Blue Skies

A beautiful sunny day today, albeit a bit windy, so I took myself off for a walk on the cliffs at Weybourne this afternoon. There were lots of people out for a Bank Holiday walk in the nice weather (max 10.3C). This morning I put the xmas decs back in the attic and took down a couple of boxes of paperwork to sort through and get rid of what what I can. A bit of shredding done already. 

Day 658 / Day 25 of Plan B (for my record only)
New cases in England today were higher at 137,541 and NHS Scotland reported a record 20,217 new cases (no data for Wales or NI). Boris says that it would be 'absolute folly' to say the pandemic is over, that Omicron is 'plainly milder' than other variants but 'incredibly transmissible'. He said NHS pressure will be 'considerable' in the next couple of weeks - and 'maybe more'. The Head of NHS Providers talked about an 'impossible workload' due to rising Covid hospital cases, staff absences due to Covid and an already busy NHS and social care system. He said more encouraging is that hospitalisations in London have dropped a lot in the last few days. The Education Minister (and ex-vaccines minister) said ministers are concerned the number of over-50s being admitted to hospital with Covid is rising. He said 'if we see more leakage of infection in the over-50s - because most of the surge in infections from the Omicron variant has been in the under-50s - then that is more likely that those people end up with severe infection and hospitalisation.' In his open letter to school leaders he said schools should start preparing for Covid staff shortages by merging classes into larger groups and considering flexible teaching options. Italy made mask wearing outside mandatory last month and made it mandatory to wear a FFP2 mask indoors in places like public transport, musuems and cinemas and today set prices for those masks at 75 cents (63p) (I pay £1.50 in the UK).