It does finally feel as if I am back to where I was pre-Covid. It’s taken a lot of patience and a lot of hard work – and it will continue to take a lot of hard work – but I do feel like I’ve crossed some sort of threshold.
My last three runs have all been inside 6:00/km, which is really as fast as I’ve ever managed to go anyway, and I’m not very close to dying like I was when I did that back in April. In hindsight, that was a fairly foolish effort, and I’m only half proud of what I achieved.
Run-wise, at least. Staying alive was a quite a coup.
Football is fun again, rather than impossible, and my legs ache because I’m exercising, rather than because they’re full of interleukins.
People go to a festival, think they’re safe because “it’s outdoors” (except the shared car journeys, the indoor bits, the bars and the densely crowded, close contact bits), and then they contract an extremely infectious virus.
We’re told that it’s sociology, rather than epidemiology or microbiology that tells us when a pandemic is over. And looking at things sociologically, in many cases – like the festival(s) above – behaviour has returned to normal. Except, if the pandemic is over, why are so many people still getting infected with the causal agent? And this in summer, as well. Wider society might think we’re done with Covid. The medical experts will tell you differently.
Crime: It’s a huge problem in South Africa. How do we solve it?
It’s not so difficult, apparently:
Actually, it’s been staring us in the face all the time. Rather than increasing policing, relying on better intelligence or working on active rehabilitation of offenders, people should just stop stealing. Then the crime numbers would come down.
You can’t fault his logic. And if we can make it work on theft, then surely robbery, assault and murder should be addressed in the same way.
Just do less of it.
Crime: Sorted.
Photography: The trouble with it being free.
There is indeed a lot of “vapid shit” in the photography sections of the internet. (And to be fair, in a lot of other sections as well.) But, aside from asking people to produce less of it (see above tactic), would having to pay for trendy, hipster, retro film – like we used to have to do – make people care more?
Probably.
But, it would also price many people out of the photography game. And we would miss out on a lot of talent because of that. And so the best way is not to make a return to the “good old days” of film and cassette, but rather to champion and support and share the really good work out there.
Your chances of sharing a space with someone who is Covid positive, based on a given prevalence of Covid in the local population and a given number of people in the space:
So (using the arrow as an example), when 7% of the local population have the virus, if you share a space (supermarket, pub, restaurant, SA taxi) with about 20 people, there’s a 50% chance that at least one of them will be Covid positive.
For those that are interested in the maths, I’ve calculated the probability of at least one person in the room having Covid as 1-(1-p/200)^N Where p is the population prevalence as a percentage and N is the number of other people in the space.
In the UK at the moment, prevalence is somewhere around 4%: 1 in 25 people are positive. And that means that if you are packed tightly in any given space together with any more than about 90 people, there will be at least one of you who is positive…
And yet there are still no precautions of any sort being put in place. Quite bizarre
Of course there are a few terms and conditions to Kit’s graph. Some people might isolate if they are Covid positive. Some people might be Covid positive but asymptomatic. Some people might not have bothered getting tested, so they won’t know if they’re positive or not. All of these might affect the assumed prevalence.
And then, of course, just because you share a space with someone who is Covid positive doesn’t mean you’ll get infected (although, see headline above). That will depend on the size of the space (and therefore your proximity), the amount of time you and they spend in the space, the ventilation in the space and – of course – whether either (or both) of you is wearing a mask.
But it’s a super useful tool for just showing how likely any of us is to be sitting next door to someone who is positive. Lovely stats. Only mildly scary.
Yesterday (well, just before midnight on the day before yesterday, if we’re being precise), the government issued an extension of sorts to the temporary amendment that it had previously made last month regarding the wearing of masks in public places.
This made a lot of those people very annoyed, but it was actually a good diversion for them to avoid talking about the USA exceeding 1,000,000 (one million) Covid deaths. And even that is a wild underestimation, according to many sources. Just like the flu, they said. But it’s really not.
Anyway, aside from the sleight of hand, the only other bit of good news for those people was that the press release about the extension seemed to suggest that students would no longer have to wear masks in schools. This didn’t make any sense – especially along the other guidelines that were in the same gazette – but since when has this (or any) government ever made any sense?
Anyway, that was the situation until the early afternoon, when someone at the Department of Health finally woke up and realised that there had been an error, and told the country that actually, students would have to wear masks in their classrooms after all.
Wow. The metaphorical cat was placed right among the allegorical pigeons with that announcement.
And lo, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But it was this hysterical tweet that stood out for me:
Because obviously, I immediately thought of this gif:
And though I have no idea what about the appearance of the individual who came out with those question above, my mind will now always associate them with Helen Lovejoy.
Look, the fact is that anyone can go to their local police station and lay a charge against the Department of Health if they wish. So why leave it for someone else, since you clearly feel so upset? Why wouldn’t you go and do it yourself if you think a crime has been committed? For that to go much further though, that Department needs to have broken some sort of law, which in this case would be… would be… er… “being a bit vague in a late night press release”?
Oh my. Proper Death Row, Throw Away The Key Stuff there.
In the meantime, masks remain for indoor spaces, schools or otherwise, and the numbers – probably affected by two public holidays and a long weekend and Covid fatigue, as mentioned here:
– continue to rise:
Ventilate, vaccinate, mask up, stay safe. And won’t somebody please think of the children?
It looks like the fifth wave might be here slightly earlier than was predicted. So early days (literally), but things are certainly beginning to tick over a bit more quickly…
Wastewater being those poo studies we mentioned a long while back, test positivity being this:
Reading backwards, i.e. most recent data on the left. (Otherwise it would be looking great!) And Gauteng numbers are looking like this:
We’re certainly not there yet (we’d need a 20% week-on-week change in positivity for it to be classed as a “resurgence”) and the Western Cape is currently recording an increase of just under 10% for that figure. But this is how every other wave has begun, so why should we expect anything different this time?
