On Becoming a Hermit, Sort of ... Day 21

Day 21
(Monday, 6th April 2020)

It is now three week since we started Social distancing in earnest. I can remember the first day that seemed to last for an age. In the blink of an eye ... 

Today, I am very conscious of the fact our Prime Minister is in hospital with lingering symptoms of Corona Virus. In fact later in the day, he was taken into intensive care and the Foreign Secretary given temporary reigns as 'designated survivor'. This is worrying, not least because, above all other considerations of how government is handling this national emergency, we need continuity of leadership; strong and determined leadership. Of all the things I've said against Boris Johnson in the past year or so during the chaos of Brexit, the last thing I would wish on him is serious illness, or worse.

Doesn't this bring into sharp focus how vulnerable we all are. This virus doesn't carefully select individuals to attack. It doesn't prefer one human over another, so that some of us might happily flout the government's instruction to 'Stay at Home. Protect our NHS. Stay Safe.', because those 'some people' believe they are not at risk! Well, here's the reality check! None of us can know for certain we are not carrying the virus, because we can, with no symptoms for up to week, so science tells us. Certainly none of us can know that we won't catch it, because, unless you are 100% isolated 100% of the time, it is catchable by droplets breathed out into the air around an infected person, by touching something they have touched - even within three days of them doing so! And none of us can be sure it will be 'mild' and that we won't die of it. In consequence of the foregoing, we certainly can never know whether we have passed the virus on to someone else, who can in turn pass it on to another and another and another ... 

Yes, we need more testing to enable a more aggressive counter attack on the virus, tracking it down and cornering it, to further contain it and, thence, speed the return  to normal life and, importantly, economic activity to ensure we have some kind of security in our future.

So we need to keep this social distancing, stay at home and adopt safe hygiene practices all of the time, except for those well defined essential reasons we may have to go out. Even if the signs are that we are getting to the 'plateau' of new reported cases, of recorded deaths, these statistics are still horrendous, when you put them in the perspective of everything else most of us may have experienced in the past century, given that, whilst we are very conscious of history of human loss due to war, genocide and the Spanish 'flu outbreak after the World War One, most of us have not directly experienced any of these horrors, or become exposed to those risks. Most if not all of us are exposed to the risk presented by COVID-19. So it's wake up and smell the coffee time.

That's enough of that depressing stuff for today.

See you tomorrow.

In the mean time, here is today's choice of music from Clemency Burton-Hill's "Year of Wonder". It is the evergreen Symphony No.101 in D major ('Clock') 2: Andante by Joseph Haydn. It is interesting that, by the time he wrote this one, he had already written 100 symphonies! Yet this one is quite different. Haydn was not tempted to use a tried and tested formula to produce his music and make life easier for himself, he constantly experimented and created new ways to express himself in the art for which he earned his pre-eminence.

However you may be affected by anything I've written about, do leave me a comment below or, if you prefer not to, talk to a loved one, a friend or someone you trust.