UK Covid figures 2 Sept 2020

It’s back to school today. We live next door to a junior school, so get to experience first-hand what the return is like. There are people queuing all the way down the road with young children. Not a face mask in sight. Lots of chatting and intermingling.

Personally, if I were going somewhere where I know there will be lots of other people, I’d be wearing a face mask, whether it’s outside or not. But it appears that we’re now getting back to normal life and activities, and devil take the hindmost.

It’s hard to get the right perspective on all this. Is it a mild illness for most, and therefore not to be feared as much as people make out? Is it a complete roulette, where some will get it really hard, completely at random seemingly, and so we should all be very careful? Is it to be feared and avoided at all costs?

Looking at the graphs, it looks like we have a very slight rise lately from the lowest point during the lockdown, but not the climbing figures like at the beginning, and the death rate seems to have dropped. I’m hoping that medical research is coming up with better treatments, and that could be the way forward – not preventing the spread but being able to treat it effectively if people do get it.

I guess it’s the balance. What do we need out of life? What do we want out of life? What’s worth risking our lives for? What’s not worth the risk?

Personally, I can survive easily without eating out at a restaurant. It’s not something we ever did that often anyway. I’d just started to appreciate theatre again, and there was always the occasional cinema visit, but again I can cope without.

It’s the casual social events that worry me. To what extent am I avoiding them because of the danger, and to what extent am I avoiding them because they make me feel uncomfortable anyway? Will it be too easy to extend this out and avoid socialising generally, with the pandemic just as an excuse?

If we spend all our time hiding away, avoiding everything because of the slight risk it might carry, what about our quality of life?

The hardest thing for me is knowing that my life and my safety is dependent on those around me knowing and understanding the situation and doing their best to protect others, including me. That’s always the case, of course, but this is just amplifying everything we had before, making it so much more obvious and important.

One question I face at the moment is exercising. The gym is open for prebooked sessions, but I haven’t ventured out yet. The swimming pool is supposed to open this month, but I haven’t heard any more details. I would always go to the gym and then follow up with a swim, so I don’t know if that’s possible. I never heard back from the gym when I emailed them about membership – if I could reduce my membership to gym and swim at the local centre, rather than the all-access pass to several local centres that I have at the moment, then it would be worth pursuing, but it’s hard to justify the fortune we’re spending at the moment, especially when I’m not using any of it.

On the other hand, I know my weight has been creeping up and my fitness level shrinking. I try to exercise from home, and have been going out running again, but at the moment I’m nursing a strained back, which really limits my movements. It’s easier to exercise with a regular commitment outside the home, just like I’ll spend more time at my allotment than gardening at home. And of course the gym would be perfectly safe as long as no one with the virus attends – which is highly dependent on other people being sensible, and still risks those who are asymptomatic – and supposedly the precautions in place should protect against even someone who is affected spreading it around others. So many unknowns!

My gut feeling is October. By then, we’ll have had a month of school, and a month or more of the gym being open. By then, we’ll have a better understanding of how this thing can spread and the problems it can cause. By then, the world will have been living with it for nearly a year, although it was only since around February this year that we started having it affect us here. By then, things will either have settled down into a new norm, or they will have exploded into problems again.

Will we ever return to a time where we can mingle freely, chat, sing, hug, shake hands, do whatever we used to do without fear?

What will it be like for the children who are too young to remember the time before?

UK Covid figures 15 June 2020

I’m now a drugrunner.

As well as carrying out secret agent activities – pick up food parcels from a central depot and drop them off at specific addresses – I’ve now had the job of collecting prescriptions from local pharmacies and delivering them to people.

It’s busy in town. It wasn’t my intention to go into town on the first day that non-essential shops are back open, and It was concerning to see so many people out and about. There were long queues outside each bank, a queue outside the greengrocer’s – at one point I had to walk in the middle of the road to avoid the queues blocking the pavements each side – and very few face masks in sight, although I was wearing mine.

In fact my favourite was the gentleman in front of me at the pharmacy counter, who was wearing a face mask but had pulled it down completely to below his chin so that he could speak to the pharmacist properly. What’s the point, honestly?

If we’d had proper, decisive action earlier on, then this relaxation of rules would be justified. As it is, all we’ve succeeded in doing is emptying out the hospitals a bit ready for the next wave. And it’s coming, believe me. We still have a high number of new cases. We still have no proper test, track and trace system in place. And people aren’t wearing face masks and being as careful as they should be.

I’m not particularly looking forward to going to Tesco this afternoon. I can imagine that people will be forgetting to keep their distance, and that will make it a stressful occasion.

At least I have my new Lucifer face mask (made and given to me by a friend) to hide behind!