We gave Covid 19 the keys to our house 130 days ago, how are things going?

It is 08.00 am on Friday 8 January 2021, one hundred and thirty days from the start of the 2020 – 2021 school year.

The cheery and not so cheery things to report

Mum and dad have commandeered the blog this week to describe the results of their festive reflections about the past year when Covid 19 took over all our lives, what we have learnt from managing to stay alive through these many experiences and how we feel it has made us much more resilient all round.

We hope it stimulates our readers to draw up their own checks and balances:

THE BIG PICTURE	THE PROS	THE CONS
Poor health systems	Fantastic intensive care clinical response	Multiple health system deficiencies > no/ little emergency preparedness
Poor health communications	Simple, clear, strict instructions > good citizen compliance > control	Confusing, contradictory knee-jerks > poor citizen compliance > no control
The rapid Covid 19 response	Many fine examples of excellent health responses to the pandemic	Many fine examples of professional cronyism, backhander deals, etc, etc!
Impact of severe adversity	An ascent of strong, resilient, independent human spirits	A descent into weaker, more fragile, more dependent human spirits
All for one and one for all	Sincere, openly expressed respect and care for fellow humans	Sincere, openly expressed disrespect and lack of care for fellow humans
Economy first, health second	Good for national budgets and big business	National budgets now forced to pay for greatly increased Covid 19 care costs
The ‘Air Pollution’ experiment	No traffic > clear demonstration of improved urban air quality	Temporary benefit only as the economic drivers kick in again
OUR FAMILY PICTURE	THE PROS	THE CONS
Keeping safe	Daily comprehensive protection programme in place, enhanced with additional school measures	Top priority, can get very pressurised by other non-protection essential tasks
Keeping physically fit	Daily simple exercise regimeDaily home chest physioDaily fresh air, every day	Occasional lapses due to not enough time and not enough energy
Keeping mentally fit (mum and dad)	Great sense of achievement with: meditation better sleep patternscreative problem-solvinga ban on multi-tasking	Brain fog kicks in from time to time slowing down the pace of thinking and the productivity, and can dampen our spirits for that day
Keeping mentally fit (our child)	The nasty impact of social isolation has been totally healed by attending school, school lunches and after-school activities	Spending extended hours in the school environment means greater Covid 19 risks for mum and dad.
Keeping ‘immune’ fit	Great, simple nutrition from our 5* home restaurant	Has a real downside from the constant grind of cleaning up afterwards
Keeping productive	Growing range of new family skills, language, music, drawing, sewing	Needs dedication and focus and time, so these past-times are not yet regular

The big picture bottom line

It has been, and continues to be, a salutary lesson for all of us: At one stroke, and with great ease, Covid 19 has exposed many our human shortcomings and frailties:

• It has forced us to personally participate in a fearsome, fiendish, Bear Grylls type ‘MAN v COVID 19’ crash course in physical, mental and life survival

(OR, if you have refused to play the game, you are still involved, whether you like it or not – you simply default to a much riskier game anyway, when Covid 19 simply spins the Russian roulette and keeps you guessing)

• It has forced us to question these shortcomings and frailties which, up till now, we appear to have passively accepted as ‘business as usual’:
  • questions about our human selves, our circumstances, our priorities, our fellow citizens
  • questions about the vulgar inequity between the rich and poor in all our ‘have-and-have not’ societies
  • questions about the entrenched human insatiability for power, influence, money, fancy possessions and complete dominance over, and total disrespect for, their fellow human beings
  • questions about the commercial rape and the ugly poisoning of our life-giving environment, planet earth
  • questions about the prioritisation of money (keeping economies going) over taking tough decisions to bring Covid 19 under control
  • questions about the impact of the cutting of corners in vaccine development and the insane rush to market with minimal clinical results
  • questions, questions and more questions

Our own family bottom line

While it is absolutely true that Covid 19 has stomped all over our family lives and plans (and everyone else’s) for one year already, and probably for another one at least, nevertheless we are also very aware, by its laying bare of the many, many human, health, social, business, economic, planetary and other shortcomings, that it has helped us to step back, examine, reflect, and update our personal and family priorities for what really matters in life.

