantine exceptions were to go food shopping since all restaurants were closed. they recommended only one person from each household go. people queued in grocery lines but were orderly and absolutely zero problems. we never waited long at all. queueing was b/c they wanted to limit the amount of people in the stores at any given time. not rocket science. sanitizer provided on entry for you if you wanted; some had disposable plastic gloves as well. nobody ever had to wear masks in the stores. it was up to you if you wanted to and most didn’t. by limiting the number of people in teh stores, the public health officials deemed that social distancing was effective enough.
ironically i thought there would be a lot more people queued up but there never was. it truly felt like a ghost town out there and i thought to myself “what is everybody eating if nobody is shopping”. we limited it to once a week.
we mostly stayed in during the entire quarantine. we worked (we were fortunate to be able to). cooked. read. i played my guitar and used the time to learn shit. caught up on movies, etc. i personally have a ton of shit to do so the quarantine didn’t really bother me at all. being in the same place working next to somebody all day long on conference calls did though
i went out for my runs at night. parcs were closed b/c public health officials didn’t want people congregating. but there’s some “open space” near by so that was never an issue. we occasionally went for walks 1 or 2 a week, it was never a problem. again no congregating and maintaining social distancing was enough in the mind’s of authorities. people respected the laws. nobody abusing it. funny to walk past people and have everybody moving out of each other’s way. that said, most people overwhelmingly stayed in. it was actually interesting to wander though the city with no traffic, no noise, no people. it was virtually empty. people really respected the quarantine. a rare opportunity the covid offered vs took.
the other big thing was that pollution levels dropped dramatically in the city / country where i live during this time.
somewhere into this, people opened their windows in unison during the afternoon to applaud all the health workers that were on the “front lines”. we joined in. kind of cool to see all your neighbors on all the floors of the apartments around you clapping for what seemed like an eternity. everybody was like "they told us when to start but not when to stop so everybody is just looking at each other like uh… " . people showed their appreciation the only way they could in a tangible way during a lockdown. who can’t get down with that!
roughly about a little under two months into lockdown in may, the federal authorities finally and strangely enough opened up 1) hairdressers and 2) garden centers lol. everything else remained the same. i guess people really needed haircuts. lots of beards around here on video conferences of fellow employees you never saw with beards before . the garden center thing was a bit of a mystery to me but people like to garden here in the city and because people were cooped up for a long time and gardening is a very “socially distant” type of activity, they probably thought it was good for mental health. oops, i forgot. restaurants were allowed to resume takeouts if they wanted to at this time as well but they had to have the right restrictions for customer queuing, etc. we ordered some takeout here during that part of the quarantine.
at this same time in may, the govt put it back to the local “states” to deal with local economic policies and issues related to businesses impacted by the covid. up until that point one of my compatriot’s here tells me it was mostly federal. i have no reason to doubt my compatriot.
beginning of june (2.5 months in), all quarantine restrictions were lifted by the feds. the authorities had been closely monitoring outbreak / death levels and when the bell-curve trends were all trending sufficiently in line with expectations, they opened up. i think the best way to characterize this is they didn’t open up prematurely. the first couple of days weren’t that noticeable but immediately after that, it was like nothing ever happened and people came out in droves. i personally was more cautious and actually thought people would be too. but just as easily as they went into lockdown without a fuss, they seemed to come back out of it without a fuss. my experience here was literally like turning on a light switch. that’s how simple it was.
during june, social distancing was enforced but people here seemed quite relaxed about it. all businesses and shops reopened. restaurants did too but had to shift / remove tables to respect the distancing.
in terms of work, i continued to work from home. my gal’s place of employment set it up so that teams are rotating every two weeks from home and onsite to maintain the social distancing guidelines at the office and might be doing so until the end of the year. it’s all fluid for her and doesn’t make a difference to her one way or the other. as i got to listen to all of their teleconferences, when the covid started, people she works with were complaining about working from home. BUT by the end of it they were all loving working from home all or at part of the week. this will have wide-ranging effects on how people work here as well as every where else around the world going forward.
during june i thought more people would be following the recommendations for wearing masks on public transport but there were few people doing it. the one exception was on the commuter trains during rush hour which my gal said compliance was close to 100%. outside of when going to get your haircut, nobody was forced to wear a mask at this time but could choose to do so if they wanted. i guess public health officials felt the social distancing was more important / effective enough.
we went to some dinners and a couple of birthday parties at this time enough to have confidence in the measures in place as well as the numbers (no health scares) reported by the authorities. so we thought we should go on vacation before and if another wave broke out.
