How’s the experiment going? New Zealand’s vital COVID stats – testing, cases, deaths (only one so far) – are looking good. Norway, Denmark and Sweden are looking similar, which is odd given Sweden’s very different approach, not locking down.
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.
Bubbles need optimists. My realism outweighs my optimism, which outweighs my pessimism. However, for bubble times, I’d like to invite an optimist into my bubble – here are a couple of people I’d import in a flash.
We often rely on trusting others to do the right thing, both when your partner hands you a water bottle and when your COVID experiment requires you to social distance. However, we have the strange discrepancy returning New Zealanders are trusted to self-quarantine while we are not trusted to swim in the sea and not drown. Hmmm…
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.
