The Last One

It’s rained (and even hailed) on and off all day and is very cold. There was an hour break this morning, so I nipped into the garden to take a photo and then cut back all the flowers that have gone over in the last two weeks and do a bit of tidying up. Awful weather is forecast for the next two days, so I’ll be staying at home. 

Day 620 / Day 131 of Step 4 of Roadmap Easing (for my record only)
The R rate in England is up at 1.0 - 1.1, with a higher daily infection rate of -1% to 2%. The ONS weekly infection survey of private households to 20th Nov shows 1 in 65 with the virus in England (unchanged); 1 in 70 in Scotland (up); 1 in 50 in Wales (up a tad); and 1 in 50 in NI (up). Daily cases are over 50,000 again (50,091). The new worrying variant has now also been found in Belgium and Israel. The UK Health Security Agency is investigating the new variant which might be more transmissible than Delta and there are concerns over whether it has the potential to partly evade vaccines. Sequencing is being undertaken around the UK to see if it’s already here. The Health Secretary has at last learnt the lessons and is taking precautions now by adding 6 African countries to the red list from noon today, flights will be temporarily banned and UK travellers must quarantine. (Many countries have now followed suit). He says ‘ We are concerned that this new variant may pose a substantial risk to public health.’ Downing St has urged people who’ve recently returned from one of the 6 countries added to the red list to take a PCR test and not wait for Test & Trace to contact them. This evening the WHO has categorised it as a ‘variant of concern’ and named it Omicron, they say preliminary evidence indicates it carries a ‘higher risk of re-infection’. Pfizer has said it will know more about the new variant and it’s vaccine in 2 weeks and if needed it can produce a ‘tailor-made’ vaccine in 100 days. Stock markets fell today on the concerns about the impact the new variant could have on business. Portugal is the latest European country to reimpose coronavirus restrictions. The ONS reported an estimated 63,000 excess deaths last winter, which is 6.1 times higher than the previous winter and the highest since the winter of 1969/70.