Weather. Quarantine fatigue. Cassandra-scientists. Being prepared.

The weathermen have forecast thunderstorms for today but there is no sign of stormy weather so far. Yesterday was crazily continental, with southern European sort of stuff going on. Washing hung out in the garden was bone dry in an hour, rather like hanging washing on the roof terrace of my Spanish sister’s block of flats in Andalucia.

While today is nothing like as hot as yesterday, the early morning cloud had shifted nicely by lunchtime.

Yesterday’s sunshine encouraged masses of people to head for the beach. Photos abounded of places like Bournemouth with the beaches packed out. It’s quite likely they were all socially distanced while on the beach but I bet there was fun getting on and off the sands. It’s probably going to continue in that vein.

“A combination of good weather, treacherous surf, an absence of lifeguards and the easing of travel restrictions in England is causing the RNLI and coastguard deep concern for this week and weekend.
Last weekend alone, coastguard rescue teams were called out 194 times in the UK to incidents including inflatables drifting offshore, crashed jetskis, people injured while out walking or cycling along the coast, paddle-boarders, kayakers, windsurfers and kitesurfers who were in difficulty as well as people cut off by the tide.”

Perhaps we just need to be patient. The culture secretary said yesterday that there are hopes of reviving the holiday industry in the UK by the start of July. “I would love to get the tourism sector up as quickly as we possibly can. We’ve set this very ambitious plan to try and get it up and running by the beginning of July,” he said. And Easyjet has announced plans to restart domestic flights in the near future. International flights will have to wait a little longer.

Although reports say that the majority of Britons are cautious about relaxing things too soon, the suggestion is that many are also suffering from “quarantine fatigue”. It’s not just here in the UK. This report by Arwa Mahdawi is from yesterday’s Guardian:-

“Coronavirus is officially cancelled: the US is bored of it, so it is over. That is what it feels like, anyway. In Wisconsin, bars are packed; Texas has reopened restaurants; and Mississippi and Louisiana are reopening their casinos. People in Georgia can get their nails done.
In New York, where I live, strict lockdown restrictions are still in place, but people are growing lax. The weather was beautiful over the weekend and the streets were full of people drinking takeout cocktails with friends. Beaches were crowded. Quarantine fatigue has set in.
That is not just my observation: researchers at the University of Maryland tracked phone location data and found that, over the past few weeks, people have started going out more. While all the polls say that Americans support stay-at-home orders, their actions tell another story.
Unfortunately, we have a good idea how this story ends: during the 1918 flu pandemic, many areas saw a deadly second wave of infections. Looking at the current scramble to return to normality, it seems highly possible that history will repeat itself.
It is a privilege to feel bored. Those of us lucky enough to be able to work from home owe it to the workers who are risking their lives every day to suck it up and stay put. Nevertheless, I don’t think there is anything to be gained in shaming those going out. We can’t expect people to stay home for ever, particularly those of us who live in small inner-city apartments with no gardens.
As the US magazine the Atlantic recently noted, “instead of an all-or-nothing approach to risk prevention”, we need clear guidelines on how to live safely in a pandemic. Instead of the UK’s vague messaging about “staying alert” (which is still better than the US’s lack of any federal governmental messaging), we need clear direction about what constitutes a high-risk activity and what constitutes a low-risk activity.
This is a marathon, not a sprint; if we are going to get through it, we need a more nuanced, more manageable approach to lockdown.”

Meanwhile, scientists and epidemiologists, the Cassandras of the modern age, are still giving us warnings of bad things still to come. The prospect of a second wave of coronavirus infection across Europe is no longer a distant theory, according to the director of the EU agency responsible for advising governments – including the UK – on disease control. “The question is when and how big, that is the question in my view,” said Dr Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Who’d be a scientist or epidemiologist? Politicians can pick and choose which bits of the science they want to work with but these Cassandras have, as one report pit it, “emerged as the straight shooters of the crisis, sometimes to their detriment.”

Let’s hope, therefore, that our government is better prepared if or when a second wave strikes. This article  suggests that they might have been prepared for the wrong kind of pandemic - influenza rather than the pandemic we have been faced with. Such a conclusion doesn’t, however, excuse the running down of supplies of necessary through the austerity years! 

And here’s an article   which suggests that preparedness for tracking and tracing might not be going so well as our leaders would like us to think. Reading it, I was reminded of IT training sessions when I worked as a sixth from college lecturer. The person delivering the training might have known what it was all about but those at the receiving end ranged from those who understood fully, through those who got bits of it, to those like myself who got frustrated with the whole thing and had to go away and look up instructions for ourselves. I hope it works better in this more important case.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!