Where do you live where you _have_ been leaving your home for non-essential reasons? I recognize that different countries have had differing levels of effect from COVID, but I'm not aware of any that hasn't had at least _some_ impact.
Midwest US. Restaurants and "non essential" businesses were closed here for a little while but everything reopened (with some capacity limitations) by about June 2020. Supermarkets, department stores such as Target, Walmart, never closed.
I've been working from home but going shopping, going to the gym, etc. as normal since the reopening last June. I never was much for eating at restaurants but they have been open also.
Other places in the US were far more locked down. I'm glad I don't live there.
The US. While many businesses (especially restaurants) shuttered in 2020, most retail businesses reopened rather quickly though usually with a limited capacity (Home Depot, a massive store, was permitting something crazy small like 200 people in at a time here last spring and early summer).
Hiking trails and state parks in CO opened up by late spring or summer 2020. Restaurants and bars were really the places most impacted from what I saw of last year in the US as they went a much longer stretch without allowing indoor dining.
Many schools in the US also went remote. I think indoor dining/bars and schools are the things that were significantly restricted more than a few weeks in the US.
(work from home isn't really comparable to those I think; I worked from home for months and liked it, and I think for people that don't like it, it still isn't as impactful as the restrictions for restaurants and schools)
True. I have a blind spot around the schools situation since I don't have kids of my own. I tend to forget the full extent of it as it didn't impact me or my immediate friends much (school closures) as I have few friends with school aged kids anymore (they're all infant to toddler or college aged or older).
Restaurants, bars, and schools were the things most consistently closed. Around here, they opened up for this current (now finishing) school year but had frequent closures based on COVID cases amongst the students/staff with an option to stay home the whole time if desired.
I live in the US too. I wasn't asking "where wasn't shut-down?", I was asking "where was it _safe and responsible_ to leave your home for non-essential reasons?". Just because a facility has opened, does not magically make it safe to attend.
I live in a small city in Vietnam. There have been about four weeks of lockdown in the past year, besides that my life has been pretty much normal, dinner parties, festivals, hiking, island hopping. I've traveled a lot around Vietnam over the past year, there's so much to see here.
The only thing that's really changed is that there are no foreign tourists, but the local tourists seem to be making up for it.
Im in the southeastern United States, we never really totally shut down. We had a few weeks but then yea it pretty much ramped back up to near normal-ish levels.
