… lots of things.
But first:
Day 67 (as some beagle-eyed readers noted) was a bit of a non-event.
Sorry about that.
Thanks to some sterling and much-appreciated detective work by The Guru, it has been determined that the Jetpack plugin (the very one that informed me that the blog was down) was actually the one which was breaking it.
Sneaky little bastard.
Having re-installed it, it’s still behaving somewhat errantly, but now I know where to look if/when things go wrong, I think I can sort it out much more quickly than previously.
And there ends the technical stuff.
And thus, today marks a return to several things: the usual dross on the blog, school for some students (after the confusion over the weekend), the traditional South African sport of drinking and driving now that we’re (legally) allowed to buy alcohol again, and – for some morons – the idea that socialising is fine without taking any precautions.
The number of social media posts I saw yesterday with friends meeting up again for the first time in n weeks and then sitting right next to each other with no face masks in sight was… let’s say:”concerning”. But in reality the actual virus has almost completely slipped from the news headlines with the riots in the US and the new-found joy of buying beer taking its place.
And yet we find ourselves continuing on a very steep upward trajectory right now.
But it’s only going to get worse in the very near future. And I’m including all 4 provinces displayed here in that prediction. Just look at those telltale little upticks on the red lines, especially in the EC and Gauteng.
To be honest, since our progression to Level 3 was announced on the 13th and since Cyril decided that churches were fine to recongregate , the lockdown had become something of a sham for a lot of people anyway. Sadly, those events coincided neatly with the Western Cape case numbers moving into overdrive and they really haven’t helped at all in limiting the spread of the virus. (And let’s be honest, the situation is much worse than the numbers here indicate: there are plenty of people who have the virus who simply aren’t being tested because there simply aren’t enough tests available.)
We have to get over the hurdle of thinking that wearing masks when near family or friends implies that either we or they are ‘dirty’. The fact is that the virus isn’t discriminatory: it will infect anyone, and anyone can then transmit it to anyone else. We need to recognise that and we need to wear masks to protect everyone – not just ourselves, but also our friends and families and our communities.
To go and meet up with your mates in a park, at their house or wherever and to not socially-distance or cover your face right now is maybe mildly foolhardy in the UK, is tempting fate in SA and is downright dangerous and selfish in the Western Cape.
There’s plenty of it still happening though.
Sadly, I feel that it’s going to take people being personally affected by Covid-19 before that message starts to get through.
And – equally sadly – that’s very likely to happen, given the current local behaviour and attitudes.
