The pandemic has turned into a “pingdemic” in the UK because as new cases soar to over 50,000 a day, so too has the number of people getting pinged as a close contact and having to self-isolate for ten days. It’s so bad that many shops can’t open due to staff shortages.
We have been worried about this ourselves and have chosen to avoid contact with other people until after our impending holiday as we don’t want to have to cancel it. If cases rise to 100,000 per day as they are expecting then huge numbers of people will be self-isolating all the time.
It’s hard to see how this can be sustained unless they abandon the requirement for fully vaccinated people as suggested by former PM Tony Blair. His Institute for Global Change predicts the number having to self-isolate could reach 10 million.
There’s an interesting article in the The Times on the weekend about the devastating floods in Germany which have claimed the lives of more than 150 people. Ben and I found it strange that so many people could die in a flood in Europe. Floods usually come with forewarning and time for people to evacuate to higher ground. Why didn’t that happen? According to the article, scientists did know the floods were coming and sent their dire warnings, which turned out to be almost spot-on, days in advance to the German authorities. The problem seems to have been a combination of people not getting the warnings or of not understanding them. Some people, inexplicably, took refuge in their basements.
It (Efas – European Flood Awareness System) raised the alarm on July 10 — four days before the first floods — with warnings to the German and Belgian governments about the high risk of flooding in the Rhine and Meuse basins.
Over the next few days it produced minutely detailed charts correctly predicting most of the areas that would suffer the heaviest damage. Its German partner agency requested specific analysis of several rivers including the Ahr, along whose banks at least 93 people later died and 618 were injured.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Time and time again people ignore warnings from scientists. It has been happening with climate change since the 1950s. Not until the fire affects people personally do they heed the warnings.
rachel.blog 
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