Coronavirus streets in Manchester - LXX

Falling temperatures and rising prices

It is 3⁰C outside as I looked at my smartwatch, so I prepared to go shopping wearing thermals underneath, a jumper and a coat with a hat to keep me warm. As I stepped out, I realised I needed a mask too, the balaclava one that I could wear around my neck and pull up to cover my mouth and nose when going into the shop.

The usuals have gone up by 10 to 15 per cent, somehow, I still have an idea of what the prices were maybe a year ago or even two, a mental note that just reveals itself as a significant difference. Sometimes, I shirk at the thought, and a voice of consternation goes off in my head, “I am not paying that much for this.”

Boosting from a hosting

My visit to the hospital just over a week ago also informs me that you do not want to put yourself at any risk as we enter the 4^th year of the pandemic, and the truth is it has not gone. People coming in from China would need to present a negative COVID-19 test to travel to many locations, in the US, a homegrown variant with the ability to evade the protections we have relied on, threatens.

For instance, I took my 3^rd booster shot just over 3 weeks ago and that is 5 vaccine injections altogether, 3 of Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty, the fourth of Moderna Spikevax and the last of Pfizer/BioNTech Comirnaty bivalent jab. Yet, hardly anyone wears a mask even as I have been doing for the past month in the church too. I guess those from the Far East as China, South Korea, and Japan who have had Coronavirus and SARs incidents are the ones to be seen donning face masks.

No one wants to sit for 9 hours to see a doctor and those who needed beds were on gurneys for hours, the NHS has been hit with a capacity and resource issue and this along with the industrial dispute has no prospect of a resolution in the near future.

You just never know

I overheard one conversation in the shop, a colleague was asking another if she had children and she answered three. The follow-up question was about how old they were; I thought she might just have a teenager and two younger ones. Well, the youngest was 26 and the older two were already in their thirties. I had to say, you can’t have a youngest of 26 when you do not even look 28.

Appearances are always deceptive in the many guises we encounter in looks or even in knowing who might have contracted the Coronavirus and is out there amongst people, careless and carefree of the danger they pose to others. Whatever you see on the streets, the authorities intend that we live with this virus and are withdrawing the data that might keep us informed of trends and concerns.

It is everyone for themselves and in that, one should take the best advice and protect oneself by avoiding enclosed spaces and crowds, wearing masks and still having hand sanitiser handy. Eternal vigilance remains the price of our liberty to be free of all infirmity related to the Coronavirus.

Cape Town reflections: To the point of embrace

With every hope to do

A time to reflect on my recent journey to Cape Town, for this visit for a rendezvous with Brian had been in consideration from the time I returned in mid-January 2021, but the pandemic with its many waves and Coronavirus variants kept everything at bay.

As the year drew to a close, I had at least two essential things to do before I could plan to travel, my biannual consultation was already scheduled for the last week in October and coming due in the second week of November was my vaccine booster shot after which it looked like there was a clear way ahead to plan for the break.

I planned on a 6-week break and had diligently informed them at work about my plans for which a stand-in was recruited for my time away and this gave me the opportunity on approval to book my holiday from the first week of November and the countdown had begun.

We ploughed ahead regardless

Meanwhile, our daily conversations continued, in the morning and the evening as we planned what we were going to do along with the prospect of getting married. It looked like the whole pall of the pandemic was being put behind us until just in the last week of November, the Omicron variant first sequenced in South Africa though from what transpired was already prevalent around in Europe and the US, led to the putting of southern African countries on the UK red list without even knowing much about the variant.

This could have kiboshed our plans, but I reckoned that since I was going to be away for 6 weeks, enough knowledge and understanding of the variant would have helped put some in reconsideration into the knee-jerk reaction in the Global North. Besides, the whole idea of spending 10 nights in sub-standard quarantine hotels did not appeal to me.

Anyway, I kept my hopes up and continued with my arrangements, renewing my travel insurance, helping my stand-in bed-in, taking my Fitness to Travel PCR Test and I was ready to go. My journey to Cape Town was smooth and in just two legs, the first from Manchester to Paris and the newly reinstated Paris to Cape Town leg, arriving just after 22:28 on the 3^rd of December, but without my baggage in tow.

Bags on a merry-go-round

My baggage did not make the transfer between arriving from Manchester to taking off from Paris, and though we arrived late in Paris, I literally had to rush to the departure gate, the transit time was another 24 minutes longer than the scheduled connection and still, I was not reunited with my baggage until Sunday afternoon. The baggage itself took the Manchester – Paris – Amsterdam – Cape Town route. I should have been given Airmiles for that too.

At first, I thought I would need to stay at an airport hotel overnight because of the pandemic restriction curfew, but that was not an issue, travellers were allowed to make that journey to their accommodations. I had arrived in Cape Town safely and was in Brian’s arms that night, that was all that mattered besides the troublesome issue of my baggage somewhere on the planet.

