Plague diary 18/05
May. 18th, 2020 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livTwo months.
9 weeks of pandemic.
56 days of lockdown and isolating at home withjack.
I had 17 days of vague but new-to-me symptoms on and off near the start of lockdown. Then 17 days where I had nothing worse than hay fever, and now 13 days where my lungs have been noticeably uncomfortable and I have flashes of dizziness. I don't think this is Covid-19. Yes, I have read the articles about the the long tail version, but all the people who have been ill for over a month had much worse symptoms in the first place.
It's day 39 of the Omer.
Mostly I am grumpy at the government. We had an annoying bank holiday on 8 May, where they moved the vaguely socialist early May bank holiday to a vaguely jingoistic anniversary of VE day. And spend the whole week leading up to the bank holiday weekend hinting to the media that there was going to be some kind of lifting of the lockdown rules on Sunday, and trying to convince people that it was their patriotic duty to have street parties on Friday. I have no idea how many extra deaths resulted but I'm massively annoyed about the whole thing.
We mostly hid from the celebrations.jack and I went for a long-ish bike ride when the weather was nice, just along the busway which is a bit crowded in the Kings Hedges to Histon area but pretty empty along the fields beyond that. We played some bridge with OSOs and just about managed a distanced game of Gloomhaven with cjwatson. We had a camera on the map, and had carefully transferred C's player pack to him, and an audio connection, and it wasn't perfect but it just about worked. And I had virtual tea with simont and I attended virtual shul and taught Sunday school as usual and it was generally quite nice.
Sunday evening we had the much-hyped prime ministerial announcement. It had basically no content; the already confusing rules about meeting one person at a time outdoors were made more confusing. There was some bluster about people going back to work which resulted in some confused people trying to turn up at their workplaces on Monday morning but no actual change. And no mention of masks in the speech itself but a very gentle suggestion that maybe we should try to wear them if we can buried most of the way down a long document released in the next few days. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland promptly clarified that their nations shouldn't listen to England and absolutely nothing had changed in the underlying epidemiological situation.
Tuesday was 33 Omer, marking the anniversary of the lifting of a plague in the first century. I was sad about the complete lack of any plague lifting, butghoti_mhic_uait cheered me up by having a barbecue anyway in name of the remembrance that plagues do eventually end. I did the Mass Observation diary; I'll post it here but under lock because the diaries are supposed to be anonymous.
It was cold all week, but I think staying indoors was a mistake, it was very bad for my mood. In hindsight, I should have accepted that it happened to be colder than I expect for May rather than resenting the weather, and just put on more layers.
Thursday there was an email, and Friday an all-staff 'Town Hall' speech discussing my institution's plans for eventually returning to in-person working. I'm reassured that they have a specific plan, they've put serious thought into how we can work safely, like how many people can fit in rooms while keeping 2m apart, how toilets and canteens and so on are going to work. But the upshot is, those of use who basically have office jobs should probably expect to be working from home until the end of the year.
I hasten to clarify, I'm not surprised by this. I don't expect that disclaimer will prevent comments about how only inferior sorts of people feel bad about any further negative developments since we first heard the news from Wuhan. But anyway, I've been struggling emotionally with actually considering the prospect of being stuck at home all the way through the end of the year. It's possible we'll have more scope to do social things at some point before then, and it's true that being at home and not having to commute and mingle with strangers is probably safer than the alternative. But also the government are flailing so much that I don't actually expect any of the public health measures to be in place that would actually allow relaxing restrictions. We're not going to get a sensible testing regimen, we're not going to get a proper system for contact tracing and allowing people to isolate sensibly. We're not going to increase capacity in the health system to deal with any second wave. I don't think we're even going to get to the point where the restrictions are communicated and enforced effectively.
So the weekend was kind of rubbish. I did go to the virtual service, and my partners joined me on Zoom which was lovely. Andwildeabandon's Good Omens readthrough was a definite high point. jack and I played Newt and Anathema in the delightful episode 4 (the one with the sex scene) and it was so lovely to hang out with friends. Sunday school was full of minor tech fail, and my 9-year-olds aren't really mature enough to troubleshoot collaboratively so they mostly just took advantage of it to mess around. And I ended up bickering with jack over the timing of lunch. He had the sensible plan of going out for a walk in the fields behind the busway; it was absolutely glorious, with the sunshine back and everything green and shady and beautiful, and we even saw a hawk. But I was still really grumpy. Eventually eating ghoti_mhic_uait's homemade mojito icecream and a call with my siblings for my sister's birthday mostly pulled me out of it.
Basically I feel like we've sacrificed all fun and in person connection for two months, and we're going to have to sacrifice at least the summer and probably the autumn as well, for essentially nothing. There have already been up to 60,000 deaths, and there are going to be more; we haven't usefully flattened the curve, we haven't bought time because we haven't done anything with the time to make things safer once lockdown finishes. Whenever that may be – it's going to be both too early, because the virus is still widespread, and too late because we'll miss out on everything we might have been looking forward to all year.
This week I have a horrible four-day Zoom workshop, which is only indirectly relevant to me, so I'm rather dreading that, which doesn't help.
