We’re all in this together, again?
As I start this week’s account on Saturday afternoon, I wanted to resist commenting on the incident of government advisor Dominic Cummings trip to his parents’ home in Durham. But having just done so, I will leave it to the mainstream media, and the numerous self-appointed political commentators on social media, to report the story to what appears to be its inevitable conclusion as more details come out. It certainly appeared that the Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps had been ‘thrown under the bus’ at the daily briefing.
Instead I will confess that, however people have interpreted the ‘rules/guidance’ both during lockdown and now, we too have stretched them, or to be correct ‘broken them’. I confess to ‘excusing myself’ about driving faster than 70mph on the motorway on the basis that almost everyone else does, and to drive at exactly 70 or below puts us in danger from all the other ‘idiots’ who are speeding. There always appears to be a ‘get out’ clause if you judge it to be right in your own mind.
This week Alyson and I took advantage of the new guidance to drive outside our local area to a country park near Northwich. It was Alyson’s birthday and she was desperate to go for a walk somewhere else, and it is a place we have been birdwatching. It is a 42-mile round-trip and it felt very strange to be driving even for half an hour. It felt very familiar as we queued in a traffic jam through roadworks over a closed bridge to get to the park. The car park was quite full and as we ate our picnic we wondered whether to come straight home. We didn’t need to pay & display as the machine was covered, presumably to avoid people touching the buttons, and everyone appeared to be keeping social distancing. The park is very large, so we walked to the birdwatching screen at the end of the lake. It was a sunny day and it appeared that there were family groups sitting alone enjoying the fresh air. We managed to pass other people with at least the required two metre gap. When we got to the bench seats at the screen which are about 15 metres long the only other person there, sat on the end, was our son Michael. He lives only two miles from the park, and I had text him to suggest he went as a birthday surprise for his mum. It worked, and Alyson was really pleased to see him. We chatted for a few minutes as he was on his lunch break from working at home. He looked healthy and happy. Alyson said afterwards that she just wanted to give him a hug. I ventured that Michael didn’t feel the same way! Have you spotted it yet? The current government guidance for this phase of easing the restrictions state;
I have highlighted the parts that make clear we broke the rules. Two of us met one other person outside our household to make a group larger than two. We excused ourselves as I sat two metres from Alyson and four from Michael and it ‘felt ok’. A lot of people will have done similar things over the weeks, using their own ‘excuses’. I know people who happen to have walked past their parents’ house with their child on their daily walk and stood at the end of the drive to talk to them, then later extended this by going through a garage (always keeping themselves two metres apart) to sit on chairs in the back garden and chat to grandparents. And if the young child who doesn’t understand social distancing happens to take a toy over to his grandparents, it doesn’t harm anyone else…. I have seen people who walk a dog in the morning and then the evening, presumably reasoning that it doesn’t do any harm.
There has been much discussion, some with a lot of hindsight, as to whether the lockdown was ‘too late’. It may have saved more lives, but even on the weekend of the 21st March, two days before lockdown was announced by the prime minister, I was emailing the owner of the lovely cottage in the north east we were staying in about renting it again the following weekend. I reasoned that it was so remote we could easily ‘self-isolate’, go for walks in the early morning from the door onto deserted moorland, take all the food we need, drive there and back on one tank of fuel etc etc. In the end we decided not to, which when we heard the ‘rules’ was the right thing. I even held out until the very end, that our week in Lanzarote could go ahead.
I have re-watched two issues of BBC’s Question Time from March and even ten weeks on there are some things that are now shocking. On 6th March after the first death in the UK when there were 100 cases, health secretary Matt Hancock said that the majority of people will get minor symptoms and a few will need some extra care. There was laughter in the audience when a panellist talked about elbow bumping instead of handshaking, and another joked about not being able to find toilet roll. To be fair there was worry about older people and those who might not be able to go to work and claim sick pay. Matt Hancock said that the evidence was that large-scale sporting gatherings outside were not places where widespread infection spreading would happen. It was in the ‘containment phase’ where the message was only people with symptoms had to self-isolate. Professor John Ashton, former head of public health in north west England was on the panel on the 13th March, the night after the Liverpool v Real Madrid match at Anfield. His accent gave him away as a Liverpool fan, but he had stayed away, frightened that the virus had come to Merseyside and spread through the bars before and after the match. I watched this live and, like host Fiona Bruce, remember getting quite cross at what seemed a hysterical reaction when he started shouting about wasting four or five weeks already.
The daily briefings had started, but in my opinion there was no appetite for a full lockdown and if it had been imposed at the start of March compliance would have been much lower. Ironically, if it had happened and after two weeks ‘only 100 people a day’ were dying, people would have said ‘it was all a hoax and businesses are going to the wall so let us go back to work and school’. It is also clear that there were not enough tests available as we seemed pleased to be testing 2,000 a day.
For me, this week has been a rollercoaster of hope. One day I hear that the cases may be falling quickly and caught a clip on the radio of a scientist who believed that in a few months the virus would just die out. I started checking the booking sites for the holiday cottage in the north east. The next day there was talk of the virus being ‘with us for years, and life would never get back to normal….’.
It does seem that there is cause for hope. You don’t need to understand much about the way viruses spread to know that if there are no cases in your local population, it can’t spread. The origins of it may have been transmission from a mammal to humans, but that doesn’t happen spontaneously on suburban estates in the UK. New Zealand earlier in the week and Guernsey on Saturday released lockdown completely. They are both islands that have managed to almost full close their borders, and done lots of testing and tracking. New Zealand has a population of 4.82 million and only 21 deaths and on several days in the last three weeks no new cases, despite carrying out an average of 4,400 daily tests. Guernsey, a very small island with a population of 67,000 had no new cases for 22 days. There were pictures of families actually hugging grandparents. Shocking! But to repeat myself, you can’t catch the virus from someone who hasn’t got it. They have been developing ‘household bubbles’, firstly just two then last week putting 2+2 to make four households that don’t have to maintain social distancing. This very simple 3-minute video explains the approach;
This could be the way the UK government(s) decide to go. Let’s stay optimistic.
