Yet Another Sunny Day
Today I looked at two of the masks I used over summer and they are both bleached by the sun. So is my hat. I normally expect things in Spain to be sun bleached, not Switzerland. The reason is simple. First, it never ever rains, and even clouds are rare today, and second, I spend an hour and a half outdoors a day walking. Plenty of time for my things to get sun bleached.
If you’re an extrovert you could go out into the street and ask people “Is the covid virus airborne” they would probably either say that they don’t know or that it isn’t. The second introvert option is just to observe people. See how many people wear their masks as moustaches, how many of them wear them as neckerchiefs, how many people observe proper social distancing. If these methods are how you determine whether people know that COVID-19 is airborne, then the answer is “very few”.
It makes you question whether self-isolation is justified. It doesn’t seem to be, because not that many people are falling sick now. There is one detail. The point of self-isolation, and the point of eradicating a disease, is that you don’t wait for things to seem safe, to resume normal life. You wait until they are. 2200 people fell sick this weekend. That’s a lot of people. That’s 733 a day. That’s an infection rate of one person every two minutes.
We are at the trough of a wave, but there is every chance that another crest is coming, and none of the barrier gestures are in place at the moment. If the virus has an opportunity it will spread quickly between communities with current behaviours as they are.
Due to the pandemic I am still going for my daily walks in the countryside. I go along roads with less human and dog traffic. I find that if I go on routes with people out for their walks they walk side by side and make it impossible to pass them without entering their safe space. I can and do wear a mask but when you cross people once or twice in 20 minutes the mask is not justified, and you need the sunshine. I walk in the countryside. If I was in town the mask would either be on, or I’d be keeping three or four meters between myself and others.
I might be eccentric, but the pandemic is over one and a half years old, so I have had time for pandemic habits to become automatic.
I had to stop walking at two moments during this walk. Tractors had to turn around. To do so they had to drive over the road I was about to walk on. I prefer not to have a tractor with seeding equipment too close to me. It is interesting to watch them as they work different fields, with different tools, at different times of the year. Daily, I see what they’re up to.