The plan seems pretty logical, with there being four phases, and each principality (and perhaps even more finely tuned than that) being on a given phases, depending on the situation.
Every place will start on Phase 0 – which is allowing people out for exercise, shopping and business where you have to make an appointment (to keep overcrowding under control), and family units can meet in houses as long as they are in the same town or village.
Each phase will last for two weeks, and assuming that there’s no increase in cases and the ICU bed situation remains good, we’ll move onto the next phase.
I think it sounds a pretty good way to handle things – of course, islands like the smaller Canary islands with no cases will need a plan which is very different to Madrid, which will need much longer to move to the different phases.
Our area is one of the low risk areas, so although we’ll start on Phase 0, same as everyone else, hopefully we’ll move through the phases quickly.
The big concern is people coming into the area and bringing the virus with them but this program of continual testing, watching and assessing means that they ought to be able to keep on top of things.
While the government did make some pretty big mistakes to start off with – they let the Women’s Day march go ahead in Madrid at the beginning of March – and although there were few known cases in Madrid, it was pretty clear from Italy what was happening. And they also were completely unprepared for the terrible damage the virus did when it got into care homes, which overwhelmed the hospital system, since then, I feel that the impossible situation has been handled well.
I really like the de-escalation plan which allows areas to move at their own speed and I think they are much more likely to get public support rather than have a one-size-fits-all approach which generally ends up fitting noone.
In other news, Sam has started having seizures again. He started at the weekend and they continued for a couple of days, however I think he’s gone 48 hours without one, which I hope is the end of this little lot. Although the seizures were quite big, he came out of them really quickly – in just a couple of minutes – which made a big difference as he wasn’t quite a ‘punch drunk’ as he was at Christmas.
The one constant thing with Sam’s seizures is the lack of consistency! He’s had little ones, big ones, none for three or four years, clusters, singles… He’s had seizures that have taken days to come round after, and ones where he’s at the fridge waiting for his post-seizure piece of frankfurter within seconds. Hopefully though, he’ll have no more, but we’ll see….