#StayTheFuckHome

What is it like there? Are people with your views common? Is the government giving people support to stay home?

Right now everything is open and life is back to "normal" but our borders are completely sealed unless you are a citizen returning home and then you have to go to a mandatory 2 week quarantine. The government meets you at the airport and shuttles you to a secure isolation facility which is a converted hotel. You have to be in isolation for 14 days and return a negative covid test before you are allowed to leave.

Are people with my views common? No. I'm in the extreme minority. You don't even have to be that far into anti-lockdown territory before you're basically treated like a heretic. If you question the efficacy of masks or ask if we could have proceeded with less restrictions you are lumped in with the people who think 5G is a globalist plot to control your brain and the flat earth crowd.

It doesn't help that our media very dutifully trots out two scientists who are hyper-fearful leftists who generate clicks because they are always telling us how deadly covid is, how its going to cause nothing but long term effects and how DEADLY and VIRULENT the new UK strain is and there have been professors here that have said if they even detect a single case at the border (where all our control facilities are) that they should immediately lock the country down for 6 weeks.

The two people are this woman who is absolutely as insufferable as her profile picture makes her look.

And this guy

They are always in one of our papers or on our morning show (Breakfast) preaching doom and terror.

The government did provide support or us to stay home which is the only reason our initial lockdown worked. Your employer was given a wage subsidy to pay to you in your normal pay. It helped people get by but the subsidy amounted to receiving less than minimum wage if you were employed full time so so many people were basically coasting on fumes.

Everyone here is celebrating being back to normal while very conveniently overlooking the fact that our economy will post the single largest drop in GDP in our history and we have hundreds of thousands unemployed or underemployed.

The last stat that I saw had more than 10% of the population here, over 500,000 people on government assistance because their jobs were gone and hundreds of thousands more are underemployed. And everyone just ignores that.

One of our iconic stopover towns on the West Coast of the South Island may go under completely. Franz Josef was a stop for almost every tourist who visited and its a tiny mountain town with just a few hundred people. Without tourism the town has said multiple times in the news that the entire town may turn into a ghost town in the next year.

And now people are saying that we can't even re-open once the country is fully vaccinated because "we don't know the long term implications".

I'm exhausted and sick of it.

/r/CoronavirusCirclejerk Thread Parent Link - i.redd.it