At this moment, the second wave is still dictating how we live our lives here in the delta. During the first wave they locked off the border with fences and obstacles, to avoid people from traveling and help the hospitals from having to deal with unnecessary extra patients…

Today, during this second wave, they didn’t choose to close the border. But they did chose again to close all cultural and social facilities. And following the success in South Africa, they chose to also forbid the sale of alcohol after 20h00. Luckily I am brewing my own wine 8)

In Belgium they also try to ban so called ‘funshopping’, by allowing only certain products for physical sale, creating eerie shopping scenaries. I also noticed that we are having a new type of litter since COVID19 is harassing our lives.

And then there are of course the people who are almost getting paranoid because of this pandemic. Hoarding toiletpaper and developing a phobia for contamination. And on the other hand there are people creating complete conspiracy theories, like that the government would be secretly implanting a chip in your brain, when they take your test…

And then you also have people whom are completely in denail, saying that corona is a hoax. ‘Nothing more that a little bit of flu’ and ‘Where are all those supposed deaths? Haven’t seen any of them, so I it must be a hoax’ They often go hand in hand with the paranoid conspiracy theory mongers.

This whole hoax and conspiracy theory bogus, has unfortunatly taken hold of one of my closest friends. As a result he thought it was necessary to prove his point, by visiting a coronapatient, whom was at the moment in quarantine, without any protection whatsoever. The next day he visited me, without telling by forehand what he had done. A couple of hours later, he finally did tell me and I was perplexed by this announcement. He immediatly started a speech about corona being a hoax and that there was nothing to it and so on…

He was so full of his own right, that he never for a second thought about me, my health, what I think of this virus and what the consequences of having been in contact with a walking coronahazard meant to me. Although I knew he was in denail and supportive of the conspiracy theories surrounding this pandemic, I had never thought he would drive it this far and be so reckless and respectless towards others. So reckless and respectless towards me…

Ofcourse I am also critical about what measures they choose to fight this pandemic with. I think it is a good and relatively simple idea to wash your hands at stategical moments, keep social distances, test when symptomatic or if in suspicion of a possible contamination, doing quarantine when infected or in suspicion of it and wearing mouth and nose masks…

Yet I think its a bad idea to set measures that violate the fundamental right to inviolability of one’s own body and the right to one’s personal privacy and so on. So a corona app is fine. Making it mandatory however is absolutely not fine. A working vaccine, great! Making it mandatory, total madness! Let’s just be smart enough to fight this virus together, without cancelling our basic human rights for it and without denailing it. I know we can!

Raemansky 2020 ©