Coronahassle travel site?

by philg

How about this as a business idea: a travel site that answers the question “Where can I go conveniently and safely in the age of COVID-19 and restrictions imposed in the name of preventing COVID-19?”

You go to the site and say roughly what kind of trip you want to take (culture, ski, beach, etc.), where you live, what kind of vaccination papers you are willing and able to show, and whether you’re a Karen or a Deplorable. The site then comes back with proposed trips based on the following:

  • current Covid risk at the destination (map for U.S. states; CDC map for the world (don’t stay home because the U.S. is very high risk))
  • current Covid lockdown situation at the destination (will it be legal to go out and do stuff?)
  • current mask order situation at the destination (if you’re upper-middle-class and wear a mask 15 minutes/day to go into stores (or 0 minutes if you live in FL and choose not to), do you want to take a European vacation where it will be 14 hours/day of indoor and outdoor masks?)
  • quarantine requirements (Australia and some Asian countries would be excluded)
  • ease of meeting outbound and inbound required medical tests (maybe it is smarter to stay domestic depending on what Uncle Joe has ordered; if the U.S. demands an inbound negative test, how challenging is it to get one done at the destination? (Mexican resort hotels are great for this, since they’ll do them at the hotel))
  • are they checking vaccine papers at restaurants and other venues? (a plus for the Karens because #TrustVaccines and a minus for the Deplorables)

Readers: Does anything remotely like this already exist?

Note that I’m personally staying domestic because the idea of finishing up a vacation with a 14-day hotel quarantine in a foreign land (due to a false or true positive Covid test) is not appealing to me. And I won’t fly commercial for leisure anymore due to to the prison galley atmosphere (people fighting about masks, etc.). But the above-proposed site could work for people who travel by minivan and/or Cirrus. Suggest Orlando and mask-free Universal to a Deplorable in Jacksonville. For the Pennsylvania Karen, suggest injecting the 5-year-old with an experimental non-FDA-approved medicine so as to get around NYC’s new exclusion order for unvaccinated children (effective today) and head to NYC to crowd into a theater with 2,000 other people wearing bandana-grade cloth masks.

Inspiration to go to Marco Island, Florida:

(I was in a small boat and we had encounters with at least 20 friendly dolphins within minutes of leaving the dock (cut the engine to idle and the dolphins approached to within about 5′ at which point, of course, I yelled at them for not wearing surgical masks over their blowholes).)

Oh yes, speaking of Australia and the virtuous life of quarantine, at a local ice cream shop, a kid asked “What’s Australian liquorice?” I responded “That’s liquorice that gets arrested if it tries to leave the house or avoid a COVID-19 vaccine shot.”

15 thoughts on “Coronahassle travel site?”

  1. I think this is a brilliant idea! Imagine the amount of data one could mine and resell. I’d also include recommendations based on past experiences: If someone has visited North Korea in the past 24 months, he/she/ze/they might like to book a visit to Australia for the next vacation.

    I have another idea: A site for swapping nationalities. Imagine a virtuous American trapped in Texas, where Deplorables are shooting at 5g masts. Perhaps this person would prefer the safety of locked-down and forcibly-vaccinated Austria. If there is an Austrian who would like to follow the footsteps of Schwarzenegger and give up his/her/zir/their safety, why shouldn’t the two exchange nationalities?

  2. There isn’t even a cheat sheet for taxes, let alone virus cheat sheet. Calif* resumed its statewide mask mandate for the peak travel months, the same as it did last year. If you’re spending a lot of time in Jacksonville & Orlando instead of starring in Icon A5 videos, moving farther north would be ideal. Surprised there wasn’t a blog post about tornados after Kentucky’s disaster.

  4. A vacation consisting of pure covid abuses, I mean covid safety measures, with a few classic vacation activities mixed in would be really popular with covid cultists. They could feel safe and brag about all the testing and distancing and masking they went through just to sit on a beach alone somewhere.
    Constant testing and buffet eating they’d love it. Test, eat, stand in a spaced out line, repeat all day long.

    • Why not to skip straight to vacations in quarantine camps? Leftists have always been inamoured with the thought of regimented prison-like life (not suprising considering the leftism grew up out of monastic ascetic cults).

