Felt rough for the last couple of days and today feel light headed and tight chested. Did a test earlier and two lines immediately came up. I have covid again, my wife is a District Nurse and said that numbers have been rising with a new strain. Only bonus is I won’t have anyone come near me. My wife’s fellow nurses bought her a bunch of flowers yesterday for her birthday, the covid I can cope with, the Lilly’s in the bunch are driving me insane.
I hope you're feeling better Roy.
From what I've read it does seem to be spreading fast. According to the Zoe health study data there were a million cases in the UK by the beginning of September and currently rising by over 100,000 a day.
https://health-study.zoe.com/data
I'm concerned because of the vulnerability of my elderly mum. With the schools going back the rate of transmission could spike. In the US they've apparently reintroduced mandatory masks in schools.
The latest vaccine will be offered to the most vulnerable soon but they might not be that effective against the new variant. The government have already brought forward the dates by a month and I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to extend the offer to all over 50s next month.
I'll be going back to mask wearing next time I go shopping, only just stopped wearing them a few months ago. It does seem futile though when 99% of other people don't bother.
Annual flu jabs, for the over 65's, immuno-suppressed, people with certain health conditions- e.g. diabetes, coronary heart disease, asthma etc. Carers of the above. I've had asthma from childhood, so I get a flu jab.
The base vaccine is tweaked every year, usually rolled out early-mid October.
I missed it one year, and really, really wished I hadn't - naturally I caught flu... 
Hello Roy,
You're absolutely right. COVID hasn't gone anywhere. Back in May/June 2020 I was literally at death's door in intensive care with COVID. Luckily, I made a recovery despite mental and physical trauma. Yet, a lot of people have become blasé about it.
I have to believe Covid , atleast the lockdown elements , is over for my mental health. So in Jan 2020 I went to my GP and asked for a ASD diagnosis, still waiting. Then in April my dad got covid and died, mum then had to have 24hr care. I ignored the rules and went to see her 2-3 times a week, I had to do her shopping, look after the house etc, and comfort her, and deal with things myself. It was utter hell, it completely broke me. Then in July she had to go into care and I had to clear their house of 40 years, heart breaking. Thankfully I was on furlough from work, but that just caused money issues and led me going into a deby management plan.
I was very active, particually around my obsession hobby in the summer every summer weekend, plus football every week in the winter. That was all taken from me it was utter hell. My mum was locked in her care home and I basically had no pleasure in my life. As we moved into the lockdown of winter 20-21 I became more and more ant lock down. Covid had ruined my life, I wanted my life back. I mostly paid lip service to the rules in public but otherwise did what I wanted. None of that involved seeing people, it involved me trying to get some sort of routine back in my life.
Then we come to 'partygate' . One of the dates that there were fines for was my mums bithday and my wedding anniversary, I totally lost it over that and vowed that I will not comply any more. I have had covid twice with no issues, ill take my chances in future.
Up here in Scotland there is an independent public inquiry into Scotland's response to, and the impact of, the COVID-19 pandemic, and to learn lessons for the future.
The Inquiry has a web page asking Scots to share their own experience of the pandemic.
https://lbh.covid19inquiry.scot/embeds/projects/22570/survey-tools/24638
Is there a similar request for people to share their own experience of the pandemic in England?
Hoping you feel better soon boopBrownie
Roy, I am so sorry to read that you have Covid. Wishing you a speedy recovery.
My experience was totally different I think what made me feel unsafe was being indoors all the time and feeling increasingly disconnected from the world around me. I’ve had Covid several times. Once before being vaccinated and a couple of times after. I was asymptomatic or nearly asymptomatic every time. statistically Covid was a much much greater risk to the immunocompromised and the elderly. statistically if you look at the death rates those under 40 in good health had very little to worry about in spite of the horror stories of relatively young men dying in ICU it wasn’t born out by the statistics.
I was well aware of this even before the lockdown and so I was always more worried by the lockdown than The illness.
Obviously, Flash is Alive ! One thing I’ve noticed is how I feel body temperature, today I felt really hot and sweating. My temperature was checked and I’m technically cold, I’ve always had this difference of feeling hot but measuring as cold. Is temperature control an autistic thing?
