Pandemic diary: July

Everyone is acting like the pandemic is over, and I'm not one bit okay with it.

I mean yes, case counts in Finland are way down, so almost all of the official restrictions have been lifted. Restaurants and bars and so on are operating at lower capacity, but to be honest, I'm seeing people flocking to night clubs and karaoke bars and whatnot on the social mediums, and it looks like a recipe for complete disaster. One person in that karaoke bar has the virus, and in about a week or so you've got a lot of contact tracing to do. I just think we're being reckless with this. We've had such a strange trajectory with this: first the official powers told us we'll be fine and the virus won't affect us; then we shut down everything, including an entire province; and now it's like we're pretending the whole thing never happened.

This affects me personally in that I'm due to resume teaching, well, next week! At this time we're cleared to hold public functions with up to 50 people. Given what we now know about how the virus spreads, I'm going to do what I can to make sure we have good air circulation, and I intend to continue wearing a mask on public transport, even though no-one else is. In September, I'll be restarting some of my lectures that usually get an older audience. I'm not qualified to judge if it's safe for them. I hope it is.

Anyway, this is the thing, isn't it; I'm not so much worried about myself, as I feel like I can take precautions and maintain social distancing and so forth. It's other people I'm worried about: not just myself having the virus asymptomatically or something like that, but someone in my audience having it and giving it to others. Obviously there's nothing I can really do to stop this from happening, but it doesn't mean I'm not worried about it.

We're scheduled to start returning to more or less business as usual in August in general. I just hope it isn't too soon, or we'll have a second wave in the fall.