Today I’d like my grandmother to be looking after me. I’d like to be in her house baking then play some ball-on-a-string, then stay the night and go to bed in Granny and Fafa’s spare room after they kiss me goodnight and Granny tells me a story about growing up in India.
Contact tracing is a critical part of suppressing COVID – going back through the chain of people who someone ill has been in contact with. It’s disturbing, the thought of the government knowing your every move through your phone.
We had a tea party with our nearby bubble mates – friends living in our barn, using a 2 metre separation as measured by our 1.8 metre table.
The USA FDA has granted emergency use of a test that identifies COVID antibodies in blood within 2 minutes from a finger prick sample i.e. it can identify whether someone has COVID. It’s the first in a chain of rapid COVID tests being developed which will reduce the stress in a supermarket queue of wondering whether the coughing person in front of you has COVID.
COVID-19 is a ‘wicked’ problem – one that is impossible to solve and for which no single solution is sufficient or all-encompassing. The pandemic’s wickedness relates to the interlinked ethical dilemmas around sacrificing people in the interesting of sustaining the economy.
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.