9 weeks of pandemic.
56 days of lockdown and isolating at home with
jack.I had 17 days of vague but new-to-me symptoms on and off near the start of lockdown. Then 17 days where I had nothing worse than hay fever, and now 13 days where my lungs have been noticeably uncomfortable and I have flashes of dizziness. I don't think this is Covid-19. Yes, I have read the articles about the the long tail version, but all the people who have been ill for over a month had much worse symptoms in the first place.
It's day 39 of the Omer.
Mostly I am grumpy at the government. We had an annoying bank holiday on 8 May, where they moved the vaguely socialist early May bank holiday to a vaguely jingoistic anniversary of VE day. And spend the whole week leading up to the bank holiday weekend hinting to the media that there was going to be some kind of lifting of the lockdown rules on Sunday, and trying to convince people that it was their patriotic duty to have street parties on Friday. I have no idea how many extra deaths resulted but I'm massively annoyed about the whole thing.
We mostly hid from the celebrations.
jack and I went for a long-ish bike ride when the weather was nice, just along the busway which is a bit crowded in the Kings Hedges to Histon area but pretty empty along the fields beyond that. We played some bridge with OSOs and just about managed a distanced game of Gloomhaven with cjwatson. We had a camera on the map, and had carefully transferred C's player pack to him, and an audio connection, and it wasn't perfect but it just about worked. And I had virtual tea with simont and I attended virtual shul and taught Sunday school as usual and it was generally quite nice. Sunday evening we had the much-hyped prime ministerial announcement. It had basically no content; the already confusing rules about meeting one person at a time outdoors were made more confusing. There was some bluster about people going back to work which resulted in some confused people trying to turn up at their workplaces on Monday morning but no actual change. And no mention of masks in the speech itself but a very gentle suggestion that maybe we should try to wear them if we can buried most of the way down a long document released in the next few days. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland promptly clarified that their nations shouldn't listen to England and absolutely nothing had changed in the underlying epidemiological situation.
Tuesday was 33 Omer, marking the anniversary of the lifting of a plague in the first century. I was sad about the complete lack of any plague lifting, but
ghoti_mhic_uait cheered me up by having a barbecue anyway in name of the remembrance that plagues do eventually end. I did the Mass Observation diary; I'll post it here but under lock because the diaries are supposed to be anonymous. It was cold all week, but I think staying indoors was a mistake, it was very bad for my mood. In hindsight, I should have accepted that it happened to be colder than I expect for May rather than resenting the weather, and just put on more layers.
Thursday there was an email, and Friday an all-staff 'Town Hall' speech discussing my institution's plans for eventually returning to in-person working. I'm reassured that they have a specific plan, they've put serious thought into how we can work safely, like how many people can fit in rooms while keeping 2m apart, how toilets and canteens and so on are going to work. But the upshot is, those of use who basically have office jobs should probably expect to be working from home until the end of the year.
I hasten to clarify, I'm not surprised by this. I don't expect that disclaimer will prevent comments about how only inferior sorts of people feel bad about any further negative developments since we first heard the news from Wuhan. But anyway, I've been struggling emotionally with actually considering the prospect of being stuck at home all the way through the end of the year. It's possible we'll have more scope to do social things at some point before then, and it's true that being at home and not having to commute and mingle with strangers is probably safer than the alternative. But also the government are flailing so much that I don't actually expect any of the public health measures to be in place that would actually allow relaxing restrictions. We're not going to get a sensible testing regimen, we're not going to get a proper system for contact tracing and allowing people to isolate sensibly. We're not going to increase capacity in the health system to deal with any second wave. I don't think we're even going to get to the point where the restrictions are communicated and enforced effectively.
So the weekend was kind of rubbish. I did go to the virtual service, and my partners joined me on Zoom which was lovely. And
wildeabandon's Good Omens readthrough was a definite high point. jack and I played Newt and Anathema in the delightful episode 4 (the one with the sex scene) and it was so lovely to hang out with friends. Sunday school was full of minor tech fail, and my 9-year-olds aren't really mature enough to troubleshoot collaboratively so they mostly just took advantage of it to mess around. And I ended up bickering with jack over the timing of lunch. He had the sensible plan of going out for a walk in the fields behind the busway; it was absolutely glorious, with the sunshine back and everything green and shady and beautiful, and we even saw a hawk. But I was still really grumpy. Eventually eating ghoti_mhic_uait's homemade mojito icecream and a call with my siblings for my sister's birthday mostly pulled me out of it. Basically I feel like we've sacrificed all fun and in person connection for two months, and we're going to have to sacrifice at least the summer and probably the autumn as well, for essentially nothing. There have already been up to 60,000 deaths, and there are going to be more; we haven't usefully flattened the curve, we haven't bought time because we haven't done anything with the time to make things safer once lockdown finishes. Whenever that may be – it's going to be both too early, because the virus is still widespread, and too late because we'll miss out on everything we might have been looking forward to all year.
This week I have a horrible four-day Zoom workshop, which is only indirectly relevant to me, so I'm rather dreading that, which doesn't help.
