Went to Costco this afternoon.
Probably 95% of customers and 80% of employees had masks on.
Definitely weird seeing unmasked people in a store.
Whenever I go back to the states I fill up a giant box of TJ items to bring back with me overseas. If they had a TJās nearby in Japan I might never go back home.
Isnāt much of the trader Joeās stuff repackaged and renamed grocery store items? I feel like thatās definitely the case for the dry, boxed, Thai noodle dishes.
I hate pizza being called flatbread.
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I thought they called it that because it really is flatbread with pizza toppings piled on top?
Isnāt that what pizza is?
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The US recorded only 16,600 new cases today. That is the lowest one day total since March 25 2020.
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Yeah, that and I think they also attract the crowd that sees the āsea salt organic home grown grass fed all naturalā potatoe chips as something thats much better than a bag of lays for almost the same price!
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I remember having an argument earlier in the year that it was important to do record-keeping and come up with a way to ID people who have been vaxxed when other people argued that it was more important to get shots in arms as fast as possible, even if it meant lax paperwork, because I foresaw that we were going to be in the current situation where weāre letting people not wear masks using the honor system because we didnāt think ahead about coming up with a system that would be conducive to vaccine passports.
There was never going to be the will for widespread mandatory passport use.
In January 2021, University of Wisconsin researchers studied 145 student athletes who had Covid-19 and found myocarditis in only 1.4% of them, none of whom required hospitalization. In March, a group of sports cardiologists reported on nearly 800 professional athletes who had tested positive for Covid-19. Less than 1% of these athletes had abnormal findings on cardiac magnetic resonance scans or stress echocardiography. None of these athletes had cardiovascular trouble when they returned to play.
So yeah, that attention grabbling headline - ā78% of patients have permanent heart damageā, where the sample size was some never-defined ā100 people from the hospital registryā - turns out to be nonsense.
Taiwan just announced 335 new cases just now. Lockdown feels inevitable. For the first time since the virus started Iām thinking it might be safer to go back to the US (Iām out of work until at least mid-June here as it is). Right now I canāt get vaccinated here.
335 cases for Taiwan should be a cake walk. Theyāll stamp that shit out in no time.
Safety issue is probably a wash. You would still have to get over here and live for a little while before the vaccine actually gave you immunity. I think itās probably a coinflip as to which is safer, but I lean Taiwan. If you can hole up for a month, theyāll probably be back to ~zero cases by then.
I knew a bunch of Americans in Prague who left to get their vaccine in America rather than wait months to get it here.
That makes more sense though. Based on your descriptions, the whole Czech Republic was in deep shit wrt COVID. We know Taiwan will handle it much better. So flying from Prague to get vaxxed but not Taipei could be the correct set of decisions.
There are other personal considerations in that hopefully Iāll be moving back to China in August. That, of course, hinges on whether Iāll be able to get a visa which might require going to Hong Kong (I am eligible to enter HK because Taiwan is part of China ldo but would still need to quarantine).
So basically just going back to the US at this point and getting vaccinated ASAP might be the most convenient option.
If money wasnāt an issue Iād have left last week when my work chances were cancelled (attending baseball and basketball games).
I thought a Chinese approved vaccine was currently required for entry to China? I donāt think Pfizer, Moderna or J&J are on that list
The China vaccine gets you in easier.
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Czech government opened vaccination registration to people between 40 and 44 at midnight Monday.
50 minutes later, the website crashed
lol Czech government. No wonder why Czechs trust their government less than any other country in the EU*.
*Technically tied with Slovenia but whatever
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