When I started to travel to NYC from Moscow first (which was a while ago), we had two options: Finnair via Helsinki, where people gulped
KOFF like they didn’t expect to land; and with Aeroflot directly, where passengers in the back rows calmed their nerves by smoking
Java Gold non-stop.
For a few years, flying for me was synonymous with smoking: as a youngster, I didn’t know how to gamble the booking system neither at the point of purchasing the tickets, nor at the registration desk, both of which at that time had more to do with a bazaar than with an airport experience. And so we always ended up in the back, sampling the second-hand smoke from various brands.
Occasionally, a passenger would even light up a
Partagás, which then lead to an escalation with the flight attendants as even though you could smoke 3 packs of cigarettes en route to JFK, smoking cigars was verboten (you could drop one on the carpet, and it would stay lit up long enough to burn through the plastic).
If you told me back then that smoking will soon be phased away, I wouldn’t believe you. I am observing the same thing now with COVID-19: while some regions are at the forefront of prevention and, eventually, eradication of the pathogen, most of the world – for this brief moment – seems to have embraced the decreased life expectancy and the risk of scoring a chronic illness as a given.
On a recent trip from Vilnius to Hamburg, I observed the stark contrast between the FFP2-wearing 🇩🇪 Hamburg and the YOLO approach of 🇩🇰 Copenhagen. While friends in 🇰🇷 Seoul are proud of their low excess mortality record and continue to wear masks in the public space (current EM:
+1.82%), friends in 🇱🇹 Vilnius consider the whole thing to be over and cram into full bars (current EM: an astounding
+20.99%).
All of this is to say that our approach to the pandemic control at the Summit 2022 remains that of the true believers in the bright future where we embrace improved ventilation and masking in high-risk areas in the same way that we embraced the ban of in-flight smoking: it will happen for sure, just maybe not today or tomorrow. But it shouldn’t stop us from already acting like the people from the future who care about their health, and the health of others, just a tiny bit more than today’s “normal”.
And now, onwards to the updates –>