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Lockdown 2 – Day One

Lucy happy that she got to go to school today! (Photo: James Kemp)

As of midnight we’re back in Lockdown. I think it’s our third time, but seeing as the brief spell in November was both short and the schools stayed open we’re not counting that one.

Lockdown 2 School

Schools are closed, just like in Lockdown 1. However this time round things are a bit more organised. With Tracy working for the NHS we have the option to send the children to school. We didn’t need to ask Lucy. She watched the announcement with us and noticed that key workers’ children were allowed to go to school. So she decided that meant she would go to school today.

Lucy didn’t enjoy school from home, even though she got really good with Lego and read lots. So Tracy took her in this morning. When I picked her up she was pretty excited about her self-described ‘best school day ever’. She had seven class mates today, and they talked a bit about Covid-19, did a worksheet, and then played and watched a video. She’s keen to go back tomorrow.

Planning Lockdown 2

As it happened neither Tracy nor I were at work today. We’d previously planned our day to pick up things we needed for later. Those plans got cancelled, and instead we did the shopping at Priory Farm.

We also spent some time thinking about how we help us all get through the lockdown. The key was something to look forward to. So after a bit of back and forth we decided that the plan is for themed days every fortnight. Starting on 16 January we will do a movie themed day with food, clothes, and viewing related to the movie or show in question. In the intervening weekends we’ll do a local takeaway.

This way helps sort some of the stress we had from the country themed meals we did last time round. Although we’re taking turns picking the theme we can all help with preparation. We’re also only doing it every other week, so there’s more time to get ready. As themes we’ve got

  • Lord of the Rings
  • The Simpsons
  • Stranger Things
  • Marvel superheroes
  • Harry Potter

I’m sure we’ll add more as time goes on.

Since last Lockdown

If you’ve read the earlier blog posts from March 2020 to May 2020https://www.themself.org/2020/12/on-resolutions-2020-and-2021/ you’ll know there’s a significant gap until now.

Some of what happened is summarised (unreliably) on my roundup of 2020 on Themself.

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Day 52 – VE Day 75 Celebrations

We had another full on day with prepping for the afternoon socially distant VE Day 75th anniversary celebration, although the start was a bit later than yesterday, and we had a slightly more relaxed evening as there was nothing else to prepare for tomorrow!

In a moment of boredom and anticipating the VE Day street party I got some chalk and a tape measure to make safe 2 metre squares on my drive. (Photo: James Kemp)

The first step I took in getting ready was to chalk out some squares in our driveway. I wasn’t sure how distant we’d be with our neighbours, so I got the kids pavement chalk and a tape measure out. The first line was the yellow one just over two metres from the pavement edge of the drive (I measured two metres, and then drew the line in the middle of the next whole block along). As it turns out our drive is a bit more than 8 metres from front door to the public pavement.

1925: We put some bunting up round the house for the VE Day celebration, as well as improvising a flagpole. (Photo: James Kemp)

I did the chalk outlines yesterday, but thought I’d keep the description clear from Lucy’s birthday celebrations. We also put up the bunting and improvised a flagpole with some old gazebo poles last night.

Alexander getting a short back and sides for VE Day, a lockdown haircut! (Photo: James Kemp)

We decided to dress for the VE Day 76 celebrations, and Tracy has some 1940s style dresses. Alexander thought he could pull off a typical 1940s schoolboy look, but he needed a haircut for that. So we got my clippers out and Tracy obliged his desire for a lockdown haircut, a short back and sides 1940s style!

Alexander as a 1940s schoolboy, with Tracy. (Photo: James Kemp)

Here they are dressed in their 1940s outfits.

Tracy looking fabulous 1940s style! (Photo: Jame Kemp)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I got the table and chairs out of the garage and put them on the drive, Tracy was very busy in the kitchen making a sumptuous buffet that our forebears in 1945 would have been jealous of. We also had a slow conversation with our next door neighbours over the fence. Dan told us that he had re-joined the Army Reservc, and showed off some of his new kit (he’s a year younger than me and spent five years as a regular infantry soldier in his teens).

It was a beautiful summer day, so we baked on the drive while eating in the late afternoon.

A laden table our forebears in 1945 would have dreamt of, no rationing here! (Photo: James Kemp)

Lucy and Alexander enjoying the buffet on the front drive as part of the socially distant VE Day celebrations. (Photo: James Kemp)

 

 

While we were eating a few of the neighbours stopped by on their daily exercise walks and said hello from the end of the drive. When the light faded we went indoors.

Dusk on VE Day, and the lights came on as I was tidying everything away from the drive. (Photo: James Kemp)

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Day 28 – Back to Work Tuesday

The four day weekend is over, although the kids are still off school. Tracy was back on the ward, and I rolled out of bed and logged into my work laptop to catch up on what happened over the weekend before Lucy woke up.

Last night Lucy had decided to sleep under her bed, which I only realised this morning when she told me. She wanted a change and built herself a nest in the area under the bed. If you look closely you can see her bedtime reading, Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls. She’s gone to sleep in there again this evening.

