Happy Crystal-Rainbow-Knob Day! My glass crystal door knob is so positioned that the sun will strike it twice a year, at spring and autumn, and today it's filling my room with rainbows.
I had an anxious night, again hardly sleeping with these virus worries; health worries, always my worst sort. Perhaps I've lacked confidence in my health because as a child my father told me that I was 'fat and lazy and would die of of a heart attack before I was thirty'. In fact this fear has plagued (excuse the word) my life and continues to do so. My confidence in my health waxes and wanes, but I know that I am fitter than most people of my age. This pandemic has a worse emotional effect because it is about the health of my family and dearest Deborah rather than merely myself, and I am dependent on them.
The news media is not helping. I think about wars on the news; about past reports from Israel, Northern Ireland, how those places seem dangerous because the news focuses on the dangerous part rather than the overall truth. Coronavirus is a bad virus, but the vast majority of people recover from it, so why worry? Life is Roulette. The government have lock-down plans and unprecedented measures which are dramatic and war-like. People are afraid (again, there is a real lack of reassuring and inspiring messages from our so-called leaders) but I can understand that these measures are to control the number of infections so that those who need medical treatment don't overwhelm the hospitals at once.
I know from sound processing that playing with exponents is so difficult! Numbers can jump sky high or to zero with a slight adjustment, and this is the knob-twiddling the government is attempting, aiming for a steady regular rate, at something like 50% of the health service capacity, over several calm and peaceful months. Of course, this is impossible (those jumping exponents), but this is the ideal.
Now it is here, most people will get coronavirus, if not in this wave then over the next three, four, five years until there is a vaccine, and I expect that, judging from the uptake levels of the measles vaccine, at least 90% of people will need to get it if the remaining 10% (or so) are to be protected, and therefore that it's best than the most in danger of dying are in that remaining percent. Coronavirus may mutate and re-infect people who have had it before, or possibly fade away, like the SARS virus, but this virus is so, well, virulent, that it will probably always be in some country, and so keep coming back every so often.
Either way, it's an extraordinary time to be alive, and my initial denial and fear is turning into pragmatism and even some romantic excitement at being a witness to these historic events. I've also been tearful at the thought of losing friends and people I know who are in a precarious health position (not yet pantomimingly gleeful at the potential death of enemies, we must look for bright sides). Are there any monuments to the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic? I expect there will be many to this one. I must work on one.
I feel weak and cold and tired now. Angry at myself for night-worries. Enough of them. Time for some lovely spring sun and crystal-rainbow gazing.
