Don’t Count Your Chickens Yet

I have been working at chemist’s for a couple of years. It’s alright. 2020 was insane, but we were not the worst effected. We have had customers giving us their opinion on the pandemic for the past ten months. This should give you an idea of the different opinions – and we have to be polite no matter what the customer says to us:

first they said it was deliberate, that a nefarious government engineered the virus and unleashed it to gain the upper on other countries.

then they said the virus is not real, that it’s a hoax

then they were glad that schools closed because they were terrified for their kids

then they were saying that kids should be at school because they are suffering at home

then we have queues out the door of customers asking for face masks (we couldn’t get them at the time, but the government were saying back then they were not necessary

then face masks were mandatory and they were saying that facemasks violated their human rights

then they were saying we desperately need a vaccine to get us out of this mess

then they start saying that they don’t trust the vaccine and they think there is a microchip inside it

People are cute man. We have had the weirdest situations and scenes with customers yelling at each other “Back off buster, stay two metres away from me,” or storming into the store pushing each other out of the way to grab as much alcohol gel as they could,

So the latest thing is the attitude towards the vaccine. I keep on hearing people say they can’t wait for everyone to have the vaccine so we can all go back to normal. I don’t want to tell them – “normal” has gone. We are hoping they will be able to start lifting some of the restrictions in the next few months. But normal won’t be around for a long time. Packed arenas, conventions (someone seriously needs to tell the US that), festivals, marathons – there are so many parts of what used to be normal that just won’t be safe for a long time.

We are hoping that soon, we can visit the Aunties without worrying. We are hoping for some normality to come back. But we cannot go back to being packed like sardines on a train for a long time. Even once the vaccination is rolled out, there is a lot that needs to have changed. Safety is going to be different from now on. It has to take into account a mutant strains, that the vaccines are not 100% effective and that some people don’t want it.

Even if you have had the vaccine, we are still going to need to be careful for a long time to come.