I finished the sixth course of antibiotics this morning with a prayer that I won't need any more. It's hard to tell what difference this course has made right now, due to what the cold does to my head. Once this goes completely away, I'll know from my blood pressure and how clear my head is whether it's worked.
There are signs that this wretched cold has done its worst. My nose wasn't streaming quite so heavily and I wasn't coughing as vehemently as I did yesterday. To my surprise however, any time I did cough was painful, not because of any soreness or inflammation in my lungs, but because every single muscle in my rib cage was stiff from the effort of coughing so much the day before. I felt as if I'd been in wrestling match and lost| It's a long time since I've had such a heavy streaming cold with so much coughing, there's no way to avoid stiffness in old, less used muscles. I was something unexpected and I'll have to live with it for a day or so, rest more, and cut down 20% on my daily walk.
It was a lovely autumnal day, a little on the cold side. The fresh air and sunshine did me good. Lounging in front of the telly all evening as I tend to at the moment does me little good, sitting for lengths of time generally ends up painfully uncomfortable, but I get fed up of spending so much time just lying down to recover if I'm tired.
DuoLingo today pitched me an ad about the new NHS covid-19 tracking app for my phone. How public spirited! It was pleased not to have to hunt for this download, so recently launched, and now it's on my Blackberry. Saying that Cardiff is at a medium risk level from the virus.
As the second wave of contagion spreads around the U.K. as it has around much of the E.U. Cardiff and Swansea will now have travel and group meeting restrictions imposed this weekend, similar to those in force already in neighbouring local authority areas. But the app hasn't yet notified my of the coming change of risk level, only the news media. Just as well I'm not using the app to make plans for travel or work this weekend. I'm reminded of how NHS Wales took two days to email me instructions about self-quarantining, after my return from Ibiza. Two days for digital data to get from Heathrow Teminal 5 to Cardiff Bay and out to me. Two days in which, if I had been unwittingly infected, I could have sown chaos. I was in isolation four hours after landing, with a home run by car.
The new restrictions should have happened earlier in my opinion The authorities wait until evidence shows a critical growth pattern rather than cautiously anticipating the inevitable. Following the evidence when scrutiny reveals that on times evidence gathering contains inconsistencies, can rely delaying action. The track and trace system is at last improving, but not rapidly enough to keep up with demand generated by schools and colleges, as a growing number of localised outbreaks are reported daily.
Much is been made of Universities welcoming the return of students. All that travel and socializing on arrival add to conditions promoting contagion. Such anxiety to resume a measure of normality, where caution would perhaps be more of a life saver. Of course on-line learning at every level all the time is hardly desirable, but wouldn't it have been better to avoid these institutional mass gatherings until real-time monitoring is actually working and in place?
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