The "New Normal"

June 11, 2022

With the first day of mass PCR test screening over the weekend it remained to be seen whether compounds would be re-locked down or not. As always, rumors were flying around. A good day for some reconnaissance bike ride. Turned out to be a beautiful day actually, one of the best all year. Things weren't nearly as busy as a normal weekend, but at least it wasn't moving in the direction of a ghost town like in March.

This place was booming. Funnily enough, it was located just inside one district with less restrictions than the other across the street

Surprisingly, I found out one country had achieved so-called zero covid: Cambodia. My first thought was they just stopped testing. So there you have it. Zero covid is possible. Just stop counting cases. I'll chalk this up to a country on my future bike tours when we get out of this cage.

Could this be another Red Rose hair salon cluster outbreak? That happened a few days after we all got "released" and responsible for the fears of a second lockdown. But in all reality, there have got to be hundreds of places like this over the city. There is no way to stop the spread of the virus.

This place would definitely be closed down now. In Beijing there was a cluster bar outbreak that could send them into lockdown also.

My wife and I enjoyed some delicious Vietnam pho by ordering takeout then finding a nice place to chill outside and eat. It was a really nice moment actually. Later I asked my friend who works in Malaysia and went through the earlier lockdowns in 2020 what it was like.

In his words, the worst of it was restricted hours of restaurants and bars and you could only order takeout and sit outside. There was also a ban on inter-state travel and you were told to stay within 10km radius of your house. This wasn't enforced super strictly, for example if you lived outside of KL you could still take the train into the city but that was a small risk for getting caught.

So wait a second. That was a lockdown? I explained to him that is more or less what we're experiencing now after being released from a lockdown. We still can't travel out of state and probably not for awhile. Restaurants are all take out, just like he said. Bars and gyms are totally closed.

My friend went on to say for a short time they invoked EMCO (enhanced movement control order) in apartment blocks with lots of covid cases where they sealed people in the buildings -- same as what we experienced. But that didn't last long. Moreover it wasn't all across a city, and it was in 2020 at the height of the fiercest covid variants where many people weren't vaccinated.

It will take years to process and recover from why a draconian government here in China decided to take these kind of actions in 2022 with a mild omicron variant when most of the world has moved on from this.

Today's ride: 17 km (11 miles)
Total: 192 km (119 miles)

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