Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

May 14 2021

Echoes of 2003

I’ve been re-reading old entries in this account, scathing missives I wrote during the whole SARS thing, and I’d been thinking, did we really learn from it? Up until now I’d thought we had; Taiwan has managed covid surprisingly well up to this point. We all had something to be proud of.

And then it turned out that most people were unwilling to get vaccinated, using up only a portion of the still-woefully inadequate amount of vaccine the government had managed to appropriate, all AZ. Where did all of those quarantine-violators from the last time go, I began to wonder. Occasionally someone would show up on the news being heavily fined, and cellphone tracking tech is massively better these days. Perhaps we did learn.

And then of course, people just sort of stopped thinking it was a thing, and all it took was a few airline pilots to infect others not only with covid but with a sudden desire to visit every. single. part. of. Taiwan. on mass scourge tours. And boom: community spread. Suddenly vaccines are more popular, but those things take time.

We were so close to getting through this relatively unscathed! We still are, but it’s going to be a close thing. My fear is that, once we reach that stage, all of the idiot behaviors are going to return. Or perhaps they never went away.

But I guess we’ll see. Chenbl just called and predicted that things are going to get scary, and he is now reexamining his previous hesitancy on getting vaccinated, but I won’t repeat his reasoning here. And yesterday most of the nation experienced long blackouts due to an accident at a power plant down south, which isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring. We are still plagued with a culture where, if someone steps down from their office temporarily and people get bag out of it, then whatever happened just magically never happened, all good, problem solved.

So things are beginning to feel a bit too 2003-ish around here. Now all I need to do is make another episode of Lady X followed by riding Gendouyun down to the Shannon and we’ll be there.

posted by Poagao at 11:54 am  

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