Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LXXIV

Out of sight, but still about

You rarely hear of it anymore, that is the Coronavirus or COVID-19, but to think it has disappeared totally is to be deluded beyond reason. Even if you do not follow the statistics, there are signs, notifications, or indications that we still need some precautions.

I cannot say for what reason, but I have noticed seemingly healthy young people donning facemasks and those are not passing for balaclavas envisaging criminal behaviour nor is this observed on the typically Far-East Asian cohort who have no qualms about masking and this before it became an accessory for infectious disease control here.

Beckoning for a reckoning

Then obviously the notices pushed to our mobile phones for those over a certain age or are immunosuppressed. This tranche of vaccine boosters is to run until the 30^th of June, but you cannot get a pharmacy to walk in for a shot.

Apart from the fact that there is none in the city centre where outlets like Boots or Superdrug could have been engaged, I guess there is no incentive for other chemists to participate. Last week, I made my way to one chemist that had unusually long opening hours and they had no supplies and were not expecting any for up to two weeks hence.

The lesson learnt was to call first before embarking on my journey and it seems the shortage is widespread, they are not inviting anyone to attend today and the possibility of being able to deliver tomorrow is speculative, at best.

Is anyone giving the jab?

The apparent lack of coordination between the drive to get us boosted and the absence of stocks to meet the demand is, in a way, redolent of the legacy of the NHS that the Tories have superintended in 14 years. However, few would take notice of that reality.

If I do get a booster anytime soon, it would be the first 2 vaccines and the 5^th booster and I would rather have it following the advice than listen to the unqualified with their conspiracy theories about COVID-19, the vaccines, and much else. The greater culprits in this atrocity and disservice to public health seem to be religious leaders.

It still behoves all to keep safe and I do have a stash of facemasks in my rucksack for times when it just seems smart and prudent to wear one.

Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LXII

No power of witchcraft

I have always been fascinated by the whole charade behind identifying that someone is a witch and the means by which the suspected are interrogated and forced to confess under the pain of death that they practice witchcraft, after which they were almost always put to death in the most horrific and gruesome manner.

It makes you wonder how someone who apparently has mastery of the dark arts can just at accusation and threat of untrammelled menace would suddenly be helpless and incapable of defending themselves. Their accusers having nothing but power and manufactured conviction that they are right, and they can rid the community of evil by the propensity of wickedness.

They can’t be that helpless

In my view, if anyone were indeed a witch, whether child or adult, the very least one should expect is something magical challenging the faculties like just disappearing from the midst of their accusers at the minimum or if they were that inclined, they put the fear of real witchcraft in the hearts of the mob usually led by religious or community leaders seeking to bolster their political status by finding unusual and individualistic people to victimise.

Just imagine, a witch in the heat of being pursued smiting one of two of her attackers with blindness or causing fire to consume one of them. For instance, someone with the mastery of martial art when cornered would hardly crumble into a heap of helplessness, they’ll fight back probably breaking a few bones even if they eventually get captured. This is just a matter of muscle in the physical, not to talk of the metaphysical and paranormal that is associated with witchcraft. I am not convinced many of those accused had any idea of what witchcraft was about, they have just been helpless victims of tyranny.

Strange places in Manchester

Which got me thinking of another fascinating setup, in the back streets of the parish of Manchester into the Hundred of Salford (I love old English placenames) as I walked from Ancoats to the centre of Cheetham to do some shopping for ethnic goods. Avoiding the main roads apart from when I had to cross them, I was soon cutting through St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park into NOMA (North Manchester) where architectural monstrosities sway in the skyline.

A rather secluded part of old industrial Manchester had a working brewery taking me back to my teenage years when my first job was in a brewery, along with clothing manufacturer factories bearing names of South Asian provenance and let one not suggest they might be sweatshops. Then I was in Strangeways (it has history), dominated by Her Majesty’s Prison where twice in the week past, I saw someone drive through the gates in a Mercedes Benz car, they must be paying good money there as it was just too early in the morning for the person to be a visitor. Anyway, I look away.

A plague of drones

Up on the walls, were surveillance cameras with screen wipers and then signs indicating this was a ‘no drone’ zone. I guess with one drone, that might present a helpless witch scenario. I can remember which of the recent Olympic games opening ceremonies I watched where thousands of drones were deployed in a light show. My vivid imagination considering a swarm of drones hovering over a prison controlled from so far away that the drones were using Artificial Intelligence to maintain proximity with each other and if one or a few were taken out, they massed into new attacking formations.

This again, not even to deliver contraband to the prison but to get everyone agitated. Who would do such a thing? This is more the stuff of thriller films than anything else. That was my though process on the matter of witchcraft, one would expect a witch to summon the equivalent of an amazing mixed martial arts practitioner controlling with the mind a swarm of drones able to defend themselves from immediate physical danger and create enough of a distraction to escape capture.

Now, where was I? Walking up New Bury Road to get to Great Cheetham East Street. Suffice it to say, apart from the lady at the checkout in the shop, I was the only other one wearing a face mask.

Coronavirus streets on my mind - LII

On the advent of the pandemic

In a way, I want to reflect on my experience of this Coronavirus pandemic; it has been troubling, difficult, and long. If I dwelt on the incompetence of my government that has marshalled and shepherded a death rate still unrivalled amongst its peers in Europe, I would find myself a misfit amongst other things, but I have to think for myself and those in my immediate community.

When the pandemic started, I was first classed in the highly vulnerable cohort and required to shield, but the British HIV Association came out with an update advising that those of us with an undetectable viral load and a CD4 cell count above 250, should not need to shield.

