LIFE IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS PART TEN (I think. I've lost count. What day is it?)

Yesterday at her daily televised one-upmanship display, our First Minister Nicola Sturgeon cheerfully informed the Scottish people (and the rest of the UK watching live SkyNews) she was thinking we might possibly - if we all behave ourselves and practice strict social distancing - and the 'R' factor (number of contagious to number of people the contagious can infect) stays at its current level of 00.07 to 1, and IF (big if, we are talking Nicola Sturgeon here) she thinks it safe, Thursday 28 May 2020 we will be able to 'drive to visit parents in the garden', have neighbours into the garden for a BBQ, and drive a reasonable distance to sit in the sun or take exercise in a 'beauty spot'. She stressed we must exercise good judgement if we want more relaxation of the restrictions.

Oh, and garden centres can reopen. But hairdressers cannot. It looks like another five months for that happy day.

Which means it will be safe for Paul and I to take a drive to the seaside or to the supermarket six miles south to collect our 'Click and Collect' shop. I'm thrilled.(please note I did not use an exclamation point to express real joy - one, I'll believe it when/if I see it, and two, I'm sick and tired of that dozy mare wretched little cow telling me and the rest of Scotland she's having an adult conversation with us whilst ensuring we all understand we're too stupid to know what's best for us so she has to take all the decisions to keep us safe).

It's a Bank Holiday Weekend. Naturally we will not have the restrictions relaxed for it. But I'm not sure it matters this Bank Holiday - yesterday afternoon the winds picked up to gale force speeds and haven't abated yet. The weather forecast for today is dismal although Sunday is forecast to be improving and Monday (the actual Bank Holiday) is forecast (of course) to be a glorious 68F and sunny. Considering our average daily temperature in NE Scotland this time of year is in the high 50sF, 68F is a blinkin' heat wave. Those of us lucky enough to have a garden will be able to 'enjoy' it as long as we don't have anyone from outside our household to share it with. We do have a garden and we're planning some tree pruning for the day.

Meanwhile - and this is the real reason I'm updating the blog today - China has several million citizens locked down again owing to the resurgeance of the virus. Worse, the virus has mutated again. It's done so at least 50 documented times and every time it does it mutates to a worse combination of symptoms and complications.

Here in the UK the growing scandal of the shocking and seemingly deliberate attempt to cull the elderly by forcing state-funded care homes to accept admissions of virus infected (and thus contagious) elderly patients being discharged from hospital has been overtaken by the growing scandal of critical care patients with 'Kawasaki-like' symptoms not even being tested for the virus. The admissions were/are children - but now are increasingly older teens and young 20somethings. Healthy youngsters. Who are now dying - but not in large enough numbers yet to cause genuine alarm and countless news reports.

Last night a friend living Down South (in England) telephoned to see how we're doing. His wife is on the 'high-risk' list. In all honesty we've been afraid to telephone them to see how they're doing as we were worried we'd find she was in hospital. She is a lovely tiny wee thing, her lungs are terribly compromised and things are at a point we didn't want to hear she has contracted the virus.

Any road, when this thing first started he was sceptical of it all. Now he's not. Before I handed the phone over to Paul, we talked about the 'broken glass' lung complication. We also talked about how his feisty wee wife is being far less feisty and much more cautious (thank-God). He mentioned she had to go for a scan and they had to sit in their car to be called into the hospital lab for the scan - and he couldn't go in with her when the fully PPE suited staffer beckoned her into the hospital for the scan.

Paul is worried about mandatory vaccinations once they find a vaccine against this thing. I keep trying to remind him 'they' can't even find a treatment for this thing owing to the many mutations, and 'they' can't even find a vaccine against the common cold (a coronavirus, let's not forget) so the chance of 'them' coming up with an effective vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is so slim as to be none. There will be no vaccine for this thing, and it's going to go on to globally kill far more than the hundreds of thousands it already has.

The best we can do, any of us, is make sure our loose ends are tidied up - wills are up-to-date, our homes cleaned up so our loved ones (or whomever is stuck with the clear-out should we die without loved ones) don't have to work extra hard clearing out our homes. It would help if the skips (landfills/local dumps, for the American readers) were open! Supposedly that MAY happen around the first of June. We'll see. I suspect the queues to get into the skips once reopened will tailback for miles at the first few weeks.

Finally, again about China - apparently they believe we in the West are all so busy with the virus we'll take a pass on protesting the gross abuse of the treaty and are forcing a law on Hong Kong that effectively ends what democratic freedom the HK'ers have enjoyed since the handover back in the summer of 1997.