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Still Room for Grim Fourth Wave Records
Even if the number of confirmed cases is dropping significantly, there’s still room for grim records over here, the new one for daily deaths being 586 as of this Tuesday, and that for patients in intensive care becoming 1902 two days later, though of course that’s mainly a question of how many beds are available, the patients needing them being far more. In addition, the official total number of deaths exceeded 50000 yesterday. And there’s a crisis with the oxygen supply, of course, and the necessary medicines are also missing in many places, on top of the usual problems of our health system, which are made a whole lot worse by being under such immense strain. At least there was a surge in the number of people getting vaccinated, even if probably grudgingly, more in order to avoid the restrictions, but that’s slowing down significantly as well, though we did hit the milestone of 6.5 million fully vaccinated people today. Many are going for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, however, since it requires a single dose and they get a valid certificate much sooner, and that one is so much less effective than the mRNA ones, so the overall benefits will most likely be lower than the numbers themselves would indicate.
And, of course, there are still so many voices spreading doubt or, directly, fear of the vaccines and even of medical personnel, and plenty who still refuse to believe that the disease even exists, accusing doctors of making up the data, lashing out when told that they or their relatives have it. Among the many who regret not getting vaccinated after they end up in hospital, there are still plenty who refuse to believe they have the disease even as they’re dying from it, insisting that it’s just a cold or flu or even that they’re being experimented on and that’s why they’re getting worse. Now that some other countries are accepting a small number of the patients who would need intensive care but can’t receive it here because of the lack of beds, there have even been situations where the relatives of such patients have refused the transfer, convinced that they will be experimented on and killed if they’ll go. And there are still some who are even afraid of being given oxygen, after falling for some other conspiracy theories that appeared some time ago.
And you also have the “industry” of fake vaccines, the number of people paying around €100, or even €150, according to reports, to get a fake certificate being at least in the thousands, a fair number of them later ending up in hospital and possibly admitting that they’re not really vaccinated when the doctors start to wonder about the severity of their symptoms. Efforts are being made to find those who supply these certificates, usually also throwing away the doses which should have been given to those people, but there are quite clearly more of them than the authorities can track down and, as long as the demand will continue to exist, more will appear. And another problem is that these fake certificates tend to be created by replacing the information of people who actually are vaccinated, and who then end up being unable to obtain or use their certificate.