The Corona Diaries – Day112

Do I detect some panic? Is Johnson becoming desperate? I think so.

There has been a panic about the economy. He was urging people to go back to work – not because they are more efficient when back at work but because they use petrol, public transport, have a meal, buy snacks and generally spend money. If they stay at home they don’t. So people are in the office.

They’ve opened up pubs, shops and restaurants and now a lot of people are going to be inside. It’s like we’re inviting a surge in cases.

The virus seems to spread in droplets that hang in the air long after people have gone. If people are together indoors, unless there is brilliant ventilation to remove the droplets, the droplets will be hanging in the air and spread from person to person. Not a great scenario.

But Johnson (or is it Cummings?) has a cunning plan. They have done a U-turn. A while ago facemasks were useless. Now they are so good that they are going to be mandatory! In fact, anybody who fails to agree with this will be fined £100. It’s that important.

The irony is that I agree with it. Facemasks are important. They catch droplets and so the virus is not sprayed out into the air. It should have been encouraged a long time ago.

The trouble with Johnson (and Trump) is that they are so far behind the curve they are a liability. They were slow to lockdown, and so let the virus take hold, slow to get PPE sorted, slow to get a tracing app, slow to get the testing up and running (it still isn’t there), slow to quarantine, slow to stop flights, and slow to bring in facemasks.

There is a stupid arrogance at work. We do it all ourselves. We have nothing to learn from anybody else. Despite all the claims to be ‘WORLD-BEATING’ and have ‘OVEN-READY’ solutions, it is easy to see that we are far from world-beating, indeed we have been pathetic. There have been no oven-ready solutions. They’ve given the tenders to their chums and their chums have been useless. They have completely failed to deliver.

What we should have done right at the beginning is to look at Asia and see how they handle this. They have had extensive practice with SARS and MERS. They know what they are doing. They were prepared. They did temperature checks, extensive testing, fast shutdowns and quarantined. They also discovered facemasks helped control these pandemics.

We had plenty of warning. The disease started up in November. It started to spread in January. The WHO was giving warnings. But our glorious leaders were only interested in Brexit. Talk about complacent. They surely had experts looking at what was going on and giving advice (if not why not?). We know that pandemics come along regularly. They either didn’t have an institution in place or chose not to listen. Either way, they are culpable!!

I hope these idiots have agencies set up to monitor asteroids! I hope they have contingency plans for all other threats. Because it is absurd for any politician to hold their hands up and say nobody saw it coming. Part of their jobs is to be prepared for every type of threat and pandemics are not a new threat.

We are just being led by a bunch of plonkers!

Johnson uses the wrong language. He has sent out the wrong message. He dithers, confuses and enthuses. Bloody useless!!

In the States there were another 58,000 cases. Things are mad. I was reading a report of a thirty-year-old man who died. He went to a covid party where people met up with a sick person. Before he died he told the nurse that he’d thought covid-19 was a hoax and now he realised that it wasn’t. It seems that there are a number of these covid parties where people meet up with ill people with the intention of building up immunity. No wonder the virus is out of control in Texas. Those people are nuts.

No news on Bolsonaro. He hasn’t died yet, unlike tens of thousands of the people he is misleading.

So, today I played my Velvet Underground, tried to go for a walk at Bridlington (but my calf was too sore) and did some work on a novel I wrote twenty years ago – Farther From The Sun. I’m enjoying meeting with my younger self.

Stay safe!