at the end of june we went away for a week. public transport mask wearing was pretty good but not 100% perfect. oddly enough some older people were not wearing masks! so there are people here who thought that we either kicked the covid and it wasn’t a problem anymore or didn’t care. restaurants and breakfasts had a variety of rules. pretty relaxed just social distancing. one place the waitresses were wearing face shields. awesome vacation! great food, wine, outdoors! explored a region vs staying in one place the whole time. orderly. people cool. no fuss. you wouldn’t have even known there was a covid. that’s how baked-in the measures are into the society at this point.
while on vacation, the federal (vs state) health officials that monitor the numbers saw a slight uptick in “numbers”. a message comes out that everybody has to comply with masks 100% on pub transport starting in July. why they didn’t just tell people to start immediately i don’t know. maybe it was to give people time to get masks?
we come home. the comply date hits. i go to get my haircut. 100% participation on all public transport. no fuss. no complaining. just like we turned the switch before we do it again. simple. easy. no hassle.
we’re still currently in 100% mask compliance on all public transport. contact tracing is voluntary via phone app. contract tracing is estimated at only 10% compliance currently which means it’s not super useful apparently but it can save lives in certain cases. i don’t do it. my gal does. feds monitoring the internal and border country numbers to keep things in check. as i write this, people happily complying. things still flowing like a river here. life really doesn’t feel any different to me than pre-covid tbh.
a couple of things to add.
my girl tells me that everybody here gets basically 2 years unemployment no questions asked (at 80-100% of your salary!). i asked if she thought it made a difference? her reply was “well if you think the govt isn’t going to hang you out to dry (or something similar to that effect) then you are more likely to follow the rules, believe in the govt”. i think that makes sense plus we agreed you’re not likely to panic knowing that your rent, bills, health care is covered for quite a long time in the event you get sacked.
that said, most people here apparently didn’t get permanently layed off. i asked another compatriot what the unemployment rate was? they said before covid the unemployment rate was 2.9 and is now 3.6 (i forgot the exact number but it’s 2 something and now 3 something)!!!. i followed up with “are you fking kidding me”? i got a reply of “no”. i don’t know if this is accurate but it sure sounded like it was so take it for what it’s worth. i actually don’t care one way or the other, i’m just passing it on. whether or not future business-related slowdowns lead to layoffs nobody knows yet, but people have the described 2 yr unemployment described above. it allows people to sleep easy at night and not fight the system.
my gal the biochemist tells me that the testing early on was good here and only got better over time and was important to the success. in addition, we apparently handled the respirator situation so that there weren’t any shortages. these details actually bore me so i don’t know if they’re true or not. i nod ok and get on with what i’m doing
she also told me that our country surprisingly appeared as #1 in one of the published best covid response lists of worldwide countries. based on my experience here i find that hard to believe. it seemed fluid and effective but not so perfectly stringent. i searched online quickly but i never could corroborate that. whatever.
that’s it. it’s a really boring story. you are probably all disappointed. much of it is probably not that different than what you experienced back home?!
the only difference is in the outcome. perhaps the devil is in the boring details.
basically, from where i’m sitting, there were just some minor but key differences. it has nothing to do with numbers and statistics. at least for me and my compatriots it doesn’t.
the federal branch of the govt took control and it deferred to it’s health ministery vs letting the states conquer and divide the response at worst / struggle at best. press conferences were short, sweet and to the point with 0 politicizing b/c the govt trusted their experts. people here obviously have high trust in their govt and they trust the little news that’s available that they actually watch. there’s not hours of multiple commentary and time spent online trying to prove them wrong for reason x, y, z. none of my compatriots personally spent time dissecting or questioning govt recommendations. some were interested in tracking global covid numbers but i think that was mostly for fun in the early stages of the epidemic.
as i said, it really felt like flicking a light switch at every stage of the quarantine or activation of mask ordinances whether you were going from switching on to off and vice versa. people didn’t and aren’t resisting here.
the “states” in this country run the gamut from L, C, R-populist which means you have regional and “congressional” differences. based on how things went, my impression is that overall public confidence appears to be high in a whole range of institutions. in my own experience here, i would describe people as more cooperative and practical on the whole than other places i’ve lived and been. that includes life and work. in general the group has an equal value to the individual.
as i said above, i did it for a number of reasons. one was to keep from potential hijacking of the thread in directions that weren’t relevant since everybody is so focused on numbers and statistics at the moment. i figured people would be able to easily figure it out from the questions already answered and info supplied in the thread but i guess not.
Except people in Denmark are NOT wearing masks… Guess they’re science deniers too… Even though they’re the model we’re told we should be looking at whenever someone brings up Sweden.
Just passing on a FL testing anecdote. Some friends were down in Fort Myers on vacation and opted for a test at a drive in location. They were in line for hours, filled out paperwork, then got tired of waiting and left without providing a sample. A week or so later they got their “results” and all tested positive.
Must be some major scammers working in FL, and I would be surprised if they report their “results” to anyone.
i know his name but it doesn’t contribute to the discussion.
