You have no idea how many families I know who have lost members in the last year, not a single one to Covid.  Sadly, they were all going to die anyway.  Of course every death is a loss to family members.  I lost a family member myself in the last year.  It’s heartbreaking and I’m still not over it.  I don’t talk about it so you did not know.

I'm truly sorry for your loss.  I know you recently lost a friend, also.  Grief is hard to deal with and everything I've ever read says that saying things like "she lived a good life" or "he fought to the end", or "we knew it was coming" can often make things much worse for surviving loved ones.  I hope for peace and acceptance for you and all affected by loss.

My issue is we know some of this could have been prevented and some could still be prevented.  And yet...

Showtalk said:

they still aren’t reporting much about after effects of Covid. They also don’t say what underlying conditions those people had.

The standard joke back in March was, if someone gets flattened by a freight train trying to beat it to the grade crossing, and the remains scraped out of the wreckage with spatula and Homer bucket test positive for Covid-19, they put cause of death as Covid-19 on the death certificate.

Thank you.  People say what they think will comfort people. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. 

They did and they were.

Maybe common sense is starting to get more common in diagnosing cause of death again.

Comorbidity, yeah, that's fine to put on the death certificate that they had the disease, but not as the cause of death or contributing factor unless it really was.

Everyone has learned a lot since March.

One thing they figured out was, forbidding cruise ships to dock condemned a LOT more people trapped aboard to contracting the virus, as opposed to disembarking and spreading everyone out on land to halt the spread.

But reading about that, although I didn't have much inclination to go on a cruise pre-pandemic, I have a very high confidence I will go to the grave without ever having been on a cruise ship in my life, post-pandemic.

If someone gave me tickets for a cruise, I'd NOT use them. I'd look for some sucker to sell them to and cash them in, and just find some place to disappear for that interval to not hurt the feelings of whoever gave them to me.

I thought about a cruise maybe once for about five minutes.

Yeah, I never really handled big crowded things well even in the pre-pandemic decades. I was socially awkward enough around a lot of people that mixing with others conferred no benefits in terms of access to better food, shelter, etc. and it also wasted a lot of time and energy and was more of a source of high stress.

So a cruise would, for me, not be a pleasant experience. It would be a lot of stress, from the flight to wherever the thing departed in the first place, worry about lost luggage, damaged stuff, missed connections, and all the other things that can go wrong when traveling at the mercy of a huge faceless bureaucracy.

Then after 9/11, the hassle factor quickly had me so totally done with commercial air travel. Stories of elderly forced to leave medication behind because it might be a weapon, the horrors of the trials and tribulations of the disabled trying to travel, and numerous other stories in the press, just drove home the message loud and clear that we the great unwashed are not welcome on board an aircraft. I decided around September 12th that I was never going to ever give "them" the opportunity to publicly humiliate me in the guise of security theater. And true to my word, I have never set foot into the secured area of an airport since, much less actually boarded a plane to go anywhere.

The horror stories of people trapped on a ship Petri dish pretty much has set in concrete my opinion that I will never set foot on a cruise ship, ever. I will never, ever give them an opportunity to leave me trapped in a harbor unable to leave. Nope, just nope. They can all go bankrupt and cut up those ships for scrap, because I've seen this year how fast that thin veneer of civilization can turn such an experience incredibly ugly in a hurry. Nope, not gonna touch that with a ten meter cattle prod.