Working

My work was in three distinct phases. From 0700 until just after ten, and then from 11 until after half two, and then three until just before five. Lucy had a martial arts grading by zoom and a birthday party. In between those I read a lot of emails, and spent some time on the phone and video. Over the weekend I found an attachment to hold a mobile phone on a camera tripod. I fitted that to my mini gorilla tripod and am now using that for video conferencing.

Birthday party

Lucy’s friend Amalie, who lives round the corner, turned 8 today. Because of the lockdown she couldn’t have a proper party, so her mum organised one on houseparty. Lucy wrote the card out, and wrapped the present (Lego dots – a flexible wrist band with Lego studs on it that you can decorate with Lego pieces). Then we decided to go and deliver it in person just before the party.

We met another of Lucy’s friends on the way out. Lola and her mum had the same idea as us, and their car was parked in front of our house. So we waved and said hello for a minute. Then Lucy and I went round to Amalie’s house and left the present and card by the door. We waited at the end of the drive and had a chat with Amalie and her mum for a few minutes before going back home.

Once I’d got Lucy logged into the houseparty app on Tracy’s phone I hid in my bedroom so that I could carry on working. From the excited shouting coming from downstairs I’m pretty certain Lucy enjoyed the party. I only had to intervene once!

Shopping

It’s Lucy’s birthday in a few weeks, and I needed to go to the Argos at the back of Sainsbury’s in Redhill to collect the present I’d ordered. We also needed a few things, including cheese, diet cola, pasta, flour, cotton buds and any cheap Easter Eggs that might be left over. Immediately after dinner I took Alexander with me to help carry it all.

We did OK on the Easter egg front, scoring four medium and one large egg for £5. I also found the pasta aisle had been restocked, although only with penne and fusilli. There still wasn’t any flour, but I found the paprika that we hadn’t been able to get last time, and everything else that was on our list, plus half price grass seed for outside my hut. We also got a video that Tracy said she wanted to watch and some sweets as small treats.

With the shopping done we collected Lucy’s present. It was rather larger than I’d expected!

Exercise

Having spent most of the day behind my work laptop I needed some exercise. So I took the kids on four laps of the green in front of the house, and we had some fun with a ‘magic’ stick. Alexander pretended to be Boblin the Goblin and did a character voice and walk. Lucy turned herself into Vikki the Fighter from Carmena. I was Dad the Bad, and we each took a turn wielding the stick to chase the other two round the green. There was an extended roleplay story going on as we raced round at a fast walk.

Once Lucy had done four laps I took Alexander on a longer walk over the railway and back down through the rec to home. We got in about three miles. That gave Lucy enough time to be in bed so that we could stash her present in the garage.

Technology

The last thing I did, before writing this and going to bed, was to try to fix a couple of issues Alexander has been having with his laptop. His school uses Microsoft office 365 for the schoolwork, and go4schools to allocate homework. Alexander hasn’t been able to print to our printer and couldn’t open PDF files or PowerPoints from the browser. Each time he tries to open one (from a link in Firefox) it causes a cascade of new tabs. You need to kill Firefox to make it stop.

I installed a PDF reader to solve that issue and it was straightforward. I tried the same with a PowerPoint viewer but that didn’t work. It garbled the presentation. But I did discover that saving the file locally and then uploading to open in the PowerPoint web all worked fine.

Alexander’s printing issue from Office 365 is a feature, not a bug. The web versions are not as good at layout as the native apps. So they produce a pdf instead. You are then supposed to print the PDF from your preferred PDF viewer app.

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Three weeks was never going to be enough

As a country we’ve been in lockdown for almost three weeks. The government said they’d review it after three weeks, which is on Easter Monday.

Why Three Weeks?

Why did the government pick three weeks as the review period?

Well, when you look at how people seem to progress through being infected the vast majority, well over 90%, are no longer infectious after that time. Pretty much everyone that was infected before the lockdown started will have either recovered or died after three weeks.

So three weeks in what you think you should be seeing, if the lockdown has worked, are the people that lived with those that were infected before the lockdown developing symptoms. They’ll also be passing it onto the people they come into contact with, but far fewer than before.

What you see isn’t what you get

However there’s a time lag in there, and we’ve only tested people admitted to hospital. So there are a load of people infected before lockdown that only get tested 7-10 days after they develop symptoms at the point they get admitted to hospital. Symptoms start about 5-7 days after they were infected. So overall the people being tested in hospital were infected 12-17 days earlier.

From the published stats, there seems to be up to a three to four day lag in processing tests, especially over a weekend. So today’s reported new cases were probably infected between 2-3 weeks earlier. Before the lockdown in most cases. That’s why it still looks like cases are going up. What we’re reporting today is the pre-lockdown infection rate.

This is apparent in the official estimate of the rate of infection. Before the lockdown the estimate was that every infected person passed it on to 3.3 other people. That took us from a 3-4 new cases per day in late February to over 2,000 per day on 26 March. Those also have the 2-3 week delay mentioned above.

The estimate on 31 March, less than a week after the lockdown started, was that it had slowed to between 0.6-0.9 infections. Certainly when you look at the daily increase in confirmed cases the rate of increase starts to slow in mid-March.