Day 54 of Coronavirus lockdown

Broad beans

The emphasis is on getting to work rather than staying home. It is not possible to eliminate risk entirely. I read recently that out of the 36000 or so deaths, most have been in the over 80s. A figure of something like 246 deaths of people under the age of 40 sticks in my mind. I think the odds of being injured in a road traffic accident are probably higher.

Well, actually as of last Monday, things have eased up a little in England. We can now go out as often as we want. The mantra has changed to "Stay alert, save the NHS, save lives".....or something like that. I don't actually remember apart from the Stay alert bit which many people seem to be confused by. So confused that the Govt. issued a detailed explanation of what they meant. I think many people are really enjoying being told exactly what to do, when to go out, when to stay in, how to interact with others. 

So we can now go to the park, have a picnic, sit on a bench. But we cannot go visit elderly relatives in care homes. That is a fiasco. The Court of human rights is looking into whether the human rights of care home residents have been infringed. More and more evidence is emerging that there was a directive in place to release elderly patients from hospital into care homes without testing if they were still infectious with COVID-19. Private care home owners have said they were able to refuse, but others were forced into taking in these patients and then it spread in the care home. 

Schools are supposed to go back in a phased way - reception, yr1 and yr 6 on 1st June. The unions are resisting it - I guess it is easy for teachers to refuse to go back as they are still being paid. Parents with school age children in deprived areas with insecure employment have fewer choices. The academies are defying the unions and are their schools back as they have more autonomy. So far the evidence seems to be that particularly young children neither catch nor spread the disease - out of 62 NHS nurseries that have been open during this period, only 3 have had any positive tests for COVID-19 and of those, there have been no instances of children passing it on. Mainly staff picking it up from outside I suspect. 

There is a lot on the news about the difference between different regions. It does seem to make sense. If you live somewhere where the virus is ramping up, then it makes more sense not to ease the restrictions. But if you live somewhere where the virus is under control - I think they had something like 26 new cases in London yesterday, then surely you should go back to something resembling normal. 

On a positive note - my broad beans have really grown well and I can even see little mini-beans forming. Hopefully they will stay blight free and we shall be eating some of our own before the season is over.