Is Monday the day the third wave of Covid begins?

 As regular readers know, I run a music studio. We are currently open only for professional musicians, solo/single household artists and education related to public exams. To give some idea of what this means, we have 19 bookings all day in our 17 studios. To give some idea of the effects of lockdown, on a similar day in 2019, we'd have somewhere between 40-50 bookings. What has this got to do with the headline? Well I am just giving you some idea of what a normal days business looks like at the moment and it is relevant. 

For our business, Thursday is our logical end of the week. We pay in our cash takings (or we used to when people used it), so we work our weeks out Friday to Thursday. Each week we keep stats to compare with the previous year. This allows us to plan, identify if a studio is not being used as much or much more. This allows us to improve as we can see in real time going back 20 years, what has worked and what hasn't. Of course, as we were shut last April, there is not too much to learn. However as I look at the coming week, I noticed something most unexpected. On Monday, we have no bookings at all. As Fri-Sun are booked  and Tues-Thurs have normal bookings, I was quite puzzled. They I remembered. Monday is the day when we can go to the pub, cafe or restaurant, if they have an outside area. It seems that all of our customers seem to be grabbing this opportunity with both hands. 

The latest Barnet Council dashboard says that Barnet has a covid infection rate of 27 per 100K people. Although that is massively lower than January, In December, the Govt was putting advisory warnings when countries rate went above 20 per 100K. In short, the Pandemic is far from over. What is different is that all vulnerable people and those over 50 have been offered a vaccination and most have had at least one dose. The chief medical officer tells us this means we are 80% less likely to die if we are infected. However almost no healthy people under 50 have been vaccinated, which means potentially there is a huge well of people who could potentially become infected. Now these are far less likely to get ill, so you may say "so what?" but the biggest risk is of vaccine resistant mutations. 

What my own studios bookings tell me is that we are desperate to be let off the leash. I don't blame anyone for this reaction. None of us want to be locked down a second longer than need be. Will meeting friends for a pint in the pub garden significantly raise the rate of infection? Only time will tell. I hope people are sensible and don't go completely over the top, but it is a concern. 

I was skeptical about he return of children to school last month and felt that this was a tad rushed. Although the rate of infection has not risen, it has not fallen at the same rate since the opening. This was good news. The mass testing has clearly helped. If we are sensible and keep a degree of social distance, then it is not unrealistic to hope that the easing will not have a major impact.

However there is one thing that concerns me. Those covid deniers, who believe the whole thing is a conspiracy, have been forced to follow the rules to some extent by the lockdown. They don't want vaccines and they don't want to social distance. In the USA where there are far more people of this ilk, covid rates and deaths have not come down. I do worry that this group could be the spark that lights the fire of another wave. There is a part of me that thinks this is just Darwinian evolution in motion, and as someone who is vaccinated, I'll be alright, but if the rate creeps up, the chances of mutation increase. The virus isn't sentient. It doesn't know that we have vaccines and it is under threat. It mutates at on a random basis, therefore the bigger the well of infection, the more chance. The anti vaxxers get very shouty about infringements on their liberty. If they bring in a third wave and another lockdown I'll take no satisfaction in smugly knowing that it is their idiocy that sent us back to Jail (in Monopoly parlence). 

There are some people who clearly don't understand statistics (I did an A Level in the subject), who are claiming Covoid is over. It isn't, we are just back to where we were last October, but we have vaccines to hold the worst of the pandemic back. My view, and the view of the chief medical officer is that we are not out of the woods. 

To sum up, I am happy that there is a relaxing. I just hope that we are all sensible enough to behave wisely and not spark a third wave. I suspect Boris is actually being far more gung ho than the medics in his team would like. I sincerely hope that we, the people, repay his faith in us. So when you see your mates, have a pint, but lay off the kissing and hugging for the time being. 

What would have happened if we'd gone into lockdown two weeks earlier?

The Prime Minister + advisor

I had an interesting chat with one of my customers who knows about such things on Friday. The subject was "What would have happened if we'd gone into lockdown two weeks earlier". I got an interesting perspective, one I'd never thought of. If we'd locked down as soon as it became clear that the disease was highly infectious and spreading through our community, and taken an ultra cautious approach, what would have happened? Well it is likely that we'd have had around a quarter of the number of deaths we actually experienced. It is also likely that we'd have been able to emerge from lockdown far more quickly with far less damage to the economy. Possibly people, such as my auntie Audrey would still be alive. As our European friends would not have been influenced, we'd still most likely be having the Champions league played in August, but locally we'd have been out of lockdown far, far earlier, with much less damage to the economy.

But that isn't what we were discussing, marvelous though that scenario would have been. Just suppose the government had been ultra cautious and we'd completely missed the worst of the pandemic, as a result of early lockdown, tight restrictions and a super efficient ramp up of track and trace. What would the Press,the pundits and the twitterati be saying? Sadly, it was suggested that they would all be saying the government bungled the response, closed the economy and the ports for no good reason because nothing much had happened. There are plenty of precedents for this if you care to look. Not least the fact that we've had over 40,000 deaths and some people are still claiming the virus is a hoax. The best example is Y2K. The government and business spent billions on measures to mitigate Y2K and guess what? Nothing happened! Therefore the media has concluded that it was a complete waste of money and a big scam cooked up by the IT industry to make lots of money.

The truth is that a lot of money was spent, we did things properly and that mitigated the risk. Because the job was done, none of the fears occurred. I was working for a debit card processing company at the time. I got a hefty bonus to come in on the night. But I had spent the previous three years working on over 57 major changes to the code to ensure that when you paid for your baked beans in Waitrose the cash went through. I also did work on a Bank ATM system, which had a major upgrade for Y2K. The bank bought a whole new IT system to ensure that it tested all of its transactions end to end, with the new systems repeatedly being run on a future date. All manner of problems were identified and were fixed well in advance. That is the downside of doing your job properly, no one appreciates you.

Perhaps the worst example of this scenario was Germany after the first world war. Despite the carnage and the devastation, there was a school of thought in Germany that they had 'surrendered too easily'. Ultimately this lead to the rise of Nazism and an even more terrible world war. My father was a pilot for bomber command. I once discussed the bombing of cities that Arthur Harris had championed. I felt that the bombing of Dresden was immoral. This troubled my father, who felt that if you hadn't lived through the situation you could possibly understand. He did however make one point which I had to concede. He said that what the RAF had done to Germany had shown the world that if you have bad leaders and they make poor decisions, the whole population suffers. It seems to me that we are seeing this at the moment, what my father didn't realise is that if you have wise and competent leadership, no one really appreciates it because they never see the downside of bad leadership.

It's a bit like car insurance. No one reads the policy, no one checks out how good the service is when we need it, we just buy the cheapest one.Then when we have a smash, we find that they are a company that does everything to avoid paying out. It's only when you need something that you realise you should do things properly and have competent people in charge of important tasks. Whatever we have running the country right now, it isn't a competent team.