I've been off here for a while and missed whether anyone has had it. Share your stories please!
Mine's kinda long.
My church put some restrictions into place last year, and all during Lent we had a 10 person limit in services. We never had a mask mandate, and didn't do stupid stuff like cancelling communion, but we have had sanitizer in place for use and that's about it. We also opened the windows and people would stand right outside listening to the service and come in for communion.
We are far enough back in the woods that we never attracted attention. But then for Pascha (which was in mid-April last year), we had some good old fashioned spontaneous order, and everyone at the same time and without discussing it all showed up for Pascha liturgy at the same time. We never discussed it, it just kind of worked out that everyone at that point was like "Yeah, nah, this is over".
And then what happened was super interesting... word got out. And we started attracting other people from as far as 150 miles away. I'm not kidding... we have people from that far who are making the trip just to go to church and have a normal experience. We went from 10 max in March 2020, to an average Fall attendance of about 130-140. And this is in a building that's about 30x40'.
We all kind of knew we were going to get it eventually, but what we DIDN'T know is that we would go NINE MONTHS before we had an outbreak, despite creating literal superspreader events multiple times per week. And when we had one, well, the term I'd use to describe how it happened was "weaponized". We've dealt with other viruses there (there was another year we can compare to where everyone at church got a bad stomach bug) but those sicknesses spread the way you'd think - one family got it, then another, and the spread took a couple weeks to die down. COVID was literally like a bomb went off.
I didn't recognize that until after the fact. My wife came home from the homeschool co-op (which is also not doing any of the BS) at 4:30 pm one Friday back in January, and she unceremoniously said "I'm going to bed" and then didn't get back up until 11am. And at that point I started to feel a flu-like tingling on my back, and even though she said she was feeling a little better I still panicked and started cooking because we have kids that need attention and if I was going down, then everyone was at least going to have food.
So I spent the next six hours on my feet, and by the end I was feeling a little run down, but that's when I noticed I couldn't really tell if I seasoned the gumbo correctly. So I stopped dumping stuff into it and called it quits. And I felt mostly fine, and started pinging around asking people at church how they felt. Well church was cancelled for the next couple weeks, but I kept getting the same reports over and over - feeling a little run down, but fine.
Of the 50+ people who got symptoms, only one went to the hospital and I just saw him a couple weeks ago and he's doing fine. I didn't get to ask what happened with him.
Flash forward to last month, and I actually, finally know someone who's having a problem with covid - a monk in New York. He's diabetic, but more importantly, his mother just died, his sister is in the hospital, and before his mother died his brothers ran up her credit cards, and to top it all off, this guy normally does 3 hours EVERY DAY teaching zoom classes to people around the world on top of his regular schedule, and he's also a monk, so he owns nothing, too, and normally every last scrap he does get he sends back home to the Philippines. So he's got a ton of weight on his shoulders. And it seems like the New York medical system was pretty happy to swoop in and say "naw man you don't have depression and stress and burnout and all that, you're dying of covid".
So that's my personal experience and it all points to the idea that this was never a real thing. I'm pretty convinced that most or even all of the deaths that happened were nocebo effect caused by the scaremongering.
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