Yeah, we've been in this mess for about 3 weeks or so now.
I live in Noord-Brabant which is a province in the Netherlands, the dutch government over here has dubbed our province the "corona capital of the Netherlands".
Most of the cases known to doctors started popping up after our annual celebration of carnaval, which is very popular in noord-brabant.
After two/three weeks we have about 6400 (known) infections and with that sadly came the death of elderly people.
I work in some nursing homes as a housing worker and, luckily, we reacted pretty quick to this new virus and took some drastic but inevitable decisions to protect the inhabitants of our "homes".
Most loved ones accepted these decisions but we've also had some death threats from people.
I have to say that the Netherlands is doing well even though other nations called us insane due to not locking down our country but of course we have our restricitions now; people who are able to work from home are deemed to do so, schools have shut down, only go outside to take a walk or do the groceries and this is limited to one person per household. Other measures taken are closing down the stores, public parks and beaches.
Some people were taking everything for granted and thought that this did not apply to them, especially the teenagers (dumb asses ).
Overcrowding everything and now an extra restriction was needed; any group (bigger than 3 persons and not keeping enough distance between each person) can be warned or fined and these fines start at 400 euro's and could even reach up to 4000 euro's or spending time in jail.
The government decided that people in vital jobs are needed outside to keep everything going and are getting daycare free of charge ( when the parents go to work).
Other (non)vital workers need to stay at home and work from there with the children around them.
Some of these parents said "i'm not paying for the daycare then" but that doesn't work that way over here given that we have an allowance system set up by the government which basicly provides 3/4 of the funds needed to pay for that.
So these parents are still billed for that and if they don't pay this the contract for the daycare will be suspended, a debt collector will be send after them and our government will want their funding back.
Eventually these day cares will refund these parents their own contribution (except for the gov's allowance of course) but this way the employees will get their salary.
Us vital workers get to keep the full amount in this time of crisis.
Vital jobs include army, police, all health workers, janitors, cleaners, garbage disposal workers and a lot of others.
At this time we apparently succeeded in keeping deaths and new infections to a minimum and thus stable.
We're a long way from home though so people will have to bite the bullet for a while and will have to abide to these "rules".
But hey, for a country that's not on a lockdown, i say we're not doing bad at all.
I just hope this will be over soon...
Ps: people started hoarding over here when the first 500 cases were confirmed, hoarding a lot of strange stuff like toilet paper.
People were also fighting over it.
Our (prime)minister responded to that by saying "there's more than enough toilet paper ... for all of us, we can poop for ten years in a row"
Gotta love it when somebody in charge makes that statement.
Also, i believe that i already had corona. About 3 and a half weeks ago i was having a runny nose, sneezing and coughing for about a week, throat felt sore and i was feeling pain and weakness in my legs.
Just overall feeling tired but keep in mind that this happened before covid-19 was confirmed in our country and at that time i believed it to be the flu.
Sadly enough i will not know for sure as there are no testing methods available for people.
