Week 30 brings confusion and concern to Britain

 Edited BY


G P Kennedy


Sally - London, UK


 Week 30 wow wow wow, where has the year gone? It’s crazy and scary and sad as there seems to be no end in sight!



So the UK is in a very confused position at the moment and England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales all have very different ways to try and control it. England is running off a 3-tier rule, where different areas are in different tiers depending on the levels of Corona Virus.  London is in tier 2 and Liverpool is in tier 3.










Scotland and Northern Ireland both have a 5-tier rule (each different) again areas are put into particular tiers depending on the numbers of the virus. Wales is on what is being called a 2-week ‘firebreak’, where the whole of Wales is on lockdown and all businesses are shut down apart from shops selling essential items.  This has caused a lot of uproar as major supermarkets have closed off certain aisles of items, which they don’t deem to be essential such as period products, clothes, electrical items, etc.  There has been a petition set up to try and get this part of the rule changed.


 For us, we haven’t really changed how we have been acting over the last 30 weeks.  We still only go for a walk or the supermarket daily, we wear masks in any indoor situation and anti-bac our hands all the time. My work has dried up again as I am restricted from traveling and staying with my parents for work in Northern England.  My boyfriend does have some work coming up which will be great for him but it's also causing us both anxiety as neither of us has been on public transport since March.  The rules for travel are to wear a mask at all times and to try and travel out of peak times.



 We did go out for a drive today to a National Trust area, about 40 minutes from our house for a walk but we forgot that it was half term for the schools and we couldn’t even find a parking space because it was too was so busy so we ended up coming straight home again! Christmas is in the back of my mind still but there is no point in even starting to plan where we will be as who knows what rules or tiers or levels we will be in by then! 


Stay Safe.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 44 - Mixed messages lead to protests in Turkey

Image
Edited BY G P Kennedy Gul- Aegean Coast, Turkey  The weather was icy cold last week, when I said I can’t take another day, suddenly that feeling of spring was in the air.   According to the Turkish folk calendar, the first Cemre - imagine a meteor fireball passing by up in the sky, warming the air - fell on Feb 19 and 20. There are two more yet to fall, one on Feb 26 and 27 and the last two in March – also will lead to the New Year Nevruz (Nowruz, Iranian).    They say the first Cemre always falls to the air, the second to the water, and the third to the earth.  Nowadays, because of warmer weather, we are able to have coffee in our garden with our neighbors and have a chat. Otherwise, we were overwhelmed with loneliness.  POLITICAL CRAZINESS  Our ordinary lives can be boring but daily politics is the opposite, there was a controversial event almost every day this week.   This country will make all of us mentally sick. It is ...
Read more

Week 49 - Simon says, 'Count your blessings my fellow Aussies'

Image
Edited BY G P Kennedy Simon - Perth, WA   Hi everyone, hope all is well wherever you are.  So here we are at the end of March in Western Australia, which means over 12 months of the Pandemic.   Across all of the country, the vaccines are being slowly rolled out but we are not hitting our intended targets.   This seems to be a combination of lack of supply and the doses being given by GP’s rather than at vaccination centers. I guess the only thing that stops this from being a real concern is the size of our case numbers.   The vast majority of our small number of cases is from returned overseas travelers who are put in quarantine anyway.   This week sees a small outbreak in Queensland with some community transmission. This has led to a snap three-day lockdown to try and contain it and perform contact tracing.  Going forward it looks like this will happen fairly frequently. We have demonstrated that these short and sharp lockdowns seem...
Read more

Week 15 - Wednesday in Milan explores the 'new normal' for Ellie

Image
Edited BY G P Kennedy Ellie - Milan, Italy    “How are y'all doing?” a friend from Texas asked me recently. I am happy to report that the contagion rate in Italy have been mostly down. Daily rates of new infections have been around 150 for the country.    I have the feeling, though, that this is due not only to scared people who mostly stick to their masks and distancing, but of the possibility to do things outdoors, which is what helps with holding new infections down. There are many unwelcome signs for change, though. For example, hope for getting rid of plastics, and its dispersal in the environment, is definitely given up.    Now that all coffee shops, company cafeterias and restaurants that hope to have clients indoors are required to outfit their spaces with distancing partitions, plastic has drastically increased. But it has also started causing some awkward moments.    I met with a friend for a coffee recently, our first get together after...
Read more