The Social Isolation Diaries — Week 11 and,
Well that’s it then, social isolation is over. Officially, not completely because we are still being urged to remain two metres apart but from next next week we will be allowed to meet up in groups of “up to six” in public spaces. Which has, of course, been translated into “you can now have a barbecue with all your friends and family in your mate’s back garden” or “you can all go to the beach for the day, especially tomorrow when it is likely to be 28 degrees”.
Which is precisely what hundreds of people did at Durdle Door, kidding themselves they were socially distancing their rugs and deckchairs, until the air ambulance needed to land and the police had to clear the beach. I don’t know if you know Durdle Door but there is only way entrance and exit to the beach down a steep path so suddenly hundreds, if not thousands were all crowded together at one end of the beach watching in horror as idiots who had jumped off the rocks were rescued from the water.
I despair.
This pandemic is still killing hundreds a day and yet people are now interrupting any relaxation of the restrictions as they see fit. Mind you, is it any wonder when we see what the Prime Minister’s chief advisor has done recently? If Dominic Cummings can claim that his interpretation of the rules were allowed and that any reasonable person would have done the same then it throws the whole “stay home / stay alert” mantra into a farce.
Did you watch Cummings’ press conference last weekend? I sat through every cringeworthy second, thinking he sounded like he was an eight year old reading out his summer holiday diary, whilst simultaneously looking like a supply teacher straight out of teacher training college who had never faced a group of 30 twelve year olds before. Driving your four year old on a 60 mile round trip in order to test his eyesight? It would be laughable if it wasn’t in the midst of a global pandemic where 13 year olds have been buried without being surrounded by their family and loved ones have said goodbye to family members on FaceTime.
How he thinks he has done nothing wrong, has no regrets, has nothing to apologise for is beyond me. How he hasn’t been fired says more about our spineless Prime Minister than anything else Boris has done recently.
The Test and Trace app was launched last week too, and promptly crashed. There are questions about the GDPR implications of giving a faceless entity all the contact information for people we have been in contact with in the previous week should be begin displaying symptoms. Unsurprisingly contact tracers say they haven’t had enough training, and the whole system crashed on the first morning.
More schools will be open from tomorrow for children in year 1 and year 6 to return after half term. A large number have been open in order to look after the children of key workers since the lockdown commenced but this is now seen as the safest way for children to return to something resembling normal. Lots of talk from teaching unions about whether or not this is actually safe, and I do feel that it might still be too soon and we do run the risk of a second peak.
We still haven’t cuddled our grand-daughter because that worry about a second peak / people being asymptomatic terrifies me. Their midwife has told them they need to shield for at least six weeks, regardless of what the government suggests, and none of us are in any rush to contradict that even if it is painfully hard.
I have focussed on meal planning, cooking, and this week, planting tomatoes, oh and resurrecting the gin garden! Home is where the heart is, but it is also where we are safest and quite frankly I am still in no real rush to change that.
Image from Unsplash