I just don't agree that lockdown is even the biggest factor in a lot of those things. Poverty including homelessness and people relying on food banks was increasing for years before covid. The death of the high street and smaller businesses was also an ongoing trend before. I'm not saying covid didn't make things worse, but if the pandemic never happened there would still be shocking levels of poverty. It's very difficult to pinpoint how much different things are responsible because covid came 10 years into an atrocious government and around the same time as the self-inflicted gunshot wound of brexit.
And a lot of the damage was made much worse by the repeated half measures. If we weren't pulling nonsense like putting off a lockdown under the delusion that we can just ignore a pandemic and have a normal Christmas, we would've been able to get past the worst and start recovering much faster.
Personally, the massive problems I had in that period were much more due to having to live in a place and time where nothing felt safe for a very long time. An effectively handled pandemic strategy (including lockdowns when advised by the scientific advisors) would've allowed us to get past that faster with fewer lives lost, less suffering and less of our health service buckling under the strain.
There’s a really big difference between dropping GDP and poverty, a real poverty that affects the poorest of the poor. The poverty that makes people homeless. The poverty that makes people worry about whether or not they can turn the gas on or afford to visit the dentist. The property that has people running back-and-forth from the benefits office worrying about being sanctioned till they are sick with stress.
A lot of people lost their jobs in the lockdown because the business as they worked for had to close. A lot of those businesses never came back. After the lockdown lifted there was a big surge as the service industry recovered but it never recovered to previous levels. Go up and down your High Street in your find empty Cafes, Closed cinemas, shut up little shop units. Places that used to be open before lockdown. Lockdown may not have been the only factor with online shopping and Netflix pushing The decline of the High Street but it’s certainly accelerated the process significantly.
fewer jobs for unskilled labourers hits the poor square and hard much more than the middle classes.
A lot of expansion in the service sector has been in supermarkets, The only things allowed to stay open during Lockdown, and I would argue in many ways stacking shelves is probably even worse than waiting tables.
then there is the mental health issues. The social poverty if you will. for me personally lockdown cost me a lot of my support networks. people decided to cut me loose because I was too stressed or for whatever reason they may have had in their heads; maybe because they were too stressed. and I found after Covid I’d lost a lot of friends. i’m sure a lot of people had similar experiences and guess what those people are now working without the same emotional and social support networks they used to have; guess what that’s going to lead to; more mental health issues more physical health issues because of the mental health issues, it will shorten lifespan and health span. And again it’s those who already had tenuous social network that will be most badly affected.
people who left lock down with smaller but still reasonably sized social networks will have found it a lot easier to build them back up again than people who already had very small social networks and then had none after lockdown.
and if you have mental health issues you are at higher risk of getting involved in substance abuse, becoming alienate it from your family, experiencing a breakdown of personal relationships and marriages, things that can lead to becoming financially hard up or even homeless.
it’s a cursed negative feedback loop where everything about lockdown feeds into tends to exacerbate and make worse all of the other things. which is why for some people lockdown will have knocked them into this kind of cyclic issue where they have problems that cause more problems that caused more problems that aren’t going away even though lockdown ended a long time ago because they’re caught in a negative cycle that’s feeding itself now.
you mark my words in 30 years time will be looking back and listening to the stories of homeless old drug addicts or inmates of mental institutions and hearing about how lockdown was the point at which their lives got derailed.
The only question is how many and will it outweigh the number of lives and the number of years of life saved by the lockdown itself.
Yes indeed. Well, the Spanish Flu never disappeared either. It just did what COVID is doing, mutate into less pernicious but more transmittable strains. The virus won't survive if it kills all it's victims and it knows this.
I accept COVID is with us forever, but it still has the potential to kill and it makes no sense to me NOT to be vaccinating the whole of the population still.
You would think even from the mercenary economic perspective the government likes to take it would make sense. Less COVID circulating, less work and school absence. Plus medical phobes like me, who still spend winter almost locked down (I have never had COVID yet because I won't go out in winter), might have the confidence to go out and use a few services like restaurants and cinemas and help keep the economy moving.
It make no sense whatever to deprive the young, even the nearly elderly - I'm 58 and won't qualify - of a vaccine this season.
To this day the experts are debating whether lockdowns were worth the social and economic cost. Remember poverty also kills people and we may be on the verge of extremely difficult economic times. The cost in terms of life years may yet prove to be greater from lockdown. Especially if you look at life years as opposed to lives, where life years takes into account the number of years left someone probably had to live when they died of covid / poverty.
you see Covid primarily killed the old, but poverty from lockdown will primarily kill the young who other wise would have long lives ahead of them.