Let's do basic Greek indeed

All Greek in our romance

In the quandary of names or naming, the unintended occurs with the need to avoid unnecessary conflict that some are wont to stir up for it is in confusion and confrontation that they find every sense of satisfaction, you almost voice a silent prayer that peace would never find a home with their kind of hospitality. [UK Today News: Donald Trump Jr, Ted Cruz troll WHO for skipping ‘Xi’ in naming omicron variant]

Much as we have adopted the Greek alphabet as the nomenclature for the variants of the Coronavirus we could as well have used Roman numerals. However, if you thought you could learn the Greek alphabet as the pandemic reveals new ways to remain part of our globally contemporary news stories, you will be on to a bad education.

Know beyond the popular

Having done engineering subjects, many of the units of measurement or formulas for equations have Greek nomenclature, many of which I cannot care to remember at this time. The new Coronavirus Variant of Concern (VoC) has been given omicron, after we have seen through alpha, beta, gamma, and delta variants, some Variants of Interest (VoI) were given lambda and mu. It would appear some designated variants just never reached the popularity stakes and so did not become global news. [WHO: Tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants]

To help understand the situation, I have shared the Greek alphabet; alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega.

Names to make trouble with

The WHO skipped the 13^th Greek letter, nu just not to give the Coronavirus the moniker of new, the decision to skip the 14^th Greek letter xi can be termed political and diplomatic as it would have sent us looking east to China where the first indications the Coronavirus emerged from and it just happens to be the surname of the President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping. The surname is first when referring to Chinese names.

I guess we would have been met with the same dilemma if Roman numerals were used, for at the time we had lambda in the Greek alphabet, it would have been XI. The WHO depends on global consensus and cooperation, which can entertain the risk of favouritism and/or bias in trying to serve all interests without offending any principal participant.

Get a piece of the pie

It might have hamstrung the WHO in tackling the Coronavirus with alacrity and most especially in determining the true source of this global pandemic, yet everyone needs to be kept on board.

One can only hope that with the emergence of the omicron variant, world leaders can come together to address the appallingly disgraceful state of global vaccine inequity and along with relaxing patent restrictions to allow the Global South to produce their own vaccines to local distribution too. In a sense, we might with that agreement finally have got a piece of the pie, to get this Coronavirus out of circulation that we would no need to get to a Coronavirus variant called pi.

The UK: On easing the lockdown, we're being taken for fools again

Defined by incompetence

The unforgivable inability to anticipate and act dogs the government of Boris Johnson that its rank incompetence cannot fail to show itself. In the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic there is one statistic that cannot be ignored, the fact that the UK, despite its success in the rollout of the vaccine still remains ahead of all European countries in the death toll, mostly acquired into early this year. Then fifth behind the United States, Brazil, India, and Mexico in that order. [WorldMeters: Coronavirus]

In my view, someone needs to be held responsible and accountable for that failure, the successful vaccination campaign cannot subsume the critical analysis of what went wrong and for some justice regarding the unfortunate martyrdom of the innocent, especially frontline workers, an independent inquiry with far-reaching scope to interrogate, indict, and publish cannot begin soon enough.

We could have avoided it

Having set out a roadmap for the unlocking of the England and broadly the UK, with an end date of the June the 21^st to all restrictions, Boris Johnson appeared to inform us that the Indian variant of the Coronavirus might stymie those plans. We hope it is just a scare, but they have form.

That situation was completely avoidable, it was obvious that in places where leadership was populist and caught napping variants would emerge, yet, our borders were left porous for people bearing the virus to arrive with minimal checks and so introduce community spreading that would definitely begin to alarm any public health official. [BBC News: Covid: Indian variant could disrupt 21 June easing, PM says]

It was a gamble, not a plan

As I have said before, the successful vaccination campaign was a gamble that paid off, for we were the first to grant emergency usage of a CoVID-19 vaccine and administer it to the broader public, and against manufacturer notice extended the timeframe between vaccine doses to capture a broader cohort of those taking the first dose. If this vaccination programme had not been under the management of the NHS, it would have gone the way of the exorbitant and corrupt PPE procurement scheme and the ineffective but outrageously costly testing, tracking, and tracing programme.

The gamble paid off, but the incompetence of the government cannot seem to find total concealment behind that success for the failure to act promptly, check border entry, institute stringent protocols against variants long before they became of concern, makes it the third time of lethargy and inertia that is about to put the UK nations at risk of another avoidable Coronavirus wave. The utter carelessness of which has been unbelievably rewarded at the polls.

Green list to nowhere

Then when you look at the 12 Green List countries, never has a confidence trick been performed so brilliantly on the public as this group of shysters have thus attempted. New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore are not receiving visitors from the UK, Portugal, Israel and Gibraltar have local restrictions as to who can visit from abroad, The Faroe Islands you can visit, but no airline comforts like food and beverages, the in-flight magazine, then blankets and pillows must be removed from the flights. [Faroe Islands] [BBC News: Green list countries: New rules for England revealed]

The vaccinated or recovered can visit Iceland, and at least if, from a high-risk country, you can have a hotel quarantine at no extra charge. [Iceland]

Brunei; how to get there or Falkland Islands; maybe idyllic, then South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands are apparently remote and literally inhospitable in the South Atlantic, also in that region, a volcanic outpost that spots the place of exile and the death of Napoleon Bonaparte is St Helena, Tristan de Cunha, and Ascension Island, places that might well be exotic but you probably cannot reach without traversing one of the amber or red list countries, or get to directly at great cost. Gosh! We really have been taken for fools.

