Rhythm wrote:A fair amount of it is outdoors, and we can find ways to endlessly entertain ourselves whilst out of the reach of kids/pets etc, so the break itself would be fine
As long as you don't find yourselves either turned away at the border on the way, on the way back, or quarantined when you /do/ get back.
To give you an idea of how seriously the Italians are taking this, they have closed all the ski resorts in the Aoste valley until the end of the ski season. Not "restricted access", but flat out closed. That's effectively shutting down all business in the area, because, like here, *everything* depends on skiing.
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Rhythm wrote:A fair amount of it is outdoors, and we can find ways to endlessly entertain ourselves whilst out of the reach of kids/pets etc, so the break itself would be fine
As long as you don't find yourselves either turned away at the border on the way, on the way back, or quarantined when you /do/ get back.
To give you an idea of how seriously the Italians are taking this, they have closed all the ski resorts in the Aoste valley until the end of the ski season. Not "restricted access", but flat out closed. That's effectively shutting down all business in the area, because, like here, *everything* depends on skiing.
They are trying to limit/stop the contagion in some way, having lot of people all in the same place does not help.
The fact is given the current percentages if more cases continue to come out even if there's only some "little" % requiring medical care and intense care that could be enough to make a system collapse and/or simply not to be able to keep some people alive.
What can they do ? If they don't try something it can only get worse, eventually more people will die.
[edit] - UPDATE : they are getting more desperate, as the measures seems to be "partially working" there's now the PROPOSAL at the government to "extend the red zone" to ALL ITALY, they are going to discuss this.
If that happens you simply won't go in/out Italy in any way.
The rationale seem that "if everything is really locked" the situation could resolve itself "faster" rather then have a slowly decline.
Well, the Big City was emptier than usual, that is the tourist areas. I mean there was tourists but not the high number we have gotten used to in the last few years. I heard Spanish and French quite often, German and English too including American English. I didn't hear Italian maybe a coincidence, probably not. There was no cruise ships and that makes a big difference because i didn't see the big packs of people those generate.
Starbucks was pretty busy, the one i go to it's mostly locals that go there. FNAC was as full as always at lunch time, with people checking electronics and books.
Officially 39 cases still the majority in the North. A lot of universities closed down up there.
Note: The walk was nice though. It was sunny, 22ºC, a nice Atlantic breeze
Esplanada much emptier than usual. The other side of it not seen in the pic was totally empty
We also know now that the 24h health phone line, the one people should call if they had symptoms or questions about the virus told the people that had just returned from Italy, including the teachers and students that they could go to work and school if they had no symptoms such as fever. By that time they should have known better.
If it goes like in China by April it should get better, maybe even by late March, and in May practically normal.
Hang in there Giles. I believe Italy has a high % of elderly people that are more vulnerable to this kind of stuff. Being a Mediterranean climate country there should be also a lot of diabetis which is one of the vulnerable conditions. Plus there is others. They are just trying to protect that segment of the population.
It's not a thing forever though. It reaches its peak and then starts coming down.
And don't forget to go outside and hug the sheepies.
gilesgoat wrote:
Sorry Rhythm I think you just lost those 800 pounds and your trip to Italy ..
From a purely selfish point of view this is the best outcome for me. Insurance only kicks in when the FCO says "don't travel" so we'll be offered an alternative break or a refund.
Obvs for people such as yourself with friends/family out there it's more concerning but as PFVA says, it should only be relatively short term
PFVA wrote:If it goes like in China by April it should get better, maybe even by late March, and in May practically normal.
Hang in there Giles. I believe Italy has a high % of elderly people that are more vulnerable to this kind of stuff. Being a Mediterranean climate country there should be also a lot of diabetis which is one of the vulnerable conditions. Plus there is others. They are just trying to protect that segment of the population.
It's not a thing forever though. It reaches its peak and then starts coming down.
And don't forget to go outside and hug the sheepies.
As I said many times I am MUCH MORE WORRIED IN UK than in Italy, Italy at least "it's recognizing the problem is trying to do something" here I think they are still in a phase of "nah it's not so bad", I am more worried to catch the virus here than catching it in Italy plus I have the feeling the NHS here is much more in panic mode than elsewhere ( and probably even more under staffed ).
I am really worried that "if I am going to catch it, it could be here in UK", the government response so far been "vague" to my taste
As far as I know for now the UK government plan is to contain the virus as much as they can so they can hold the peak of it for later when the weather is warmer. It's not that bad of an idea. Remember in this situations even though who you see talking on the news are the politicians, the ones really making the decisions and taking care of things are the people who work in the sector and who stay there independently of who wins elections. And the UK has a good public health sector.
And you live in Wales. Sheep do not propagate this virus and you don't have a high density of people living there. Housing, cities are pretty much build horizontally not vertically and that helps a lot.
Here today they made the decision that all football games will be at closed doors, several sports events have been cancealed or postponed. The game between Benfica and Swansee has been postponed too. Porto and Lisbon have closed all museums, expositions, etc, etc. Lots of schools are closed.
