You know how it is, you are living and working in a developing country. You don’t speak the language, know the customs or culture, and, you don’t care to learn either. Your money goes A LOT farther than it does at home, but the comforts of home are few and far between. What are you gonna do when you need to unwind? You’re going to go for the sure thing, a prostitute. Am I right, or am I right? I’m right, right?

Life in China during the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020

Not that I would personally know anything about that seedy ugly underbelly of society. Honest, I don’t. Just what friends have told me about… and what I’ve read in the media… and that time I stumbled into a girly bar, but those are all stories of a different color. This story is well beyond the financial reach of a part-time blogger and full-time citizen.

On 7 February 2021, a private jet from Dubai landed at Phnom Penh international airport filled with 20 folks ready to party hearty (Or is that hardy? I never realized I didn’t know until I tried to write it just now. If you know, let us know in the comments, okay? It’s more fun than Google.) As soon as you land at Phnom Penh International Airport, you have to (a) lay down a $3,000.00 (US) per person deposit (returned after passing your two-week quarantine), show proof of at least $50,000 (US) of insurance coverage, produce a certificate of a negative test within 72 hours of travel, take a both-nostrils nasal and throat swab test, and quarantine at a designated quarantine hotel at your own expense until all of the tests from the folks on your flight come back negative usually about a day or two. Then, it is off to a private residence for the remainder of your two-week quarantine. But, should someone come back positive on your flight. You’re at the designated quarantine hotel for two weeks. And, at the end of your quarantine, to celebrate, you get another double nasal and throat test. Man, those double nasal swabs really suck.

Where have I been These Past Few Months?

Getting into the country is possible, but you really had to want to be here. That is a huge investment of time and money. So, what is a working girl gonna do? She’s gonna work extra hard to pay off her debt! She’s gonna bribe the quarantine hotel guards to let her and her partying working-girlfriends out of the hotel so they can go gallivanting around town and country getting paid to be the life of the party and the after-party, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Unfortunately, for these kids, someone on their flight came back positive! The crazy thing is, everybody else on that private jet from Dubai, up and took without completing their quarantine leaving our four anti-heroines here working.

At the end of their two-week quarantine came to an end, they tried to sneak back into their hotel at which time they were surprised to find the authorities waiting for them.

Let’s see, they arrived on 7 February, they quarantined for two weeks, so that would mean that, let’s see, that’s a one and carry your one, and if I could just reach my toes, that’s uh, 18, 19, twenty, um, they were busted on 20 February, thus the moniker, 20 February Community Event. I bet they didn’t get their $3,000.00 (US) deposit back, either.

By the time the authorities caught up with them, one of them had sero-converted. The others would after that. That one woman infected half of Phnom Penh! They were in nightclubs, restaurants, bars, malls, wet markets, coffee shops, apartments, all over the place. Dozens and dozens of places.

They shut everyone of them down. They shut the schools in Phnom Penh. They asked that anyone who was at one of those places from 7 – 20 February to self-quarantine. That would include members of Ye Olde Blogge. We were quarantining like crazy there from 21 February to 4 March. On 5 March, I thought about going out of the apartment for the first time in couple of weeks and realized there weren’t no where I wanted to go, so I stayed in. We’re home bodies.

In the meantime, the outbreak keeps getting bigger because she had the highly contagious UK variant! She’s up to 740 some odd people infected because of her! One person. It is now covering about half the country from Sihanoukville to Siem Reap — the town where Angkor Wat is located. And, Cambodia suffered its first fatality. She killed somebody. Great.

Now that she no longer tests positive for , she’s been deported back to China and banned from the country.

The 20 February Community more than doubled the number of cases Cambodia has experienced. According to John Hopkins tracking map thingee, Cambodia has had 1,319 as of this writing. The Chinese prostitute is responsible for over 740 of them!

I can’t believe the unbelievable chutzpah, the self-serving, entitled, narcissistic, uncaring, utter disregard for everyone in the country of Cambodia that this woman had. If there is a cautionary tale for wearing a mask, social distancing, avoiding socializing, especially in doors, and handwashing, this is it.

Seriously, the fragile healthcare infrastructure of Cambodia is fixing to be overwhelmed by this. They have a fairly robust contact tracing effort here. They have a fairly compliant population who will do as asked. They had done a good job of containing the virus knowing that if it got out of control, it would devastate them.

Exploring The Three Psychological Roots of the conservative Resistance to Containing the #COVID19 Pandemic

And, the government got complacent and developing-nation corruption caught up with them.

Because of this one person, businesses are closed, people are sick, we’re back on distance learning, badly needed scarce government resources are being diverted, lives of tens of thousands of people who live on the edge are being disrupted. Un-fucking-believable.

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Image Attribution

Image was taken from Johns Hopkins #COVID19 tracking thingee.