Photo demonstrating how little we use the car at the moment – it has grass growing on it!
So, it’s about 21 months now that we’ve been living within a pandemic. I remember when it first became serious I was giving classes and my students in Madrid were telling me how things were getting more and more scary – and that was just before we had our big lockdown. After that, their situation was really scary with one of my students living where she saw hearses lined up in the street outside her house as the hospitals couldn’t cope.
And then this time last year we had our night time curfew – which didn’t affect us other than it stopped the early morning drummers (which was one good thing to come from all this 😉 , but sadly they are at it again this year!!)
Since the start of this year, it’s been pretty much living the ‘new normal’ and everything seems to have settled down pretty well. Spain hasn’t yet had the new surge that other countries are seeing but it’s relatively early days with the new variant and we are already hearing warnings about exponential increases in cases, and while the numbers of hospital beds taken with Covid are less than this time last year – they are rising again.
I am sure the high % of vaccinated people has helped up to now, with third doses being rolled out and children from 5 being offered the vaccine. The other thing I am certain that has helped is the mandatory wearing of masks. Whether or not the actual mask works, it acts as a visual reminder that Covid isn’t over – it’s still very much here. While I am certainly not a fan of wearing masks (and I am sure I would have a different opinion if I was wearing one 12 hours a day when it was hot), and I don’t wear a mask if I am out in the country and there’s no-one around (but I always have a mask with me), however being masked up always reminds me to be aware that we are still living in a pandemic.
I will be interested to see if mask wearing becomes more the norm when this is all finished. My student who is a scientist told me that flu cases were down significantly last winter which was put down to mask wearing and social distancing. It gets very dusty here in the summer, and when we are out for a walk, if a car or tractor passes, there is quite a dust storm created which is compounded by dust from the cement works. I’d often thought about wearing a mask as breathing in all that cementy dust can’t be good, but I’d always felt a bit silly so didn’t. I think that stigma will have gone now.
I also wonder if the very hard lockdown we had is still relatively fresh in people’s minds. Not being able to go out for 3 months, not even for exercise was pretty tough, so I imagine doing all we can not to be in that situation again is pretty key to most people!
We’re also seeing appointments being required a lot more now, much less turning up and milling around for a while waiting to be seen. And we still have hand santizer in shops and in the vet it’s still one person per animal. The jumble sale in Portugal had to change venues so it had an in and out with a directed flow of traffic (which thinking about it, must be a Portuguese requirement).
I wonder if we’ll see new travel restrictions in the coming months. I know that some provinces have covid passes already in place for attending large events (we don’t here yet, I guess we don’t have very large events!!) and I can certainly see provinces putting in restrictions for people entering who aren’t fully vaccinated and perhaps the super-local lockdowns implemented when there is a cluster in a village.
We’re getting close to the two year anniversary and I wonder what I will be writing then!
We had to go to the vet in Zafra, and we stopped for a picnic at our new favourite reservoir. HERE’S some photos I took of us there for a picnic last year when the water level was a lot lower. Currently only the top two steps are above water.
This is Barry the Lovebird who has been busy dismantling a lovely woven nest I bought her and she has been using the pieces to make a heap of rubbish (AKA her nest) on the floor. She seems to have missed the nest building gene!