From tomorrow six people, or two households, can meet in English gardens or other outdoor places. Not that the outdoors is very warm and inviting just at the moment, but we will have that bit of freedom.
Wales has gone one better. Since yesterday the Welsh can travel where they like within Wales. Self contained holiday accommodation, including hotels with en-suite facilities and room service, can reopen to people from the same household or support bubble.
Their freedom is still limited to Wales however. They can’t leave their country, and nobody from England, or presumably elsewhere, can go into the country without a very good reason. But they are reviewing things on April 1st and if all goes well after April 12th the English can invade Wales once more.
Foreign travel still seems to be a no-no! But there is talk about it being possible for us to travel from the UK to other countries by the middle of May. We shall see!
In Barcelona, meanwhile, they have been experimenting with ways to hold big concerts. 5000 people went to the Palau Sant Jordi (that’s Saint George’s Palace, by the way) concert hall on Saturday night to see a group called Love of Lesbian. I can’t say I have ever heard of that group but I’m no longer a teenager and neither am I any longer a teacher who needs to keep up to date with the Spanish music scene! The five thousand had to be tested beforehand and they had to wear high quality face-masks which were provided by the organisers. Would-be concert goers who did not test negative for Covid had their tickets cancelled and presumably received a refund. Those who did test negative received a message on their phones validating their tickets. And in they went and stood together, waving their arms around and jumping up and down or dancing, just like the good old days.
It’s all gone ahead officially, an experiment in making such things possible again, with health protocols designed under the supervision of virologist Dr. Boris Revollo. And concertgoers have agreed public health authorities could inform Revollo’s team if they came down with coronavirus in the weeks after the concert. With that information, Revollo’s team will do an analysis of infection rates among the 5,000 concertgoers compared with that of the general population to see if there are any discrepancies that could point to contagion at the concert.
Little by little steps are being taken to make live events possible again. A good sign!
Maybe we will have to accept the idea of vaccine passports to expedite such a return to near normality. I continue to feel somewhat bemused by the fierce opposition some people show towards such a measure. This from an article in today’s newspapers online:-
“This could be used by more than just pub landlords or election officials. The data on our vaccine passports could be used by the police, just as Singapore’s authorities admitted in January to using contact-tracing data.
All this – effectively, as I say, a stealth national ID card without the necessary debate – when we don’t even know if vaccine passports would help to solve our biggest problem: stopping the spread of the virus. We don’t know how long immunity lasts. We don’t know to what extent vaccines reduce transmission, or by how much, or whether this varies depending on which vaccine we’ve had.
We don’t know how much such a system would cost, how we would know if it represented good value for money or whether our resources would be better invested in other solutions. We need to know the answers to those questions and we need the government to explain why it has done a U-turn on vaccine passports.
For months, ministers have been telling us that there are no plans for vaccine passports, while funding eight pilot schemes to test them. In January, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said: “We are not a papers-carrying country.” Yet, here we are, with the government reviewing plans to become just that.”
While I am sure some of what is said in the article is quite reasonable, I personally have no objection to an ID card. And many of the objectors carry iPhones which already reveal a lot of stuff about us.
We still have the question of the right, or lack of right, to protest hanging over us here in the UK. More protesters have been arrested over the weekend. There has been some reporting of what looks like police violence at the various protest marches but it’s not been getting much attention on mainstream media. However, even some former police are letting us know they oppose paramilitary-style policing. Here’s a link to one such.
I am watching the progress of all these things with interest.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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