I'm in Mexico, but going back to Hungary in a few weeks to try to get my COVID vaccine. There's a soccer match tomorrow (I mean Saturday) with Fradi, the favourite football team of the prime minister, that's why he opened up the country more. Many people just go with it, as they just want to get back to normal, even though the vaccines that people got are not protecting yet.
His main goal is to open up even more to be able to organize EU soccer championship, that's why he's rushing ahead.
Viktor Orban wanted to be a professional soccer player when he was a child, but he wasn't good enough, and now the whole country is suffering because of his childhood trauma.
The spike is big, but not dead people hanging from the trees big. Hospitals are well over capacity, staff is over-overworked, and there was a recent new change in the law that regulates healthcare workers. 5-6 thousand HC workers declined the new forced change, so even less staff available.
At the same time people are getting vaccinated, but the gross incompetence of the government doesn't help. (Just yesterday the website where people ought to schedule an appointment for getting a vaccine was offline day due to too much load.)
While the death/capita indicator peaked our wise leader opened the terraces of pubs and restaurants.
... I'm aware that a well ventilated terrace on a dry sunny day carries a relatively very low risk of transmission, but still. It's complete bollocks to do this without any contact tracing, any testing, etc. (That said, it's important to note that people were already not social distancing, but now it's trivial to get infected by total strangers, plus now those can infect a lot more random folks. Whereas before the opening at least people were able to do some informal checks and tracing.)
Friends in Budapest tell me it’s getting better, but they recently opened up outdoor drinking venues for the first time since November and everything was packed, no distancing and no masks, so I hope it doesn’t backfire.
Interestingly, Hungary already has vaccine passports. Not sure if they’re used for anything but I’ve seen them, same size/shape as the national ID card, and chipped. A lot of my friends got Sputnik instead of AZ, they were offered a choice.
No idea! What would a chip do? How could people use the chip? Verify it? Then why not just make an app!? (Oh, one was announced in February, but absolutely no signal about it since.)
Corruption and competence rarely go hand in hand.
The whole plastic card thing is a shitshow. I got the shot at the same time as a friend. Same day, same hospital, same vaccine type. Said friend already got the card days ago, no word about whether I should have gotten one or what's going on. No way to ask it either. Only thing folks can do is send an official application for requesting the card, which in theory is completely redundant. But it costs nothing, so I sent one. (It's just a nice form on yet another gov site.)
I guess in the US they get a paper card with a CDC logo on it and a stamp for each injection, which will be trivially easy to fake for those who want post-vaxx privileges without actually getting the jab. Saw one on Insta today.
I’m in favor of a vaccine passport but I see a lot of chaos on the horizon as countries with high denialism (US, Germany) but also big outbound tourism and business travel, get real slacky about the passport-ness of it.
