nothing real

 When we first got wind of COVID-19 as any sort of serious thing, it was probably too late to do anything about it.  Nobody I knew was taking it seriously at all until late February, and even then the attitude that it was just a "bad flu" was pretty common.  Then, in the middle of March we had sort of a shut down.  Everyone was encouraged to stay at home, the majority of businesses were locked up, only "essentials" were allowed to keep working.  We got through our lockdown with stories of makeshift hospitals and morgues, hundreds and thousands of infected and dead, and now we are trying to open up to our new normal.

Spain has the highest number of infections in Western Europe, even more than Italy and the UK, major centers of viral activity in their own right.  The number of deaths doesn't put the country at the top of the list, although some calculations give a number of around 45,000, very close to the UK's leading 46,498. Many people blame the poor management of care facilities for the elderly, where apparently we still don't know how many were infected or how many died of the virus versus some other cause (lack of care because of lack of material and human resources, for instance).

Although the majority of people wear their little masks when they wander out onto the street, there is a lot of movement, socialization and contact between people.  It's not a surprise, and it's not an unreasonable way to behave; however, it doesn't keep a virus at bay or drive it out of the population.  I'm pretty lax about sterilization after being outside myself, relying on a good hand washing.

The problem can probably come down to the government not wanting to be a Chinese-style hardass.  There were fines issued to people outside their homes in the center of town, but a lot of others were out walking their (new?) dogs or exercising unmolested.  The shutdown was very gradual, keeping children home first, then waffling about stay-at-home orders, then fudging around with hours of permitted street access.  Also, people moved around all over the country when there was no national system in place to track infections or deaths - and there still isn't.

To be honest, I don't know if I'll ever take the virus seriously.  I haven't gotten it (as far as I know) and nobody I know has gotten it.  Somebody in my building was infected, but there were no reports of anybody else after that.  I hear about second hand cases, but nobody I know personally, so it doesn't have the same impact.  Despite the stories of beds packed into IFEMA, there was no visible transportation of patients, so the whole things seemed unreal and continues to seem so.  Sadly, I think it's the same for a lot of people.  We don't mind curtailing our activities a little, but because there doesn't seem to be any effect directly upon us, it's difficult to maintain our resolve.

The future just seems unreal.