Friday, March 11, 2022

Qatar Coronavirus Updates -- Omicron wave is over

Cases are now back to a level before the Omicron wave, today there were 116 community cases, and it has been under 200 a day for the last week. There is still the odd death, about four this week, but there's now only 26 people in hospital and 10 in the ICU, a far cry from two months ago when people were swarming testing centres and hospitals were filling up.

Qatar has announced further relaxing of restrictions, both for travel and while in the country. Masks are still required indoors, and the Ehteraz tracking app will need to be shown to enter buildings, but otherwise there are few restrictions anymore. Even travel restrictions are easy. Unless you came in from a 'red list' country (and there's only nine on the list) you don't need to do a pre-test to enter Qatar and on arrival do a rapid test within 24 hours. That's it. Well, if you're vaccinated that is, if you're unvaccinated then the process is trickier but you know what -- if you're an adult and don't have a valid medical reason for not being vaccinated then I have no sympathy about how restrictions inconvenience your life. If you have a Reddit account feel free to hang out on r/HermanCainAward to see how not being vaccinated can impact both yours and your family's life.

With no new variants on the horizon we might well be near a point where the pandemic is essentially over, at least for the time being. It'll be nice to travel without worrying too much about Covid. Looking forward to it in fact. I just got back from a trip to Turkey but I was still careful the whole time. 


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