Thanks to all the friends and other social media addicts sharing the pictures of their wonderful country walks in the sunshine this week. As a doubly vulnerable person it’s unwise for me go out at all so I’ve been self-quarantined at home for the last 25 days and a further week before that in Spain. These pictures of sunny fields and dogs playing in the park bring me some real joy, tinged with anger at the unrecognised danger you may unwittingly be creating.
I know the Government has issued ‘advice’ to only go out for essentials and, for some reason this has wrongly been taken to include an hour of exercise but to treat this ‘advice’ as an inalienable right to go wandering far and wide isn’t clever and it isn’t safe. You can exercise effectively in your living room. Taking it outdoors is pure selfishness. The actual Government advice from it’s website is:
Enjoy your walk today. Just thought that I would let you know that the person opening the farm gate ten yards in front of you has just come back from Northern Italy. He has no symptoms but is carrying a massive virus load picked up accidentally at the airport, much of which he has left on the gatepost. Congratulations, you are now infected. Take a seat and wait, hopefully, for a test.
Later today the farmer will be coming to shut the gate which was left open by someone else. The farmer won’t die but his lungs will be so compromised that he will never work again and his daughter will eventually recover too but will have to sell the farm to pay for his care. The nurse who treated him is displaying symptoms so has been isolated from her family. She missed her son’s 21st birthday but there is an outside chance she will celebrate his 22nd.
The person coming after you some twenty yards away with a picnic basket in one hand will be opening the gate with the other and later today giving her elderly Nan a warm hug and a lethal gift of this horrific disease. None of her family will be allowed to attend Nan’s funeral and her granddaughter will not be able to comfort her young toddler hooked up to a massive ventilator. She cries herself to sleep but nobody sees it.
Please think about why you need to go for a walk in the woods or the park today. We kill this virus by not allowing it to breed. Without human help it would be dead in a week.
Some interesting facts:
- Infections of Covid-19 in the UK still double very three days
- If you are lucky enough to get allocated a ventilator then your chance of surviving are already less than 50%.
- Current death rate from Covid-19 in the UK is marginally short of 13%. Across the world it is only 6% – we are not doing this well.
- If the reproductive number (number of people infected by one person) of Spanish Flu was 1, the corresponding rate for Covid-19 is 2.5. So the people you infect could infect 1,500 others easily.
Sources:
https://www.icnarc.org/DataServices/Attachments/Download/c31dd38d-d77b-ea11-9124-00505601089b
https://covid19stats.live
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200306-sitrep-46-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=96b04adf_4
Paddling 
Yes so true. Good post! We (NZ’s) were on hard lockdown early before other countries started to do it and I personally only went one time to pick up groceries for 2 weeks and just stayed home. I love traveling but at that time I was too scared to even travel outside my home but it’s necessary to get some food. Now we are reaping the rewards as we are now on level 2 and can go out and do normal things but still mind the social distancing and proper hygiene (over) just to protect yourself and others.
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