The Core

>time-shifting & being choosy about venues

Time to put a dining table in the Sprinter?

>time-shifting & being choosy about venues

We have few venues to choose from around here, but we time-shifted even before covid. We would try to get in and out before the main lunch crowds arrived because my husband's hearing fares better with less background noise.

>27% last I checked --and not a mask in sight

That's the bit that is baffling to me.  If one wants to avoid the vaccine you would think that that person would do everything they could to reduce their chances of exposure.   I have a dumb cousin (by marriage) who is afraid of getting the jab; he has bought into all the conspiracy theories, yet he'll do nothing to protect himself.  On top of that he goes and visits his elderly grandmother on occasion.

Just found out my BIL has Covid. They just moved back here from England 6 weeks ago and based on past conversations I am 95% sure they aren't vaccinated. We haven't talked a ton about Covid but I think when I talked about some of the restrictions here he kind of scoffed at them. Guessing he got it from a co-worker. And now of course my wife and I are psyching ourselves out and wondering if we are sick. We haven't had a ton of contact with him in the past week so we are probably fine but it is always scary when someone you know and have had contact with gets sick.

Somewhat OT...

>>symptoms

A friend and his family are part of a blood study where they have blood drawn every so often to test for antibodies. It turned out that his daughter (early 20s) got Covid twice without knowing it. The first time she had a small antibody response and a much bigger one the second time, but never any symptoms and did not pass it to her parents or sister (though her sister, who is in her last year of medical school, managed to get Covid all on her own... no surprise there).

Vietnam locks down capital Hanoi for 15 days as cases rise - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/vietnam-locks-down-capital-hanoi-for-15-days-as-cases-rise/2021/07/23/c0644d3a-ec2e-11eb-a2ba-3be31d349258_story.html

And... everything we know about the effectiveness of lockdowns.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more

This one quote is interesting...

Goolsbee and Syverson study the US situation and find that “while overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 of that. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection.”

But there are big variations by region and country and specific policies and all that.

The author also wrote a "What I learned while writing the lockdown post"
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writing-the-lockdown

It has some interesting comments about getting more done by pulling from the side in a policy tug-a-war