Inverted Sheep

This week I’ve been thinking about the things that are different. Not the big things that are obvious like not being able to go out to work and having to queue at the supermarket, but the little things.

Covid-19 has now officially killed over 20,000 people in the UK. The word to pay attention to in that sentence isn’t ‘20,000’ as you might think, but ‘officially’. You see the reported deaths are only those of people who have died in hospital and have been tested for Coronavirus.

As most people aren’t tested even when they have extreme symptoms, even when they die, we can be sure the figure is much higher than 20,000.

I thought I’d try a different supermarket this week to have a bit of a change. It’s a bit further away but is a lot bigger and I wanted to buy a few things that aren’t stocked in my smaller local supermarket.

Bad move …

We’ve done really well at being bad this week.

We’ve had more than 10,000 deaths. Stories are starting to come out about how bad the situation is in some care homes. We’re not testing. Many frontline workers don’t have adequate PPE (or any PPE at all). Too many people are still not socially distancing.

Manchester has been in the news for the number of parties the police have had to break up. This BBC article has a map filled with dots showing where each of the 660 parties were. 494 were house parties which is bad enough but 166 were street parties.

We’ve hit just short of 6,000 deaths today. Deaths now include two nurses (both in their 30s, both leaving 3 children behind), two doctors, and six bus drivers.

Although the majority of people are taking social distancing seriously there are still some who just don’t get it. I keep hearing figures like ‘one in ten’ are not social distancing. One in ten doesn’t sound too bad until you realise that’s nearly six million people. Yet another new word has been added to our vocabulary – ‘covidiot’ – to describe these people.

So much can change in a week. Last weekend people were flouting the whole social distancing thing and flocking to parks like it was a bank holiday, but on Monday it was like everyone had suddenly thought ‘ok this is serious now’ and just like that isolating became the new norm.

My week has been busy as I’ve got to grips with having all my meetings as phone or video conferences and had to get my head round all the different apps there are for facilitating these. I’d never heard of Zoom before this past week; now I’m wishing I had shares in the company.

I never got round to writing an ‘end of year reflection, look to the future’ post for this year. Life was too busy, too depressing and I knew that 2020 would be a year different to others. I just had no motivation to write that post though I know that they’re good to write as I always realise I’ve done more than I thought and I enjoy reading back over them. I thought I might still write one but it would end up being a couple of months into the year instead of right at the beginning.

Well, I said I knew 2020 was going to be a different kind of year, but I had no idea it was going to be different in the way it’s turned out.