COVID is making my brain fuzzy, like when we were living through the Canterbury earthquakes. An opinion piece in Stuff today made my brain even fuzzier, when it suggested we need a milder lockdown to keep the economy going. The economy serves the people, we don’t exist to serve the economy. If a lockdown saves many people’s lives, isn’t that what we need to do?
“You can’t be happy all the time, but you can be content,” my Dad would say. He was remarkably contented. Here are two other exemplars of contentment I’d like to introduce you to.
I met my first non-bubble person in a week today. This was ridiculously stressful. How soon will we have rapid tests to show whether people have COVID and vaccinations to prevent people getting it?
The planet is feeling prickly, as is our country. People are telling each other what to do and other people are reacting badly. We all need more kindness to make life work better. Here are some pictures of the people the word ‘kindness’ reminds me of.
Here we are in our bubble wondering how much news to read each day. I’ve added Denmark to my graph to compare more widely in Scandinavia. I’m thinking deaths may be more indicative of the state of COVID than cases because who knows how each country defines cases. At least deaths in Italy are increasing at a lower rate than last week, after locking down.
The world is setting up COVID-19 management experiments and New Zealand is one of them. We will be able to compare, in an action research setting, how different approaches to COVID work. New Zealand and Norway are lockding down, like much of Europe, while Sweden is staying open and asking people to physically isolate. I will watch the case data with interest.
New Zealand is about to hold its breath for 4 weeks and it’s time I return to practicing meditation. I’ll have time and this is the type of time meditation is helpful.
We’re preparing to hunker down, doing last runs to town for supplies. New Zealand is racing against the clock as Level 4 approaches. Will it be only 4 weeks of lockdown? Here’s hoping but it seems unlikely. And whose information on the virus and how to act is reliable? So many unknowns.
Already we’re moving into a Level 4 lockdown. That was a quick honeymoon period. Now we can watch cases rise while staying home; we won’t get on the Our World in Data COVID graph till we reach 100.
We’re all in shock, finding it hard to absorb the speed of events related to COVID-19. We’ve heard Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern explain why a rapid rise in cases means we have to start reducing our freedoms to prevent disease transmission. What is life going to be like for the next little while?
