Rain, Rain, Go Away!

It hasn’t stopped raining all day - about half an inch has fallen. I don’t often binge watch tv, but today I’ve binged on A Discovery of Witches as I got an offer recently on 4 months of SKY via NOW, plus I’ve been doing a particularly difficult jigsaw and reading the paper. A very lazy day. 

The Press are showing a picture of a mask-less Djokovic with a large group of young people that was reportedly taken the day after his lawyers say he tested positive for Covid - a disgrace, unless it was a PCR test and he hadn’t yet been told the result.  

Day 663 / Day 30 of Plan B (for my record only)
New daily cases was down today at 146,390 - I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ve passed the peak of this wave. Official daily deaths in the UK have passed 150,000 - the news reported this no. as being almost the population of Oxford (deaths with Covid on the death certificate are 23,000 higher). The UK is the first country in the EU to reach this horrible milestone and the 7th country in the World to pass it (5 have considerably higher populations, but Peru has around half that of the UK). It took 8 months to reach the first 50,000 deaths, another 2.5 months for the next 50,000 deaths and 11.5 months for the third 50,000 deaths - I’ve long thought the Govt’s biggest mistakes were made in the Autumn of 2020. Last night the JCVI said that older adults still have 90% of protection against hospital admission 3 months after a booster, although protection against mild infection drops to c30%. As such, there is no immediate need for a 2nd booster. An epidemiologist working for the UKHSA says all lateral flow tests still have high sensitivity to Omicron. A SAGE study of data just pre Omicron shows that those people who go to the shops once a week had an increased risk compared with those who bought groceries online and represented the highest proportion of infections acquired outside the home. Royal Carribean has paused the sailing of 3 ships due to Omicron.