A New Year Starts

Monday 4 January 2021

In the UK today, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson announces that England is going to go into a third national lockdown. This is going to be ‘Tier Five’ with almost everything closed, people staying at home, schools and universities closed, people working from home as much as possible. The lockdown is to come into effect on Wednesday. And the sad thing is that it is to last until the end of February.

The reason he gives for this is that there is a new, more highly contagious variant of the virus and the numbers of positive tests is rising. (Not mentioned in the newspaper articles is the fact that the number of tests being carried out has increased significantly. I have to search the internet for official statistics to find this information). The number of daily deaths is rising as well, although I would have thought that this is to be expected in mid-winter. Many people are saying the numbers of ‘cases’ and deaths have risen because people went out a lot to do shopping and socialising before the last lockdown and around Christmas too.

Most people are accepting of the new restrictions. They are sure that they are saving lives – their own and the lives of others if they obey lockdown rules. Surely, high numbers are to be expected in winter.

Tuesday 5 January 2021

A blaring headline states that 1 in 50 people in the UK have the virus. That sounds terrible. But it’s 2% of the population. That sounds reasonable. What if only 2% of the population had a cold or flu in mid-winter? It would be considered pretty good.

Wednesday 6 January 2021

It is exactly one year today that the world first started talking about the mystery virus. We have lockdowns and more to protect people from the virus. We need to control the number of deaths from the virus. We are constantly bombarded with numbers of ‘cases’ and deaths. We are expected to be shocked at the high numbers and scared of the deadly virus. We are told that there are 88.5 million ‘cases’ which sounds dreadful. But just to give some perspective on the number of reported deaths connected with Covid, the World Health Organisation own figures show:

• 60 million people die every year.
• 9 million people die each year from malnutrition;
• 3 million of the deaths from malnutrition and hunger are children under the age of five.
• Over 17 million people die each year of cardiovascular disease.
• 1.9 million deaths connected with Covid this past year.

I start this journal in early January 2020 expecting it to be all over by August or September. We all thought that. No-one thought it would still be such a big event worldwide lasting so long. I start to write because I am concerned about the response to Covid, and I think it will be interesting to look back on when things are settled down and normal again after a few months. I am wrong. At the end of the year things have not settled down at all. Things are much worse and will likely continue to worsen in 2021 and even beyond.

In just twelve short months the world has changed in ways I would never have dreamed possible a year ago. I know a lot of things now that I would rather not know. I see things I would rather not see. I experience things I would rather not experience. And I grieve over human-caused pain, in particular for young people and for poor people.

I am astonished every day by the foolishness, deceit and lies from governments and the deceit or wilful blindness from MSM. And also how gullible the population is and at how many people just accept and believe whatever they are told.

I read an article saying that trust in Government has gone up by a large amount. People truly believe that the Government is doing a good job of Covid management. The fact that the Prime Minister is in the news for having her photo taken in an ice cream shop in a seaside holiday town, rather than for preparing for an increase in positive tests at the border or building up the reserves of nurses and hospital beds is very telling.

I never expect the effect of the worldwide Covid response will be so united in foolhardiness. I never expect to feel so sad about the world. I want to stop this journal now, not because the pandemic is ending but because it is discouraging to follow events so closely every day.

I feel out of step with the general population. There are others who think like me, but we are in the minority. Will this change? Will the questioning increase? Will people start to rebel against the removal of freedoms? Will people cotton on to what is happening and resist the restrictions? Will they see that the loss of freedom is more serious than the risk of the virus? Will freedoms ever be returned to the people?

It seems clear to me that the virus isn’t going away anytime soon, that it isn’t something that is going to clear up and clear off so that the world can get back to ‘normal’. And yet people talk a lot about getting the vaccine so that life can ‘return to normal’.

Catching-up

January – August 2021

New Zealand continues to swan along, blissfully smug at what is happening around the world, and with no community cases of Covid reported apart from two incidents in February and March. In both of these instances Ardern drops Auckland only into immediate Level Four Lockdown for a week. The rest of the country is running smoothly. It’s like waiting for the Sword of Damocles to fall. And it always falls on Auckland.

There are a few ‘cases’ of Covid in MIQ from people coming in from overseas. There are ‘leakages’ from MIQ but it’s never the Government’s fault. There are people trying desperately to get home but the restricted number of MIQ places means that it’s painfully hard for them.

People believe that New Zealand has somehow ‘beaten Covid’. They think Ardern is great for navigating NZ through the pandemic and out the other side, and they are great for following the rules so carefully

There is much talk of ‘vaccine’. New Zealand is behind the rest of the world in vaccine roll out. It is going very slowly, and people are not in any hurry to go for it as it is still in an experimental stage and the ‘trials’ don’t finish until mid-2023. There is also mention that it is not a traditional vaccine, but an mRNA gene therapy. The more I hear about it the more I am suspicious and reluctant to get it.