Britain still believes the three big myths about Omicron.
Covid restrictions have now eased in Scotland (as of 18 April), and at least two-thirds of people seem to have abandoned masking in the shops. Two of our household caught it again in March, one pretty badly, so we had another few weeks of disruption as a result. I had another faintest-of-faint test result, but didn’t come down with it this time. Is this going to be the story every three months?
The grief of a million US Covid deaths isn’t going away.
The first US cases may date back to mid-December 2019.
30 April 2022
Reports on the weekend of the bodies of mutilated children left behind by retreating Russian troops in Bucha, just outside Kyiv, confirmed the worst fears of recent weeks.
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7 April 2022
Sometimes when a musician dies unexpectedly, an Elliott Smith or a David Bowie, I end up bingeing their back-catalogue and becoming a bigger fan than when they were alive. It feels as if the war in Ukraine has had the same effect, teaching me so much about the place that I find myself wishing I could visit places that are now gone. It’s been eye-opening to learn about its archaeological urban sites as old as Mesopotamia, its Korean community who have lived there since the 1960s, and other features of its pre-war life and culture.
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1 April 2022
Our family has been part of the ONS Covid survey for a year, and I’ve been answering that I don’t think I have any symptoms of Long Covid from my Delta infection in September. But I may have to change my answer next time. Everything smells burnt, as if I’m smelling smoke; not cigarette smoke filtering up from the neighbours downstairs, but sooty smoke, like from a campfire or a fireplace. At first I wondered if it was from sitting on the couch in front of our old blocked-up chimney; but I went in to the office for the first time in a month yesterday, and smelled it there too. So, that’s new. I’m pretty sure I got Omicron at Christmas; my PCR test was negative, but one of my LFTs showed a very faint test line—faint enough not to be sure if it was a trick of the eye. I was slightly under the weather for a few days, so it seems possible. Repeated exposure seems to raise the risk of Long Covid, and its different features can come on at different times. All I can hope is that being vaccinated up to the hilt keeps them at bay.
The signs of a new and stronger variant from Hong Kong and South Korea are ominous, and cases are going up here as well, in the face of—or partly because of—the relaxation of restrictions. Mask-wearing is still required in shops in Scotland, although that’s set to change. Covid has disappeared from the news in the past fortnight, totally supplanted by Ukraine; but it feels as if the pandemic is far from over, and that we’re in a period of collective wishful thinking.
10 March 2022
Last Wednesday was the wrong night to wake up at one a.m. and habitually check Twitter. Realising that the Russian army had started shelling the largest nuclear power plant in Europe wasn’t exactly conducive to sleep. Thoughts of Chernobyl had already been at the back of my mind during the first week of the war, even before the Russians took that notorious site over, but Zaporizhzhia seemed an even better candidate for “accidentally” turning into a giant dirty bomb. Just the fact of Russia attacking either is reason to worry very, very much.
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10 March 2022
The situation in Mariupol on the coast of southern Ukraine is desperate, with water supplies cut after days of Russian bombardment. But further north, there may be cause for hope. A Russian thermobaric bomb launcher got captured by Ukrainians because “it tried to go off-roading … in springtime”, when the ground hasn’t frozen as usual this winter. Meanwhile, poor Russian Army truck maintenance practices implied by a photo of a gun-missile system’s right rear pair of tyres have significant implications for Russia:
When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end … the side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips. … The Russians simply cannot risk them off road during the Rasputitsa/Mud season. … Given the demonstrated levels of corruption in truck maintenance … their wheeled AFV/truck park is as road bound as Russian Army columns were in the 1st Russo-Finnish War.
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3 March 2022
It’s a few hours short of four days since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Defying his expectations and everyone’s fears, he has failed to take its capital quickly, and the valiant example of Ukraine’s president and people is rallying the world to its cause. Far from weakening them, Putin’s actions could end up strengthening NATO and the EU. But the situation remains fraught with the potential of escalating into something far worse, with Putin today putting Russia’s nuclear defences on alert in response to the West’s sweeping economic sanctions, and Belarus reportedly committing its ground and air forces to his cause. Kyiv could yet fall. Every night Europe is holding its breath.
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27 February 2022