  5. A good rule of thumb is to avoid anywhere colored in blue, since both enforcement and the likelihood of a rabid Karen encounter are strongly correlated to politics.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#/media/File:2020_United_States_presidential_election_results_map_by_county.svg

    The exceptions would be states with strong governors, basically Florida, California, and New York, where the entire state defaults to one color.

    • Steve: Those sound like the BEST places to visit for half of our clientele, i.e., the COVID-concerned/lockdown-faithful. They’re not going to feel comfortable in a place unless the local officials are #FollowingTheScience

  6. I have a friend who traveled to the Dominican Republic recently and had to be re-tested upon reentry into the US. She gave me a good tip about how to defraud the travel insurance system: if you test positive and are asymptomatic, the best thing to do is LIE, so the insurance company picks up your resort tab:

    “You can’t come back into the states, you’re stuck.
    So for all international travelers: get Geo Blue medical insurance.
    If you test positive for Covid, and are asymptomatic, they will not pay for your quarantine expenses, tell them you’re symptomatic! They pay for the resort, everything.”

    FWIW I haven’t tried it but I don’t think she’d have posted it with a picture getting her COVID test unless it was true.

  7. TRAVEL WARNING: In the UK, Omicron has been elevated to Ebola status:

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/suspension-of-the-15-minute-wait-for-vaccination-with-mrna-vaccine-for-covid-19-uk-cmos-opinion/suspension-of-the-15-minute-wait-for-vaccination-with-mrna-vaccine-for-covid-19-uk-cmos-opinion

    “The Chief Medical Officers (CMOs) of the UK and lead Deputy Chief Medical Officers (DCMOs) for vaccines have considered whether, in the light of the very considerable need to speed up vaccination and boosting in response to Omicron variant, the 15-minute wait for some mRNA COVID-19 vaccines should be suspended.”

    People have lost their minds completely. As usual, the Daily Mail keeps its sanity:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10305417/Fury-lack-transparency-UKs-Omicron-death-victim-fully-jabbed-vulnerable.html

    • Eric: This is a great idea. Green is the good color, so that should be the book for people who are vaccinated, boosted, masked, and socially distanced and who yet want to travel (thus risking spread of variants!), but want to make sure that they encounter only fellow vaccinated, boosted, masked, and socially distanced believers. There can also be a white (lowercase) book, since white is the bad color. That’s for Deplorables who want to know where things are so lax that they can still shop, eat, stay, and sightsee without showing proof of having taken the latest emergency use authorized medications for a disease that they don’t have and/or are not at risk for.

  9. I get that you’re now one of the richer of us all after your photo.net winfall but man, you were making the world a better place back then, with lovely photography and writing about travels with your girlfriend. Now, at least outwardly, it’s just all adversarial tone in your world, it seems. I guess you found your audience though. Work that furrow, I guess.

    • Oh, please. You know that this “adversarial tone” was the default in open source circles, who wrote software worth billions for free? Who actually made the world a better place?

      If a single key politician is convinced of the futility of non-scientific corona measures by reading this blog, the actual positive impact will have been greater than making 100 people happy by writing travel logs.

    • Dava: I’m not sure why you would pick out this post as having an “adversarial tone”. The proposed site would be useful to people holding a veritable rainbow of opinions regarding the correct response to the existence of SARS-CoV-2.

      Is it “adversarial” to mock California and Massachusetts officials who closed schools and kept marijuana and liquor stores open and called that a “science-based” response to coronavirus? If so, I plead guilty! But I think that I’ve been proved correct. Once you adjust for age, Florida (schools open, no statewide mask orders, everything reopened by June 2020) has experienced a similar death rate to California’s (see https://twitter.com/DrJBhattacharya/status/1442656553845334016 from a Stanford Med School prof). My position that SARS-CoV-2 is bad, but that the Constitution (e.g., First Amendment right to assemble) still applies even when something bad is occurring, was shared by 3 out of 9 Supreme Court justices in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States (i.e., a minority opinion, but not a minority of 1)

      Also, if there is an adversarial situation in the U.S. right now, shouldn’t at least some of the blame be assigned to the officials who ordered the lockdowns? Unless the only reasonable attitude for a citizen/subject is meek compliance, shouldn’t we expect some adversarial tone after schools are closed?

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