where I live in the UK the area has gone straight from Tier 2 to the recently introduced Tier 4 skipping Tier 3 
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I will take the Sputnik V vaccine, but not the RNA vaccine.
There is no weird (or glorious 
) name here for it.
Now I wonder if that’s a mistake and if you could motivate more people to get vaccinated with a fancy name. Maybe one of the big mistakes the German government has been making since the beginning of the pandemic was that the PR strategies not just for vaccination, but also for teaching people about the dangers of the pandemic and about what they should do to keep each other safe were and are mostly not very good.
Just a thought.
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Many people lost ability of smell detection during COVID
It returned. But it returned wrong to some people.
long-term symptom known as parosmia seems to be affecting young people and healthcare workers in particular.
virus is affecting the nerves in the roof of the nose
One said they could smell fish in place of any other scent, and the other can smell burning when there is no smoke around.
Ms Corbett, from Selsey in Sussex, said: "From March right through to around the end of May I couldn’t taste a thing
sense of smell began to return in June, but “nothing smelled like it should”.
“Most things smelled disgusting, this sickly sweet smell which is hard to describe as I’ve never come across it before,” she said.
She added that despite being a “coffee addict” before March, the drink now smells “unbearable”, as do beer and petrol.
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That’s why I really don’t like this virus, all these sides effects I hear about. I hope we get rid of it asap and get back to some normal life.
I am in a china-France WeChat group and I can’t stand there anymore all these conspiracy things by some participants that it’s all fake and so on. I want to turn the page.
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Original Image: “Curly World” by Leunig
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동의합니다
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Well, you can social distance and still live a normal life, if you reside in the countryside. If you live in a big city, you cannot sightsee anyway. From today’s walk … literally noone in sight. I wasn’t even wearing my mask, most of the way, since the only person I met was someone on a tractor going to tend his fields.
On a more serious note, some reporters asked our minister of health if the doctors and nurses that work so much to help people with covid will receive extra payment for Christmas, and he replied that “they have the admiration and love of all the nation” … but, not extra rewards for their hard work. 
I see that the “thoughts and prayers” school of “do nothing in a disaster” that was built in the states has started to be successfully imported in the EU.
I wonder what would happen if there were mass resignations of healthcare workers. What would the minister say then.
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Kinda, kinda not depends where you live
I believe the healthcare workers probably have more of a conscience than politicians (maybe on average at the very least). One of the things people can do is remember, and vote them out. Similar thing, our government refused to pay student nurses and midwives and voted against it twice during this pandemic.
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They can, technically, but they usually don’t. We are known to have goldfish memory when it comes to voting.
For public healthcare, it’s still the only permanent jobs (public sector) in the country. So, I don’t see it, really. Maybe isolated cases of “fed-up”.
Louder for the people in the back.
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Everyone has more conscience than a politician. That doesn’t mean that they should be taken advantage of.
One of the things people can do is remember, and vote them out.
Highly unlikely.
Voting here is like being a sports fan. Most people support a side “just because” and without any real thought. The idea of changing what you vote is considered a blasphemy on par with wearing the colors of the opposing team.
In that regard we have had the following prime ministers from party 1:
George Papandreou Sr. (the father) 1964-1965
Andreas Papandreou (the son) 1981-1989 and 1993-1996
George Papandreou Jr. (the grandson) 2009-2011
and the following from party 2:
Konstantinos Karamanlis Sr. (the uncle) 1955-1963 and 1974-1980
Konstantinos Mitsotakis (the father) 1990 - 1993
Konstantinos Karamanlis Jr. (the nephew) 2004-2009
Kyriakos Mitsotakis (the son) 2019 - today
Vote them out, indeed 
They are going to hire 15.000 (!!!) new “semi-permanent” “professional soldiers” ( a.k.a. total slackers and money leeches. Yes, during a pandemic we are hiring soldiers) which is NOT a permanent position “officially”, but it becomes permanent after seven years where they are re-evaluated (and of course they all pass or at least all the people that belong to the party that is currently in charge). There are many many tricks and windows around here as always. The onlyactually difficult way to get through to a permanent position is from the actual door 
The only reason I can think of for the medicinal stuff for not resigning and going to a different EU country to work is that in order to become a doctor the process is so arduous, time-consuming and complex that by then you are 32+ which means that a lot of them either have families of their own OR their parents need their help. Either way their other responsibilities makes them hard for them to relocate. If not for that, quite a lot of trained professionals would have fled this country and not only the young ones just out of university, which is the most usual case.
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That’s the fable they like to tell themselves, no country is waiting our bright scientists with open arms, they have their own (yes I know the anecdotal cases). People don’t leave because they like the convenience of their home country and all related reasons (“we have the best weather” comes out, if you press them).
P.S. Έτσι όπως το γράφεις φαίνεται ότι το Μητσοτακέικο και το Καραμανλέικο είναι μια οικογένεια.
In normal circumstances and in a lot of fields, that might be the case, but right now who would say no to an influx of trained medical staff? I’d think that the vast majority could find another job abroad due to the outbreak very easily.
Most people just can’t do it even if they wanted to.
Relocating their family and children to foreign cities and schools, leaving elderly relatives and other obligations unattended, leaving their own house and car behind and live on rent and the list goes on. That is why the fact that the average new doctor is far older than the other new professionals is so important in this case. If they were around 24 years old, most of them would have packed up.
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Meanwhile, our government has become a complete embarassment, as The Netherlands somehow is the last country in Europe to start the vaccination program: we’ve had the whole year to prepare, but for some unexplained reason, the vaccine “surprised” our government, and they hadn’t really any infrastructure planned to actually start the vaccination program. It’s supposed to start at January 8, but I heard from a friend who is a doctor that they haven’t gotten any instructions yet, and it seems the vaccination of non-healthcare workers will have to wait until January 18th. Healthcare workers meanwhile are crying out loud that they need the vaccinations immediately, right now, as there is so much sick leave under hospital personnel that they’re at the edge of collapsing.
In related news, the lockdown we have seems to have no effect, as we’re still around 10’000 cases per day, for 3 weeks in a row. And that’s ignoring the effects of Christmas and New Years, which is expected to make things worse.
And I thought all these years that The Netherlands was one of the countries in the World where these things would run smoothly…
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In that chart, I can clearly see a decrease after the partial lockdown that started at 14 October (closing bars and restaurants, with some added restrictions from 4 November until 19 November) and a decrease after the current lockdown that started at 15 December (closing shops and schools). So I wouln’t say the lockdown seems to have no effect.
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Well, it is effective since it stopped that line going up at that steep angle, but what most people hope from a lockdown is to make the chart go steeply and swiftly down, which is not always the case.
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Your bottom chart shows an increase from 10.6% to 13.6% positive tests from about 5 December until about 20 December.That coincides with an increase from almost 5000 to almost 12000 in absolute numbers of tested positive in that same period. The growth in absolute numbers tested positive is much greater than the growth of % positive tests, so apparently there was a strong increase in tests in that period (probably because more and more people were having symptoms). But you left that period out in your top chart (why?).
Your top chart shows that the number of tests decreased since 20 December. That can be explained by less people having symptoms since 20 December (but I’m not sure if that’s the main cause, because some say that people were avoiding tests just before Christmas).