We mentioned earlier that we have not had a lot of fears about covid on this trip and that we have decided to trust the vaccines. I wanted to add it’s a lot more than that. Back home, even up to shortly before we left, I was reluctant to go anywhere without a mask and only would dine in restaurants if they had an outdoor area. That was difficult in our cold Albuquerque winters but luckily a few had patio heaters. (Thank you Holly for indulging me on that!)
We also stopped feeling so fearful because Spain has a high vaccination rate and, like the US, is in a low point with respect to number of covid cases. A lot of people got Omicron so we figure that there’s probably a lot of immunity out there. Also we took a plane trip to California in January at the height of Omicron. Four or five days after our plane flight there, I had a mild sore throat and felt very tired. I took a home covid test and it was negative and luckily no one I was around got sick. But I was kind of convinced that I had a very mild case and/or reaction to an exposure either on the flight or in wait in Phoenix Airport. Somehow surviving that trip made us feel a lot more confident.
This might all be crazy thinking. I’ve heard stories about over-confident people getting extremely sick or dying from covid.
It certainly would be a drag to get covid here, even a mild case, because of needing to quarantine. But one amazing thing is that Galicia, the Spanish region that we are in, will pay for all medical care for anyone who gets covid including tourists. Galicia is trying to get their tourist industry going again and this is part of it.
One more thing I wanted to write about: In the landing outside our Airbnb apartment (above photo), there is some hand sanitizer and a bin for shoes. We hadn’t noticed the shoe bin but this morning, our landlady, Margarita, pointed it out, not to ask us to use it but to tell us how at the beginning of the pandemic she and everyone thought it was important to sanitize our hands and not to track covid into our houses. She said that now they know it is transmitted through the air and not (or rarely) through surfaces. So now she doesn’t ask people to take off their shoes.