Lake Polmuir

There’s lots of news today.

We got woken by a massive thunderstorm this morning with torrential rain. The rain was so heavy that many streets in Aberdeen and Stonehaven  flooded. This is Polmuir Road in Aberdeen at around 8:30am this morning.

The water has subsided now.

A train derailed in Aberdeenshire this morning killing three people, including the driver. An investigation is underway but at this point it looks weather-related.

Schools in Aberdeen were meant to open today but the two schools the children would have been going to both had to cancel their reopening due to water damage from the storm.

The Aberdeen lockdown has been extended for another week. There are now 177 cases here linked to the outbreak. I’m beginning to think the Chancellor’s eat out to help out scheme was a mistake given what has happened in Aberdeen. We ought to be encouraging take-away and home deliveries rather than eating out since this is going to help reduce virus transmission but oddly the scheme does not apply in these cases.

England’s death toll from Covid has been reduced by 5,000 because they were counting everyone who’d had a positive test even those who had recovered and then died later from something else. The new number is still high at 41,329.

We can’t keep putting cities into lockdown. We have to be smarter than this and manage the virus without having to resort to such damaging methods. Back in May a paper appeared in The Lancet suggesting that we test every person in the UK every week. I think this idea has merit. Anyone who tests positive must then stay home, along with all their contacts, for 14 days. The government will need to cover any lost income for individuals forced to isolate otherwise people will flout the rule. We also need a South Korean level of contact tracing with an app that can trace all close contacts and then notify them that they too need to self-isolate. There’ll still need to be physical distancing but this is preferable to the draconian lockdowns that people are currently being subjected to.

Here’s a cat pic to finish off.