Some thoughts on the vaccines

I am feeling good

Two days after taking my second Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, the only discomfort I have had is a pain in my arm where I took the shot. Whilst I did take a painkiller yesterday, I do not think there is any need for one today, the pain will subside, and things should be fine.

Then, I have heard from friends who took the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, all their reports suggest that for at least a couple of days, they almost feel like death, terrible headaches, feverishness, and sweats.

Fears and cheers

It is a bit concerning that some people are not returning for their second shots and that is news from the United States of America where it is the Pfizer / BioNTech and the Moderna vaccine are the more widely dispensed and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine is yet to approved there. [National Geographic: Why we shouldn't panic about the millions who missed their second vaccine dose—yet]

With such first experiences and side effects, some who took the Oxford AstraZeneca might be reticent about returning for the second and reliving their ordeal. The reading is whilst the side effects are serious for the first dose, on the second dose, there have rarely been serious side effects afterwards. [British Heart Foundation: Getting your second Covid-19 vaccine]

It takes two shots

It still remains if we decide to take the vaccine, we should follow the full dosage to be fully vaccinated. Despite the reports of debilitating side effects which are statistical rarities and I know I have written about statistical versus personal realities of experiencing side effects, the preponderance of evidence makes taking vaccinations a safer bet over no protection or contracting COVID-19.

Blog - Opinion: Between statistical and personal side effects

Blog - Rather the vaccine than COVID-19

Obviously, the AstraZeneca product has not had the best of the press, who can receive it is being reviewed constantly as we learn more of how people are affected by it, but on balance it is part of the arsenal against this Coronavirus.

Getting to go on

I did not take it and was ready to exercise the option not to if offered because I am a frequent traveller to South Africa where the vaccine apparently offers minimal protection against the prevalent variant there. [British Heart Foundation: Covid variants: latest on the Indian, Brazilian, UK and South African variants]

Even the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine still being studied for efficacy, is apparently 100% effective against symptomatic COVID-19 disease. All the vaccines worked on for boosters to tackle the other variants. My beau has had his two Sinopharm vaccine shots in Zimbabwe, after a bit of hesitancy. [Xinhua: Feature: Chinese vaccines rollout gains steam in Zimbabwe]

We need to unlock the world and get going, the vaccines are part of the newer world order. Let’s go.

The CoVID-19 mutations are not the problem

South Africa is doing well

I have just about had it with all this talk about the South African variant or mutation of the Coronavirus, especially in the UK where it seems to be driving the conversation with hysterical and histrionic abandon.

The virus was the same everywhere until its apparently unchecked spread led to mutations and that is what we have seen with variants in the UK, from Mexico, from Brazil, unfortunately for first a region in South Africa before it really caught on.

I was in South Africa for five weeks, on holiday and also to be with my partner who I had not seen for 11 months because of this global pandemic. We were under stringent restrictions with extensive CoVID-19 protocols that are literally absent in the UK.

The things they did

We had to wear masks in public, on entry to any premises we had our temperature taken, we sanitised our hands, social distancing was the rule with CoVID marshals in public places. There was a night curfew, an alcohol ban, beaches were closed, but the public parks were open, we could visit museums and travel a bit.

They brought it under some control that they could ease these restrictions and begin to chart a path to recovery. Sadly, I do not see either the resolution, will, or competence of our government in the UK to reach a point where this virus will be controlled.

South Africa had checks as we came to passport control, our tests were checked, vitals observed and where anyone did not meet the requirements for entry, they were to be whisked off to quarantine hotels for 10 days at their own expense.

To leave South Africa, I had to take a PCR test that needed to be negative, I could not board a plane without it and had to don a mask through the flight. My details and particulars were checked as I traversed Paris, yet, when I arrived in the UK, there was nothing in place, I walked through immigration without any hinderance and was only contacted over 24 hours after my arrival and then 4 days later to consider a CoVID-19 test, just in case I had returned with the South African strain.

We need better hands

This should have been checked at my entry into the UK, but here we are with well over 100,000 deaths because of the lackadaisical and moribund policies of this inept government. The variants and the mutations are not the problem, it is the ability to handle it and manage it whilst carrying the people along with convincing and competent governance that will bring this under control.

Let’s just say it as it is, the South Africans have been competent and efficient that in the midst of a pandemic, they opened for tourist and managed the situation, despite the variation or mutation, life is getting better.

The vaccines will work only to the extent that we remain vigilant, it will not be a talisman to wipe away the errors in managing this pandemic, we hope in time, the principals in this matter will be held accountable and responsible.