I was thinking of changing the name of these semi-regular blog entries, but lo and behold, Dublin is in what’s been dubbed ‘stage three lockdown’ again, and we’re stuck in the county and limited in what we can do – no restaurants (except outdoors, no sports, no concerts, no meetings with more than one household at a time, and so on).
It’s been a bit of a full-on couple of weeks. Our little lad got a cough and had to get a test, so I’ve had the actual testing experience (negative, fortunately). Basically it involved masking up, driving over to the Aviva Stadium at a specific time, being lined up by the army, and guided through a set of tents in the car park.
An impressively friendly (under the circumstances) pair of carefully robed medical types swabbed the back of his throat and the back of his nose, and we were back out of the other end of the tent tunnel in no more than ten minutes. The results took a little over a day, though he was out of school in total for a whole week for a minor cough, but that’s just the way of things now.
I was also supposed to return to the office this week, if only for two hours, and honestly I was really looking forward to it – the familiar faces, a bit of a chat and some coffee, and then a stroll home again. But cases in Dublin have risen to a level that caused the whole thing to be called off a day ahead of time.
Deaths, reassuringly, have dropped, but it’s hard to see an end to this particular journey at the moment that doesn’t involve a vaccine. Until then, we’ll be kind of floating, trying not to contract the virus and trying to get through the very worst of things. 100 cases plus every single day in a city of 1.5 million is not that many, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s enough to know that the virus is out there and that the risk of catching it isn’t as tiny as you might hope, and having a bit of a scarea few days back doesn’t help.
Back in July, there was a day with just four new cases in the whole country. The second wave seems to be ramping up across Europe, and it’s going to be a rocky winter. Here we go again.
