A New Start

One of my favourite lunch places in the city centre is closed now. It’s probably a result of Covid and work from home practices, with not enough working people in the city and needing lunch. I was disappointed to find it gone when I made my first trip back to the city centre today.

At my next favourite cafe, I find the “drinks uncle” holding fort. He used to only make hot drinks, and other workers would man the cash register and work in the kitchen. But today he was the sole worker. He made my drink, took my money and gave me change. There was no one else there and he seemed okay. So he’s actually far more capable than I knew.

Slight changes but oh so significant. I wonder what’s next. The newspapers warn that a recession is imminent and inevitable. Especially with the vexing war in Ukraine.

Meanwhile it’s Mother’s Day weekend (and already May 7th) but some are still in the mood for May the 4th. I wonder who they are. Perhaps I should have had a photo taken with them.

Garden Produce

I wonder how many people kept up with the gardening-for-food fad that Covid isolation brought on. For myself, I haven’t been very successful. The bittergourd run is ending but I have a few little things going.

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Mixed Messages

Since 19th Aug when we opened up a little more, allowing some workers back to office and eating out, the number of cases have been rising. After being conditioned to accept a zero target, of course many people are uncomfortable to see cases rising from tens a day to hundreds.

Cases rising coincided with opening up

We’ve been subject to a number of mixed messages, such as:

Be responsible and try to stay home for the next two weeks.

In other words, we’re opening up but try not to have more than one social gathering a day. But if you see people gathering out there, it’s perfectly allowed.

Cases are climbing, but the good news is the number of very sick ICU cases are stable and not increasing in numbers.

We will continue to monitor increasing number of cases and see if ICU numbers go up. If they don’t, we’ll continue opening up.

Hospitals have been asked to reduce non-urgent treatment.

Just in case we get it wrong and suddenly we need a lot of beds for Covid-19.

We expect more than a thousand cases per day in the next few weeks. But we should all be responsible so that we don’t get to three thousand cases per day.

This takes the cake. I don’t know if any country has managed to fine-tune Covid numbers like this.

We’re not rolling back our measures but we are pausing reopening.

Yep, in a nutshell. I just wish we had one good spokesperson who fully understands the science laying it out. The different ministers say it the way they understand it and sometimes it sounds stupid and contradictory.