What Covid 19 is doing today in France

Quite simply, and as we said last week, Covid 19 is still in charge, rampaging about the country in most places, reflected in the continuing the numbers of new cases and new deaths, testimony to the way the ‘men-in-charge’ are continuing their exasperating tinkering approach. They prefer to wait and wait and wait for their preferred Covid 19 vaccine thinking that it will save the day.

(but not the lives of the people that are being sacrificed because of their shoddy workmanship – if they were boat builders, their boats would be sinking right, left and centre).

Still nothing on the option of closing the schools, at odds to what is happening in numerous other European countries. It is impossible to understand their position on this. Do they believe that the schools are not an important source of transmission? Do they believe that the schools remain safe, despite the increasing presence of Covid 19 in a lot of communities?  Do they believe that keeping them open will help control the virus? This is just nuts!

 Mum and dad’s assessment:

This is really getting repetitive! Each week is simply reinforcing no change, or worse still deterioration, from last week’s assessment, AND reinforcing precisely what they forecast in early December, that in January, the pandemic would continue to spread. This week, once more, in a loud voice, shouting from the rooftops mum and dad’s view is that:

• covid 19 is still running rings round everybody
• it is a big mistake that schools remain open
• nobody knows when the vaccination programme can be declared a success, or if it will be declared a success
• all personal anti-Covid 19 procedures must stay in place
• it is time for the ‘men-in-charge’ to get real about what needs done, over and above the vaccination programme

And meanwhile:

Mum and dad are back into their ordinary daily routine. Following on from their PROS and CONS listing, we are now chasing down the following key elements of our daily and nightly routine:

• quality use of time in the day: undertaking a time and motion study of all the routines, daily, weekly, monthly and ad hoc tasks – deleting; substituting better ones; changing the order of things, changing the scheduling, anything to release more time, for better productivity and to much better purpose
• quality of life: planning to extend mum’s restaurant skills AND, at the same time, to reduce the complexity of preparation, cooking and the time taken for cleaning up afterwards
• quality of productivity: getting mum’s sewing machine out of hibernation and giving her a little sewing corner. Then, there are no more excuses!
• quality of sleep and ‘adult time’: working out how to get to bed earlier! Seems an easy task to organise but it’s not in our household – the switch from day time to night time remains problematic. Unfortunately, getting more sleep means less mum and dad adult time. This is mostly thanks to the very progressive child that we are rearing, commonly intruding into our space for both valid and invalid reasons after her 8.00 pm nightly curfew – ‘but I’m not tired’
• Only one new item makes it onto our agenda – chasing down how we go about getting vaccinated. 

Finally, after 130 days of exposure to their primary school, are Mum and Dad still coping?:

Hey, we’re coping much better than we thought at this point in the New Year. While we actually managed to enjoy the festive holiday timeout, in a strange way it was also a bit disturbing. We have grown very used to our own restrictive practices, delivered daily over the course of most of last year. The holiday break was both nice and not nice – nice to have a change to our daily rhythm and not nice because our usual daily rhythm is also our emotionally reassuring anchor, keeping us on the straight and narrow. We were actually glad when it was all over with back to school on the 4^th January.

We are increasingly concerned about the schools remaining open in the present Covid 19 circumstances and about the lack of publicly available information about Covid 19 in schools. As declared in a previous blog, it is a matter that we simply have to deal with the best we can, it is completely out of our control. Our school related Covid 19 procedures are as bullet-proof as we can make them. Nonetheless, we find the situation very unnerving. It undermines our usual equanimity.

By John Saunders

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World Health Communication Associates (WHCA) & INSPIRIT Creatives UG NGO,
MediaWise and MediaFocusUK

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