Tag: covid-19

Day 168 – Pandemic ends as parent is “so over it already”

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Great news.

A parent on a local Whatsapp group has single-handedly ended the Coronavirus/Covid-19 world pandemic.

During a discussion around the need for safety protocols including sanitising your hands and wearing a mask* at an indoor venue, the parent happened to remark:

But really now I am so over this already

And added a facepalm emoji for extra gravitas (please note that touching one’s face is not recommended).

Anyway, it seems that someone important was reading the aforementioned Whatsapp group, as a statement from the SARS-CoV-2 virus was issued very shortly afterwards. It’s fairly lengthy, so I’m not going to share the whole thing, but here’s some of what the spokesperson had to say.

As the officially recognised causal agent of the Covid-19 pandemic, the SARS-Cov-2 virus was both disappointed and alarmed to learn that one of the parents in the [redacted] Whatsapp group was “so over this already”. It was believed that the human population of the planet were at least content with the situation as it currently stands. We had no idea that people were unhappy with how things were going.
Someone should have said something.

While it was always our intention to kill as many people as possible – a goal assisted by individuals being “so over” wearing masks, washing their hands and socially distancing – we’d like to keep our relationship with mankind as amicable as possible, and so we will be ending the global pandemic with immediate effect.

We would have done this much sooner if we had known that really now people were so over this already.

So there you have it.

If only someone had made the point that really now they were so over this already previously.
We could have avoided an awful lot of fuss.

Personally, really now I’m so over people ignoring Covid-19 regulations because really now they are so over this already.

Want more regulations? Then just keep choosing to ignore the ones we have now.

Very straightforward stuff.

 

* clutches pearls, fans face, faints dramatically

Day 160 – (even) More on Masks

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It takes quite a lot for me to read a Physics paper. Of the the three, traditional “main” branches of science, Physics was my least favourite. And that’s saying something, given that one of the others is Chemistry.

However, this paper by Verma et al. in the journal Physics of Fluids (please try to restrain your excitement, readers) is actually rather interesting and offers further evidence that masks with exhalation valves are frankly useless in the fight against Covid-19. It also adds that those plastic face shields people are starting to use are equally kak. (In addition, they are not “cloth covering the nose and mouth”, so technically not legal either. Not that that will bother anyone in SA.)

Thus:

…there is an increasing trend of people substituting regular cloth or surgical masks with clear plastic face shields and with masks equipped with exhalation valves. One of the factors driving this increased adoption is improved comfort compared to regular masks. However, there is a possibility that widespread public use of these alternatives to regular masks could have an adverse effect on mitigation efforts.

Just for the record: “improved comfort compared to regular masks” just means “people being overly dramatic about having to wear a mask”. Having “an adverse effect on mitigation efforts” is merely fancy language for “won’t work at stopping the transmission of Covid-19”.

It’s been said before.

And there are some more of those lovely visualisations of coughs and sneezes, which I screenshotted.
For the clear plastic face shield:

And for the mask with exhalation valves:

Full descriptions and even some delightful (and educational) videos on that link through to the paper, but basically (as you may have already guessed), green cloud is not good. And there’s a lot of green cloud in those images.

So. If you are one of those people who wears one of these masks or face shields or you know someone who does, please (politely) let them know that they’re not helping the situation at all.

Day 158 – Imminent return

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Since the schools were closed on Wednesday 18th March 2020, with this rather optimistic line in the official letter…

Oh, how we laugh now. In a hollow, washed-out, distressed kind of way.

…our kids have been learning from home. School has slowly been getting back to some sort of normality, although the classes are still running on a rotational 1-day-in-1-day-out basis, but there has always been the option to continue schooling from home and we’ve chosen to take it.

However, it has been decided that* one of them should head back to the classroom.

So, after a break of 169 days, one of them is heading back to the classroom tomorrow.

It’s a mix of excitement, nervous anticipation and a flurry of organisation here. She’s been at the school for almost 9 years now, but this will be different to anything she’s experienced there before. That said, the school has been amazing with online lessons, communication and even support with videos and letters about what to expect upon returning, so I have high hopes that she will be just fine.

And so we cross fingers, hold thumbs and pray to the great flappy-eared beagle in the sky that it all goes well.

 

 

* he typed, diplomatically

Day 153 – New judgement criterion

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Here’s a post tying several other posts of mine together.

This doesn’t happen often, and so when it does, I leap on the opportunity with huge excitement. I may even have lobbed a bit of tautology into the title of the post. Oops.
I’ll try to keep it all sufficiently toned down from now on though, so that we can all get through this together. Let’s go.

Firstly, this post involves advice not to go to the cinema. I have told you about not going to the cinema on several occasions previously. Like this one, for example:

My only interest in films stems from the need to have some sort of awareness of plot and cast for pub quiz purposes. And I don’t need to pay R70 to sit with 100 cellphone-using, popcorn-crunching people in the dark for 3 hours to pick that up.

It’s a lifestyle choice, and it’s one I’m more than happy with.

And now there’s a new reason not to go to the cinema: Coronavirus.
I mention that here:

Cinemas, theatres and casinos?
No: Indoors. Proximity to other people. Prolonged duration of potential exposure. Ticking lots of those High Risk boxes and none of the Absolutely Necessary ones. Red flags everywhere.