PFVA wrote:As far as I know for now the UK government plan is to contain the virus as much as they can so they can hold the peak of it for later when the weather is warmer. It's not that bad of an idea.
This is, of course, based on what happened to the the 1918 Spanish Flu - extrapolating that to a completely different virus is a risky proposition. It's also, unfortunately, ignoring that the 1918 Spanish Flu came back, having mutated to a more deadly form, in the Autumn, and killed far more people in the autumn / winter of 1918-1919 than it did in early 1918.
What stopped the Spanish Flu in the end was not hot weather, but immunity in the 1/3 of the population who had already been infected. In other words, it saturated the population and died out. We can hope for the same with covid-19, but there are reports of reinfections...
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I'm wondering if it might, perhaps, have already done one pass.
Because, just before Christmas, I had an odd flu-like illness. It was odd because, one, it didn't feel like your ordinary run-as-the-mill flu. And it took ages to build up steam, and then a long time to go away again.
And the really weird thing it did was that, halfway through, I started to feel better and then it got worse again, before it finally - very gradually - went away over a couple of weeks. This, of course, struck me at the time as not making much sense. You catch a virus, your immune system adapts and then the illness goes away. It's not supposed to come, go, come back again and then go.
It was also very contagious. Everyone I knew had it.
And I also know that something was doing the rounds elsewhere too, because I watch the Yogscast do their Christmas charity streams over December - I plug their Humble Bundle here - and their Bristol-based office was also struck, about a week into my own recovery, and all of them were bowled over by it (they jokingly dubbed it "the YogPlague"). Via the Internet, I spotted others, elsewhere in the UK, coming down with something that suspiciously looked an awful lot like what I'd had a week earlier.
And, more over, in hindsight, something that pretty much fits the "mild symptoms" that they ascribe to COVID-19.
Now I don't think that what passed by before Christmas was COVID-19 itself. I'm more thinking that it was what COVID-19 was, before it eventually reached Wuhan and mutated into COVID-19. That there was a coronavirus already doing the global rounds just before Christmas, and when it reached Wuhan in China, that's when it turned even more nasty and potentially lethal.
Mind you, I don't know that this is necessarily useful to the human race. Because, depending on how it mutated, immunity to its previous state might not be useful combating what it has now mutated into - in the same way that seasonal flu keeps mutating constantly, and we have to come up with a new vaccine and likely suffer the sniffles every year. Yeah, you've got immunity to last year's flu, but this year's flu's gone and mutated again.
And, also, of course, this is anecdotal - and I would be amongst the first to say "the plural of anecdote is not data". It could be pure coincidence, has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19 and I'm talking out my arse.
But from a symptom / behaviour comparison to what we're being told about COVID-19, something that went around before Christmas - in less drastic and potentially lethal form - was very suspiciously ticking all the boxes back then.
It was identified in Wuhan. It possibly mutated there to this newer nasty strain. But the coronavirus that mutated into COVID-19 might have been in the wild beforehand - but the thing is, it doesn't get identified when it's "mild symptoms" only, everyone presumes it's just the seasonal flu and so forth. It got identified in Wuhan, because that's where it turned nasty and started killing people. Which correctly makes people sit up and take notice, and start doing actual tests to find out what the hell we're dealing with.
Perhaps. These observations are not backed up by empirical evidence. But something weird was going around before Christmas - I got it and, via the Internet, I saw some of the spread happening elsewhere - and the symptoms / behaviour seems to roughly match and the timing seems about right too. If it was in Bristol in about the second week of December, then one could see it reaching China about a month later, and then mutating... and that's about right, timing-wise, for COVID-19.
Who knows? I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.
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Probably just a weird flu. I think I had something like that. Surely we'd have known if it was something else? Some hospital somewhere would've picked it up.
A few people I know had that Norovirus thing around that time but as you know that's the "shitting out of both ends" bug.
We had that weird virus here right after Xmas. I didn't have it but a ton of people had it. I heard it was something related to pneumonia. And yes there was noro virus making the rounds too around that time.
Here we are going into 59 cases, and they are thinking of closing all schools but there is the problem of who is going to take care of them. Can one parent stay home to do so? How employers will react to that? Children generally stay with grandparents when schools and pre-schools close but grand parents are generally in the more vulnerable group of over 65.
People are getting stressed some afraid of the virus, and lack of capacity of our health system in answering to it if it spreads very fast. Others are afraid of the economic consequences. The biggest industry is the tourism.
I hear, I have to hear more directly from the people there, that they are applying even MORE restrictive measures in Trieste.
It seems they were around the town blasting "warning messaeges" with loudspeakers telling ALL PEOPLE TO STAY AT HOME, DO NOT GET OUT UNLESS STRICKLY NECESSARY !
.. it's .. getting a bit weird really ..
Also .. "Italy is always Italy" .. this is very sad :
Honestly, I reckon Boris Johnson is at least partly hoping it gets that bad here so he can get a power trip out of going all authoritarian on our arses.
By that time they should have known better. 
