Deadly Glee

Next week, after a year of being careful, I have to be at a workplace. My first vaccination is set for tomorrow. It will not be protecting me yet.

This exposure is happening because of people I don’t know who didn’t give a damn about whether they hurt or kill other people as long as they have fun themselves. Follow along and you will get a glimpse why the UK still has so much COVID-19 after £22 billion in Track and Trace costs so far plus a vaccination program that is racing along.

Three days before his birthday, Man A was told that a close work colleague tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Man A wanted to have a birthday party even though such a thing is currently forbidden, so he did not self-isolate. He didn’t even cancel the illicit party.

Man B is a friend of Man A. He has a habit of getting friends and relatives to visit in his house against lockdown rules. He wanted to attend the birthday party. In addition to Child 1 who lives with him and his partner, he picked up a daughter of his, Child 2, for visitation. He took the children to the party.

Fast forward about a week. Man A, Man B, the children and pretty much everyone else at the party developed symptoms of COVID-19. You may be wondering why the usual proportion of cases weren’t asymptomatic. Prolonged exposure in an enclosed space with poor ventilation and no masks exposes people to a significant viral load. The more of the virus a person picks up, the worst their case is likely to be and the less likely they are to have an asymptomatic case or avoid infection.

The people who gave Child B a ride have it. Her stepdad has it. This is his second bout. The second is often more severe and his first bout was a close call. His household are all doing lateral flow tests which are persistently negative. That’s only a screening test. It has a relatively high error rate. His PCR test is positive.

This time he has a pulse oximeter. This time he knows as long as he stays flat doing nothing, his oxygen saturation level is fluctuating around the point at which he should be hospitalized, plus his heart is racing and he’s had pins & needles sensations. This time Test and Trace exists, but it only wanted to know who he was around two days before symptoms developed, even though it is clear that the people in this web of exposure generally had an incubation period of about a week before they became symptomatic. As a result, people with potential exposure from 3 to 7 days before symptoms have not been identified and notified.

The same explosive spread of cases from Man A’s actions is repeating through the households of every person at the party.

The government sent children back to in-person schooling on Monday without ensuring that at least the teachers got vaccinated beforehand. The children at the party went to school not knowing they could be taking the virus in with them.

The stepdad is a business partner of mine. Next week he was supposed to take care of that workplace I’ll have to cover. I live twice as far away and being there is more complicated for me. All of us at the top of the business are not yet vaccinated and have elevated risk, two because of underlying issues and the stepdad because he’s had COVID-19 before.

All these sick people, all this risk, all this bother because Man A and Man B think having fun for themselves is more important than anyone else’s health or life.

It’s worse in places like my native Texas. I’ve deleted three versions of what I would like to say about that. I can’t come up with a version suitable to say in public.

In the future, whenever you are angry about having to live alongside SARS-CoV-2 as an endemic virus that continues to mutate so that we can’t fully get rid of it, remember who’s responsible. If more of us had dealt with this like such places as New Zealand, Vietnam and Bhutan, we wouldn’t be facing a future in which the entire world is likely to need vaccination against this again every year just to keep the death rate and hospitalization rate down.

The people who decided it’s okay if their bit of personal socializing kills you? It’s their fault.