Pandemic origins according to WHO

The government has announced its plan for organised quarantine hotels for travellers returning to the UK from overseas, at a cost of £1,700 for an obligatory ten day stay for entrants from high risk countries. This includes two covid tests while confined in personal isolation. Only rich people and executive business travellers will be able to afford this. At the moment foreign holiday travel is considered illegal. A surreal notion. The hopes of an air travel industry revival any time soon are being dashed, as infection rates are still high, even if declining slowly. Any easing of restrictions and return to some kind of normality could take longer to arrive than we expect or wish for.

The WHO investigative committee has reported on its visit to Wuhan. Their findings rule out an accidental release of a virus from a research lab there. The market at the centre of the initial outbreak is thought to be the place where the virus, occurring in bats, may have crossed the species barrier, perhaps to other animals before crossing the barrier to humans. Something similar I guess may have happened in other parts of the world spontaneously, given there are reports of covid traces being found in waste water in other countries at or before the first reported outbreak. 

We're already learning from recent experience that very similar if not identical new mutations in covid19 are emerging in this way, so why not. Right at the start of the crisis environmental health experts said this kind of thing was inevitable because of the breakdown of natural ecosystem complexity which normally would check the spread of new viral mutations and the crossing of species barriers to humans. Biodiversity loss all over the planet, no matter what complex mix of species a region may contain, has a similar outcome. Humans are now reaping a disaster they have sown.

It's been another bitterly freezing cold day with strong wind. Again it was a challenge to walk in the park in the afternoon and stay warm. Yesterday afternoon I took a photo of a Tesco trolley parked on a hillock by the north west entrance of Llandaff Fields, noticed over the weekend. I posted the picture on Instagram tagging Tesco Metro's community service team. By this afternoon it wasn't there, hopefully retrieved and returned to service. I was leased about that.

I spent rather a lot of time later in the day shifting my collection of Ibiza photos from one Google Photos account to another, having discovered I uploaded them to my Google Blogger account without realising, many months ago. I need all the free space of that account for texts posted over the past fourteen years - yes, that's how long it is since I started with my first 'Edge of the Centre' blog.

It was good to hear this evening that the American Senate has voted to proceed with impeaching Donald Trump. It may not lead to a two thirds majority decision to convict him, but at least the full story will be told and stay on the record. It will be there to be quoted against Trump if he decides to run for a second term as President in four years time. And then the voters can made another hopefully informed decision on the basis of what they know then.