That did not make me any less vulnerable as anyone with HIV is immunosuppressed to a degree, we still need to continue our medication regimes and attend our scheduled check-ups. I had returned from South Africa by mid-January 2020 and within 2 weeks I was down with a water infection that required an albeit short hospital admission and weeks of weakness that took a while to recuperate from.

The choices that chilled

If that illness had happened in April, I would have been asked to stay at home and hope for the best when intravenous antibiotics and two sessions of electrolytes would have been needed to get me back to normal. The thought that doctors had unilaterally placed Do Not Resuscitate on a whole swathe of vulnerable patients on their register to apparently save the NHS sent a chill down my spine.

Blog - Thought Picnic: From chills to thrills in health updates

I for one kept isolated as much as I could, wore a face mask everywhere, avoided crowds and enclosed places. I even took to walking exercises as I longed for the opportunity to return to South Africa to be with Brian and that was not until mid-December. If I had not left in the week that I did, I would have been caught by the lockdown in the UK that fuelled another wave of infections and deaths.

Personal precautions, all the time

In South Africa, we had a lockdown too, with a curfew and an alcohol ban, though we could not visit the beach, we could the parks and botanical gardens which we took advantage of. Everywhere we went, we had to don facemasks, had our temperature taken, sanitise our hands and leave our contact details for track and trace purposes. There was a variant on the loose, but we were not careless about our health and welfare.

The only time we ended up in anything like a crowd was when we had to take fitness to travel PCR tests, for at that time, only one laboratory offered reliable tests accepted for travel purposes. This was before there was a vaccine and when we had not yet been offered the option to take it.

On return to the UK, I had to self-isolate at home for 10 days, but I was invited on the 5^th day for a test that proved negative and so earned an early release from my isolation. All the while, I was working from home and doing my best to thrive, despite the circumstances.

Every measure for safe living

Through this year, I had my first Pfizer jab in the last week of February, the Delta variant turned into a community threat from April into May, requiring another lockdown and in the first week of May, I got my second Pfizer jab. Much as we planned for another rendezvous in South Africa, it was beginning to look like we might not meet until the end of the year.

I had my hospital consultations for HIV in April and October, my annual flu jab and then took my third Pfizer jab or the booster shot in the second week of November. From October, we had decided December was the earliest we could meet again, and I put in my plans for holiday for the whole of December and the first two weeks of January. I would suppose I was granted the time compassionately with respect to my circumstances and the agency has provided a stand-in for the time that I am away.

Much as we are vaccinated, we are not throwing caution to the winds, as the same precautions we observed last year when there was no vaccine, we have observed diligently even as many we see on the streets seem to care nothing about the pandemic that has hardly gone away.

Calm in the face of turmoil

Just a week before my departure from England, South Africa and neighbouring southern African countries were placed on the red list that required any returnees to the UK to take up exorbitant hotel quarantine for 11 nights regardless of vaccination status, it could have scuppered our plans, but as my absence would be for 6 weeks and we were still learning about the Omicron variant, I felt that things would change during that period. I had to field many enquiries about my plans, but I remained calm and sanguine.

I changed nothing about my plans and flew out on the 3^rd of December, I am glad to note that the red list has been completely depleted from this morning and it is my hope that no radical changes occur for the rest of my sojourn here. Despite what the governments in many countries think they should be doing regarding this pandemic; I think they should be giving us advice and full information about the state of the pandemic.

Not getting too smart about it

However, I think it is now down to personal responsibility to take the utmost and particular attention to one’s health, to get vaccinated, to take precautions, and to navigate out Coronavirus streets with moderation, common sense and every safety measure to avoid contracting this virus.

Much as I cannot understand the inclination for vaccine hesitancy from the unlearned, talk less of those in the health services, I can only wonder how they expect to fight a virus with a naïve immune system, but each to their own, I know, I need vaccines against many things and some I cannot take like the yellow fever vaccine because it has a life though attenuated virus.

We are making the best of the time we have together and that is also for our health, our wellbeing and most importantly, our mental health too.

Blog - Quarantined in my self-isolation

Coronavirus streets in Cape Town - L

This city wins us

Cape Town is like our city of dreams; we have so fallen in love with this place and found that we take in life with gusto finding quiet locations in this bustling city to feel the warmth of the weather and watch the idling nature be what they naturally are.

Then you wonder, there are troops and troupes, groups and teams, friends like gangs, families with children left to the abandon of carefree and unconcerned expression, that they could literally be out of control but for the grace of God.

There is no pandemic here, omicron is as Greek to them as their probably knowing such a letter existed only a week before. I thought I had flown into a curfew and would have to spend the night at the airport, the law was not as strict as it appeared to be, the knowledge that a flight had arrived late to the international airport made allowances for the passengers to be taken to their chosen destinations.

Omicron be on the run

Out at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, the crowds were milling, and most facemasks were like stirrups hanging off the chin rather than covering the mouth and the nose. For those who even attempted to cover something, their noses stuck out like protuberances much longer than when Pinocchio had told his third lie.

Then as we looked around for Zakhele Popo, he approached us, not yet in his regalia and we hugged so tightly like old friends do. Everywhere else was lively and heaving, even the dry dock had a large vessel to provide a cacophonous background sound that robbed the waterfront of any stillness.

Blog - Zakhele Popo of V&A Waterfront

We made for the Marina that was secluded as usual, sat on the benches, hugged and kissed many times as the clouds billowed and rolled over Table Mountain, the winds boisterous to the point that the main door to the V&A Waterfront Watershed had to be closed. We were recognised by some and identified by others. We felt we were back. Omicron, go and find another city to give your grief.