I have of course said, careful what you eat to boost your immune system. The vaccination program will surely lag behind the mutating variants.
We booked a hotel for a visit to Cambridge in July. We are avoiding contemplating a foreign holiday. Portugal looks inviting just now but we just don’t want to book anything and have the hassle of Covid related cancellations, quarantining and simply not being able to get home. There is too much risk still. Boris is hesitating now over the Indian variant, just days after I had been feeling more optimistic.
I think Boris gave out a fairly upbeat message on Friday, and seems to want to ensure that now our friends have come out of religious fasting uptake of the vaccinnes in the areas required will be better. Our holiday is 3 months away on a flexible sailing ticket. France and Spain infection figures are improving and only 6 regions are showing of extreme concern in France and they are friends of our friends who are giving the UK the issue. Boris said " hands face space and fresh air" So I have a choice fresh air of Blackburn or the fresh air of France and Spain. Hmmm
May may may may. Life is full of risks. Not over yet, it never will be Live your life. Your a long time dead
In India you have a precise example of what happens when you just decide to live with it either because you got cocky and thought that your country had herd immunity and that it was all over as in the case of India or in the likes of Brazil or the USA under Trump where they didn't care and denied the danger. May, may, may, if you just accept the risks and say to hell with it then you will eventually get the kind of collapse of a health system that you see in India right now, that's the reason why we have may, may, may. People crave certainty and imagine that certainty is something that is obtainable in their lives, it isn't, everything is probabilities and particularly when it comes to decisions about public health we have to be governed by an assessment of the balance of probabilities. The difference in this case is that you living your life the way you want and taking the risks you want to take can and will kill other people who didn't choose to take the risks that you wanted to take. I'm not referring to 'you' personally but to the portion of society in general that thinks it's all about their personal quality of life. This virus is unique in recent human experience in its ability to spread through people that show no symptoms i.e. carriers, and also in its long incubation period, it's those two features that force us to consider our actions and the effect of those actions on our fellow citizens.
I think it is inevitable now that there will be full vaccine escape variants somewhere in the world in the next couple of years because of lack of vaccination in poorer countries, at the start back in Jan 2020 people were expecting the problem to be Africa and were pushing a case for helping those countries once vaccines became available but we have vaccine nationalism and other countries have not had enough help, pretty predictable to be honest. What we also have are some amazing new technologies in vaccine development and while they help enormously the production lag behind demand is going to see multiple repeats of the last 18 months as we go forward. Hopefully this will result in a great increase in global vaccine production capacity as this will not be the last virus species jump. One light is a possible Universal Coronavirus vaccine that is being worked on, they are trying to locate common essential components without which any Coronavirus cannot function and trying to create an immune response that targets that component of the virus, it is speculative but it is in development.
I sometimes watch a GP being interviewed at breakfast time. They normally ask her opinion on the latest Covid related developments. Something she said about a week ago struck me. It was simply that younger individuals will protect themselves by having the vaccination. That is to say, to protect themselves from a third lockdown. Yes we are all in this together. We may not see a risk to ourselves but there is a responsibility on every one of us to protect the rest of us. Because if we don’t it will bite us all in the arse one way or another in the end. It is not over yet.
That's not quite true, vaccination programmes could eventually reduce it to a level where it is little more than a cold HCov-OC43 appeared in the 1960s and is a serious virus that can kill but is mostly seen as a cold, HCov-NL63 and HCov-229E are closely related but diverged about 1000 years ago again implicated in the common cold. We will adapt it's just that we haven't really seen something like this, as dangerous as this, in the modern world but viruses have done this forever and the human race is still here, but now we are in a position to not suffer a massive cull of humanity and to compress the time needed to adapt to this. If the numbers get suppressed enough globally it will settle down eventually, but it will need teh vaccines for us to get there. The original Sars virus disappeared – here's why coronavirus won’t do the same (theconversation.com)
Sooner the better, but I can see Europe shooting themselves in the foot again, Like they did last summer. Portugal already opening up to the UK.
I am using this to track Europe Portugal in a good place, but they need to make sure they stay there with tourists coming in https://www.google.com/search?q=por...3j0i131i433.8273j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Population adjusted their case count is greater than the UK at the moment as are their daily deaths although they are on a par to the UK for deaths over the last week. They certainly look a little better than France, Germany and Italy at the moment.
Until the rest of the world is vaccinated it is going to be a see-saw back and forth where we try to grab some normality for 6 months but hopefully the oscillation will get shallower and shallower as time goes on. I'm getting very pessimistic about being able to come over to see the kids now as vaccination won't progress quickly in the Philippines. Flights via Air France/KLM are in short supply I think they are suspending direct routes as everything is via partner carriers now and they are not cheap either, Emirates I would be concerned about using their Dubai hub that is a huge melting pot and while in the past I liked long layovers at transit stops now I would prefer short transits and they appear to be in short supply too, and guaranteed refunds only apply to flights dated up to 31st Dec. Not sure I will be able to do Christmas even.
