Sombre prospects

A merciful return to sunshine, blue skies with fluffy clouds today. What a difference it makes after the penitential grey skies and rain of yesterday! Before and after lunch, walks in different parks filled with kids letting off steam and mums with pushchairs chatting socially distanced (sort of), displacing walkers into the still rain saturated grass. It's quite treacherous in many places, to walk on turf whose surface is suffering badly from lack of drainage - there's a lot of clay subsoil around here. It's like walking on a layer of thick soap. Carefree boys at the end of a park outing are often caked with mud below the waist. Heaven help their mothers!

When our weekly delivery of groceries from Beanfreaks arrived this morning, there was a fine looking organic lettuce tucked in with the order which we hadn't ordered, but wished we had. Clare rang the store and reported this, and ten minutes later, Simon the delivery man returned and collected it. Someone had mistakenly added it to our order. It happens occasionally with our home deliveries, inevitably when you consider how complex a task it is to deal with scores of items for scores of customers a day. 

At tea-time Clare and I rehearsed together our version on the Beatles' song 'I saw her standing there', and then recorded it with a birthday greeting for Rhiannon who'll be seventeen next Monday. Kath has asked for video greetings from family and friends to edit together and show during their home celebration. Clare learned to play a basic piano accompaniment by heart, part of her jazz piano learning, so she can still keep playing when she can no longer sight read. 

She's also got the hang of recording videos as well, though she gets very annoyed with her new phone, which she thinks is fussier and more complex than the previous one with an earlier version of Android. Both of us composed 'Rhiannon' limericks to record and send as well, just for fun. Clare had the idea and that spurred me to creativity for a change. Apart from taking photos I haven't done much that's creative recently, so this little effort has done me good.

Today's news again reports reduction in the rate of infections and deaths, and discussion on the easing of lock-down restrictions which are still the main factor driving down the numbers. The mortality rate among elderly people has dropped sharply and this is the first indication that vaccination is having an impact. It's not surprising that infection rates among children, teens and young adults are still high, even if they tend to recover quickly from covid19, have mild symptoms or none at all. 

The trouble is, they can transmit the virus to older and more vulnerable people in the general population, so re-opening schools, even in a phased way with regular testing regimes in place is still a risky business. Observing the way children and teenagers behave outdoors with few wearing masks and little or no distancing makes me wonder just how the transmission of the virus can be reduced to the point where the general risk is very low.

Testing for the virus and population sampling for variants is going to become even more important as a result of the ability of covid19 not only to produce new ones, but also to combine variants that have survived into even more effective versions that are more efficient at spreading and vaccine resistant. This may happen randomly. Most 'recombinants' may not survive to spread, until one does and wreaks havoc. 

Preventing the spread of new forms depends on continuing to do what is already recommended to be done: mask wearing in enclosed spaces, social distancing, hand hygiene etc., even for the vaccinated. This is going to be tough for everyone, but we'll run the risk of promoting our own extinction as a species if we don't. Global warming is not only melting ice-caps but producing conditions favourable to the evolution of many more kinds of virus we may not be able to prevent from harming us and robbing us of our future.

Going through this Lent, reading scripture, reading the unfolding story of this pandemic and the world's heroic efforts through medicine and scientific research to see an end to this plague, is going to be the stuff of my spiritual endeavour. Would that there was something more practical that I could do.

Risky planning or planned risks?

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?