I had a rather fraught night. I was woken by "er
indoors TM" having something of a row with Treacle. I woke
in intense pain, and lay in intense pain for some time until I struck on the (frankly
genius) idea of rolling over. The pain went right away, and I saw the alarm
was due to go off two minutes later. I nodded off and woke seemingly ages later
to see it was only three o’clock.
What was that all about?
I watched an episode of “The Good Place” as I
scoffed a bowl of muesli, then I had a little look into the internet. Still
more people were showing their ignorance on Facebook. It is a sad reflection of
our society that any vocal half-wit can become an oracle these days. On a more
serious note, one or two people had been laid off as their firms closed up for
the foreseeable future as the coronageddon situation worsened. Rather than
keeping people on it is cheaper to let them go. I understand that lists of
companies doing this are being drawn up. When this is all over we will know
where not to spend our money.
I eventually found
where I'd left my car and set off to work on a rather cold morning. As I drove
the pundits on the radio were making a rather poor attempt at describing how
testing for corona virus is performed. One can either test for the actual virus
which takes an age and costs a fortune. Or one can test for the body's having
had a reaction to the virus. This is relatively quick and cheap but has the
disadvantage that the test will remain negative until the body has had a
reaction which can take a few weeks after the initial infection. Therefore it
will have a high incidence of falsely negative results. Perhaps it's because
this is what I do every day, but I can't understand why the people on the radio
had such a hard time understanding this. It's all rather simple. In fact this
has been the case when testing for glandular fever for about a hundred years
ever since messers Paul and Bunnell devised their test all those years ago.
There was also an
interesting (if chilling) thought posed by the ex-chief scientific
advisor to the government. He said that this corona virus pandemic is going to
cause a world-wide economic recession, and attempts to alleviate it will make
that recession worse. He went on to say that the corona virus will (for the
most part) take out those members of our society who are least economically
productive, and that a global economic recession would also cause many deaths.
He suggested that by *not* treating the elderly and infirm and leaving
them to croak we could lessen the effects of the coming global recession and in
the long run have less deaths in total.
Is he right?
Is this really how the
government is thinking?
I got to work and found
that since I was last there the door now had a lock on it and that my swipe
card didn't work on that lock.
As I had a cuppa before
I started by phone beeped. The geo-feds had checked the locations of the
potential new geocaches I'd been working on and had given me the thumbs-up for
most of my plan. That was something of a result. There was a minor hiccup with
one bit of what I had in mind; I thought that I might sort that on Saturday
until I had an email from the head honcho at the forestry commission. He has
announced that they have closed all their
forests
to the general public for the duration of the current emergency.
Why?
I was in one of their woods yesterday for hours
and only met three other people. There's far more social isolation to be had in
a forest than there is in the local park.
As the day went on I heard of more lunacy. A
good friend of mine is the manager of a branch of (let’s call it) a
well-known high street store. He’s been told to close up for three weeks.
Another branch of the same store not thirty miles away has been told to stay
open as that branch is “key workers”.
I came home via Aldi where I got more supplies.
I’m getting better at this shopping and got pretty much everything I was after.
Some of it (the chili sauce) went into tonight’s dinner. It was rather
good….
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