We gave Covid 19 the keys to our house 206 days ago, how are things going?

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It is 08.00 am on Friday 26 March 2021, two hundred and six days from the start of the 2020 – 2021 school year.

After more than 200 days of coping with an elevated risk of catching SARS-CoV2, time to take stock

The blog as a source of ‘pain’ relief

Mum and dad started this blog in 31 August 2020, now over 200 days ago. This was the day in France when all the kids, including our Child, went back to school. This was at a time when SARS-CoV2 was still not under control. In our view this decision from the ‘men-in-charge’ that particularly dangerous – it exposed a lot more people spread across the whole country to a lot more risk, namely the kids themselves, the school staff, all their respective families, not to mention the particular high risk for all ‘at risk’ members of these families. With this crass decision, they had given the virus the golden ticket to epidemic stardom, a readymade young brigade of carriers, reaching out to every family in the land with kids at school, and with their explicit approval to wreak havoc, family by family, community by community.

We therefore designed our simple blog to give us an outlet to examine and express what we felt about the new peculiar constraints upon our lives, the blight upon our family plans for our future, to help us work out how best to deal with it all in the most practical, positive, safest, continuous way possible, and how to best develop and maintain an effective, if drastically modified, ‘joie de vivre’.

This experiment has now matured into a vital element of our weekly work. It is now a very comfortable, warm, critically essential psychological blanket that protects our family mental and physical wellbeing and enables us once a week to discharge whatever nasty, toxic, destructive poison is building up inside us. What we only realised down the line was the huge ‘pain’ relief the blog gave us just to write down and share with you what we felt about the Covid risks, the ups and downs of the daily boredom of a humdrum Covid life, the frustrations, the feelings of entrapment and, above all, how it enabled us to discharge the anger we felt on behalf of citizens everywhere about how badly most of us have been treated by the supposedly clever ‘men-in-charge’ at the head of many governments. This unexpected benefit alone has enabled us to stay afloat, to cope with everything we cannot stand about the circumstances, to keep in good spirits, and to stay in great shape, able to take the sting out of the impact of the next bit of avoidable but uncontrolled SARS-CoV2 nonsense to make the headlines.

We have managed to avoid SARS-CoV2 so far.
The secret of our success?

We regularly pose this question to ourselves, talking in hushed tones in case we’re overheard by the bad spirits and they bring down a big fat viral load upon our heads.

Overall, our protection consists of two different but complementary lines of defence:

The first one of defence is of course based upon the strongly recommended basket of recognised Anti-Covid procedures that we all know about and have been urged to comply with. We have operated our own version of it for more than a full year now, namely a combination of:

• loading up with daily Vitamin D
• wearing masks in public places (carefully selected for filtration quality and worn CORRECTLY)
• no close-up human to human adult contact outside the immediate family, at all
• 2 hourly handwashing + sanitiser top ups
• strict isolation and decontamination of all products brought into the house
• regular sanitisation of all door handles and at-risk exposed surfaces
• regular additional ventilation at home
• only shopping in well-ventilated premises
• and finally, one of our own and the real toughie, absolutely no sneaking off anywhere out of the house for a short overnight break away just to escape from our open prison regime.

The second and final line of defence. We began this on 31 August 2020, on the day Child started going to school again. We developed it as the only practical way we could directly respond to the daily increased risk of exposure to Covid. We assumed that Child could easily pick up the virus and bring it home to infect us. We further assumed that if Covid got into our throats and noses, it would take 3 days to establish itself and start to hurt us. On this basis, we set out to have two shots a day at killing any adventurous lurking Covid with a heavy, targeted morning and night-time dose of hot salt water throat gargles and salt nasal sprays.

When we established this personal second and final line of defence, the approach, which for us is now an automatic part of our daily cycle, was not talked about at all in any official advisory notices from the powers-that-be or by invited experts on the TV programmes. It is therefore nice to note that it is now receiving a lot more attention, with studies being conducted on a range of different nasal sprays to determine their efficacy and utility in new confirmed infections, (but not yet for prevention). Strange also that throat gargles are not being pushed yet.

We apply both lines of defence with a daily strict religious fervour, strange for a pair of confirmed agnostics! So, the secret of our success? We don’t really know for sure, it looks like a bit of a combination:

• Firstly, a stroke of luck, in the sense that we are not sitting in the middle of one of the designated French Covid hot-spots and therefore subject to special measures, so not so much virus around (this also depends of course on how much testing is going on around us)
• Secondly, whether luck has much to do with it or not, we like to think that it has really been down to the strict adherence to both the general and the personal lines of defence, not due to one particular attribute in isolation.

Altogether, we clearly devote a significant portion of time each day to our protection regime, time stolen from the many other activities we would much prefer to undertake, but don’t, since they do not contribute to the feeling of safety and wellbeing. We would obviously like to simplify things as well, if at all possible, but have no idea what can be safely dropped! This is a significant source of frustration and really hard to bear, but we try not to think about too much. It is at the end of the day a small price to pay for own security.

Time to take stock. To be continued.

By John Saunders

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

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