Vaccination programme or no vaccination programme, the pressure never ceases and the problem has definitely been exacerbated with the latest spike in India and the new India mutation.
It seems strange that the UK is hopefully in the throes of trying to return to normal whilst the rest of the world is getting worse and it has been reported that a couple of days ago showed the highest number of new cases worldwide for any day so far. The fact that the Prime Minister has cancelled his trip to India signals the fact that matters are serious and India has now been added to the red list with effect from Friday. Perish the thought – the Prime Minister would have had to quarantine on his return!
And of course, quarantine seems to be the order of the day even if you have been vaccinated.
What does all of this tell us? Well it seems to us that nothing much has changed. There is still a very serious pandemic out there which has every chance of continuing to impact on the UK because of the mutations and variants and the constant race of trying to get vaccines to catch up – just like with the flu.
But unfortunately even in the UK the situation is not entirely rosy. Whilst deaths have continued to drop, showing a weekend figure of only 4 yesterday, the new cases are now starting to slip back up again. This is surely going to be inevitable because of schools, the lifting of the lockdown, open of more shops etc etc. So what are seeing now is a new type of pandemic in the UK – a pandemic amongst younger people and the anti-vaxxers. It remains to be seen how that sort of scenario will play out or whether the younger people will show greater resistance and less propensity to become very ill.
And we must remember that post covid syndrome or “long covid” as it is colloquially known is still on the cards, even possibly for those who do not get the disease badly. There is still a chance that their bodies could be damaged.
The next seven days will prove to be interesting because we shall see the effect of lifting the lockdown, whether cases continue to rise or they are contained.
Adrian Leopard 20-04-21
Photo Charlotte Harrison