Test, Test, Test! or Education, Education, Education?
When the head of the World Health Organisation was asked for a message to countries fighting to control the spread of Coronavirus Pandemic in early March, his answer was very clear ‘Test, test, test’. It does seem that those countries who had a good testing regime allied to a system to do contact tracing, asking people who had the virus to isolate themselves, have managed to control the spread.
Former prime minister Tony Blair at the ‘New Labour’ Party Conference at Blackpool in 1996 gave a speech about his top three priorities if they were able to form the next government. He said ‘Education, Education, Education’.
Following on from last week’s blog, these two phrases have collided as the country tries to start ‘the new normal’ with schools being asked to start opening to more pupils. Teaching unions met with scientists and data has been published and discussed. There is still some uncertainty and natural concerns, specifically around the ability to do local testing and tracing. If we wait for a vaccine or 100% guarantees of no risk we will never get schools open. But with a combination of good risk assessments, the ability for schools or local authorities to determine phased opening in conjunction with parents, no sanctions for parents not wanting to send their children back, and exemptions for ‘vulnerable’ children and adults, backed with local testing hubs, it could work. We might even decide to ask parents to form ‘household bubbles’ based on the friends of very young children so that they can hug and go to each other’s houses to play. Some schools will wait two weeks which is the current time for infection rates to halve.
Other news this week
- The daily death count continued to fall even when ‘all situations’ were taken into account. The last four daily totals of 338, 351, 282 and 118 and the total of 36,793 appears to be a steeper decline than previous weeks.
- We clapped for carers for the 9th week on Thursday. I was pleased to learn that Dutch-born Londoner Annemarie Plas responsible for starting this initiative, suggesting that this coming week should be the last and tenth time. This will allow us to stop, reflect on the sacrifice and set a date in the future to remember again, perhaps annually. This will stop it going on and on and simply petering out gradually.
- President Trump was causing concerns again with his announcement that he had been taking the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for two weeks. This is not a recognised prophylactic for the virus causing problems now, and even the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) warn against its use. Being a pharmacist, Alyson has access to the online British National Formulary (BNF) of UK recommended drugs. She posted two pictures of the list of side effects on social media. I have highlighted two particular ones that President Trump should be aware of:
More worrying than President Trump’s personal medication was a warning from the White House’s coronavirus taskforce member Dr Anthony Fauci that new localized outbreaks were “inevitable” as mitigation measures are relaxed, leading to the need to put in place a further lockdown. Given the dependence of the world’s economy on that of the US, however much we wish it didn’t, the decisions of the administration are vital to the rest of us. - Airlines, travel agents, hotels and others in the tourism sector gave stark warnings of the economic effects on their businesses. Hertz Global Holdings Inc the US car hire firm, and Specialist Leisure Group, which owns coach company Shearings, both collapsed into administration. US business magazine Forbes stated;
Hertz was just another victim of the pandemic, people will say. It’s easy to blame the company’s misfortunes, as well as the other corporate casualties, on the pandemic. The reality is a different story. The failures of Hertz and the others have more to do with their own arrogant inertia and inability to recognize the fast-changing trends and a refusal to adapt their business models accordingly.
This is a narrative we will come back to when the whole economic story of the crisis is analysed. Some companies have been ‘found out’ by the pandemic while others have adapted in an economic equivalent of the evolutionary principle of ‘survival of the fittest’.
How has week 9 been for us?
We are conscious of the fortunate position we are in with regard to holidays. We have managed to get a full refund on our Lanzarote holiday, moved an Easter cottage and another Cottage in Ross-on-Wye, both with family, to the same weeks in 2021. This week the travel company moved a very expensive cruise in Norway to 2021, along with an upgrade and £45 credit.
We have been taking part in a UK Biobank project for over 12 years. They are a major national and international health resource, and a registered charity, with the aim of improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening illnesses – including cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes. We have been scanned, had blood taken and completed endless questionnaires on lifestyles. This week I received an email from them on behalf of Professor Sir Patrick Vallance, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser. I volunteered to send a sample of my blood monthly for six months to be tested for coronavirus antibodies. The project will help the scientists track the course of the infection across the population. As well as us ‘oldies’ aged 40-69 they needed some younger adults, so I sent invites to Michael and David.
This week I was very proud to wave Alyson off back to the ‘frontline’. It did feel a little like sending her off to war, as she set out with her mask, visor and hand gel to work a shift at a local community pharmacy. She had been desperate to play her part, but as she has a condition that would class her as vulnerable, she wanted to wait until safer conditions were in place. There was no way that she was going in at the start of the crisis with busy branches overwhelmed by customers and lots of other people working there. Her Saturday morning session was at a small local branch with screens between the customers and counter. You can see below pictures of some measures. There was only one other member of the team working so social distancing was easy to maintain. We have had a chat about her wishes should she contract Covid-19 and need to go into ICU.
Alyson also had an alarm on her phone go off as part of the local volunteering force. It was to call a lady recently discharged from hospital to check she was ok in terms of shopping, medication, loneliness and mental wellbeing. All was fine and she didn’t need to pass them on to anyone else.
Keep safe everyone and let’s see what the next week brings.
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