And then it was confirmed by the DoH and WHO:

And when we’re doing those mini-risk assessments, the balance on the other end of the see-saw is how necessary or desirable the thing we’re planning to do is.

It seems that Russell Crowe’s new movie doesn’t cut it:

Yes, it would seem that this is the new criterion by which movies should be judged (at least for the time being). I mean, for me, no film would be worth the risk (because necessity = 0 and desirability = 0, while risk > 0), but if you are a cinephile, you might really want to get back to your local movie house and watch… well… not Unhinged, apparently.

In untethering the character from time and context, ‘Unhinged’ defangs him as well, reducing him from an avatar of a grander ugliness to just a guy who’s gone off the rails after having been left behind. And without that, there’s nothing much in the movie that’s worth remembering, much less risking a possible COVID-19 infection to see.

Brilliant.

In sharing this, I’m not saying that cinemas aren’t doing everything possible to keep their patrons safe. I’m just suggesting that – like some other places – they can’t possibly do enough. And importantly, some of those efforts will rely on cinema goers following the rules, just like cinema goers have always followed the rules about… say… switching their cellphones off during the movie.

Exactly.

As I’ve mentioned, this isn’t a decision I have to make at all, which is great. But what is also great (in my mind, at least) is the fact that Alison Willmore might well have found the next big thing in film reviews. And who knows what else?

Next week: Is a visit to Joburg worth getting hijacked for?

(it’s a no)

Day 151 – I’m not saying don’t do it, but …

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…this microbiologist is staying away for just a little while longer.

Level 2 lockdown, arriving last Tuesday, means more of the economy can open up again. Balancing viral infection versus economy, the scale and effect of each, and retrospectively examining what should have been done has become a divisive, bitter and typically polarised debate, and is for another post, another time and – quite possibly – another person.

So that’s really not what this is about.

Gym is what this is about.

Gym is somewhere that I used to go several times a week BTV and is something that I generally enjoyed. A quick cycle here, a quick sprint there and some lifting of generally rather heavy things meant that my gains were lekker, boet* and my body was literally flooded with several (or more) endorphins, which was very nice.

My gym reopened this week, but I’m not going back.

In my considered (some might even say “professional”, but let’s not push things unnecessarily) opinion, gym is not a safe place to be right now.

There are two reasons for this.

The first one is a South African reason: the government’s hand has been forced on relaxing the lockdown. We simply do not have a strong enough economy to continue limiting business and “normal life” anymore.  SA’s infections have spread in different places at different times, prolonging lockdown: we were almost through the storm here in the Western Cape, while it was only just beginning elsewhere. And while a lot of the graphs and statistics show that we are probably past the worst, in all likelihood, if government policy was to use a harder lockdown to avoid further spread of Covid-19, they would probably have chosen to leave that harder lockdown in place for a while longer yet. (As I said, the argument about whether lockdown is/was a good thing is for another time and place.)

Thus, the virus is still very much with us and, given this opening up of bars, restaurants, businesses, and yes: gyms, it’s likely that we’ll see something of a resurgence in infections over the next few weeks. We’ve seen this pattern all over the world. In our case, this resurgence is likely to be somewhat worse than we might like, because we still have a significant number of cases circulating, meaning that the pool of potential infection is larger than we might like.

Secondly (and sadly), going to gym is one of those activities during which you are more likely to get infected with SARS-CoV-2. Nothing personal against gyms, it’s just one of those things.

This piece (shared by the NICD, nogal!) shares some of the reasons why gymming is higher risk than other things you could be doing.
It’s a list whose contents you might have seen on this blog before.

Gym is inside.
People breathe more deeply when exercising, potentially spreading more virus, and further.
You cough and splutter more as you push your exercise (see above).
Gym is full of smooth, metal, high frequency touch surfaces: weights, bars, handles etc etc. These are great surfaces for the virus to survive on.
When you sweat, you touch your face more. And when when you touch your face, you’re more likely to spread the stuff you picked up from the surfaces to somewhere where it can enter your body (eyes, nose, mouth).

It’s an infectious virus’ paradise.

And then we have the human element. Because while there are a lot of things you can do to mitigate that higher risk, you’re also relying on other people in the gym doing them too.

And to be honest, that’s not going to happen.

Masks are not going to worn (at the very least, not worn properly).
Equipment is not going to be cleaned after each use: we’re supposed to do that already and virtually no-one does.
Social distancing is not going to be respected: no-one does it in shops or anywhere else, why would they manage it here?

The cleaning team at my gym are actually noticeably brilliant. Happy, helpful, unintrusive and really, really thorough. But how are they going to keep up with people swapping machines left, right and centre? And if they can’t keep up, how clean are those machines going to be, and many of those privileged, “healthy” gym members are going to wait for 30 seconds or a minute or however long and not just shrug and get on with their workout?

Exactly.

For all those reasons, it is, sadly, just not a safe situation.

I like my gym and I miss my gym, and of course, if you feel the same and you want to go back: that’s entirely your call.

 

I’m not saying don’t do it, but this microbiologist is staying away for just a little while longer.

 

* they weren’t; and I don’t speak like this at all.