It's Crazy.

It's been quite a while since I wrote anything about the Covid situation - partly because, during the summer, numbers were low-ish enough to ignore things, and partly because there was other stuff to write about, but mostly because I'm tired of it. Like probably everybody else is as well.

Vaccination rate in Germany is still pretty low, as opposed to new infections and incidence numbers - they are sky-high, and still skyrocketing, thanks to the politicians doing, well, exactly nothing for way, way too long. Now we have 7 day incidences of over 1000 in some areas, overfull hospitals that cannot accommodate any more patients, overfull ICUs which is a danger to anyone suffering a stroke, heart attack, or having been involved in a life-threatening accident.

And why all that? Because, obviously, not a single one of the effing people supposed to steer this country has learned just a penny's worth from the pandemic occurrences in the past two years. I'd love to say now that if anybody would act as stupidly and irresponsibly in a company, they'd be fired at a moments' notice, but unfortunately that is not true either.

The thing that I find most disquieting about all this, though - it's actually that I am so tired of the stupidity of the politicians, and so tired of all the pandemic shithappenings, and so tired of all the misinformation, that the most I can do is go "meh" and move on. Like so many others, I've become so jaded - and it frightens me. We've been living with high incidence numbers, high death numbers, high numbers of people in ICUs for so long, with the politicians always saying "ah, it's not so bad, everything is under control, everything is fine, let's loosen restrictions some more" that slowly but surely they have been losing their importance, and they just seem so normal now that it's hard to remember how scared everyone was back in the first wave, and how outraged by the passivity of the politicians in the second and third wave. And now we've come to expect them, actually, to do nothing until things are far worse than before, and then act half-heartedly and go say "but look it's even worse somewhere else" and "oh who could have known" and "somebody else is to  blame".

In July, scientists predicted an incidence number of 350 for mid-November if vaccination rate would stay at 65%. Guess what rate we had? Guess when we hit the incidence of 350? And now politicians say "well, who could have guessed that!" I just feel so taken down the garden path. I also get the impression that no matter what most of the Germans would like to see done, or changed, in the politics of the country, the guys at the rudder just blatantly ignore it. Most of us would like a general speed limit on the Autobahn... right during the pre-talks for the new coalition after the elections, the group declared that there would be no general speed limit. WHAT?

All this makes me so mad, and so tired and hopeless at the same time, that I don't know what to do anymore. So I've been ignoring things for a while, which does not make it better either - and now I'm writing about it here, because, well, not talking about it is also not an option.

So. I'm jaded now, so jaded that it frightens me, while it feels at the same time that being frightened about my own jadedness is also getting less and less each day. That probably is a very useful psychological mechanism to help survive inevitably dire situations without going insane... but unfortunately, this situation would not have been inevitable if some people would just have listened to scientists and actually did what people who know their shit recommend. I also wonder if politicians are at all able to learn from the past, or not, and if the latter, why. Why can they not do sensible things, and make sensible decisions, instead of going "oh look there's a wall straight ahead, let's hit the accelerator!"?

Sigh.

Maybe it's a little better in your bit of the world - how are you feeling?