Corona in Cortona… Isolation in Italy…..Covid Chronicles…. part 12

7 min readMay 7, 2020

Mon May 4 — Thursday May 7……….. Days 55–58 ……………Strange Days

Can you believe it? Professor Neil Ferguson and his married lover have been breaking lockdown. The government advisor who had spent so much time preaching the reach the rules on social distancing; but he breached them! Sometimes it seems that the more brains they have, the dafter they are!

It turns out that, pretty much whichever way you measure it, Britain is the sick man of Europe, with more cases than anywhere else. Britain had two or three weeks to take the lessons from Italy, so why didn’t it go into lockdown earlier?

All the way through, the British government have said that they have been acting ‘according to the science’. I wonder, is it possible that the advice was coloured by the fact that it was known that masks, PPE, ventilators, testing kits etc were in critically short supply? Is that why they abandoned testing at a certain point? Would they have acted differently if they had known that there actually were sufficient stocks of all of these things available?

Interesting point on Woman’s Hour… most of the countries who are faring best, are led by women. Merkel in Germany, Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand for example. I am not convinced, but who knows?

The tracing app for the UK is about to be trialled on the Isle of Wight… but apparently this is a different type of device than the one used or planned to be used in many countries in Europe. This may mean that anyone wanting to travel to Europe will have to go into isolation for 14 days, on arrival. On which subject, it now emerges that at the beginning of the crisis, flights were depositing people into British airports from abroad, with no testing, and just leaving them to get on with it.

A friend of mine flew back from Italy on one of the very last flights. She told me that there was a lot of confusion; the plane was almost empty, but when they landed, there were no checks at all at Stansted. No masks and no advice! At midnight that night (Monday), the government changed their advice, but didn’t immediately change their website, or advice from their staff at the111 call centres. It appears that the advice was later backdated to 9 am Monday, and she then had to self isolate for fourteen days — luckily she already was.

Another new word … de-densification; it describes the process some airlines are considering, of not booking out the middle seat, for distancing on planes in the future. Maybe. But an authority from one of the airports, pointed out that the queue for one jumbo jet alone, if social distancing were observed, would take up a large chunk of the airport! Sadly, it seems that some of the airlines will be out of business before we see the last of the virus.

With all the talk of testing, it is interesting to think about the effect that Patient 31, the ‘super spreader’, had on the progress of the virus in South Korea. Up to a certain point, that country was doing well, following a quick lockdown. So well in fact, that with only 31 cases, they were starting to ease restrictions.

But all the time, a secretive ‘church’ had been continuing with frequent mass meetings, its worshipers cheek by jowl, and no masks. Patient 31 was quickly released after her first visit to hospital, without being tested, as she had none of the usual symptoms. A week or so later, she returned to the hospital, and was confirmed positive. Ten days after that, the number of positive cases had shot up to around two thousand, and there are now over then thousand in the country. Apparently, this ‘religion’ predicts the coming of the end of days…ironic!!

May 5th

It’s Busta’s 6th birthday today, and Albi will be the same age in 20 days time despite the huge difference in size. When I first accepted that I was keeping Busta, he had such mad energy that he was driving me and the cats almost insane. I always took him with me when I went down to the kennels every Monday morning. He ended up playing a lot with a scrap of a puppy, who hadn’t been adopted, apparently because everyone said he was too ugly.

Busta was quite a lot bigger than him, and I was a bit worried that he was going to tread on him or injure him in some way. But they seemed to really enjoy playing together, and a couple of days later, I made the decision and brought the little runt home. He really was rather ugly, because he basically had no coat — he was a pink rat with a few white hairs sticking out here and there.

The first night he barked non-stop, to the point that bundled very tightly in a towel, and Busta and I spent the night on the settee with him. It was warm and all the windows were open and I don’t think my neighbours were best pleased. The next night it was exactly the same, and I decided he would have to go back to the kennels. However, my next-door neighbour arrived with a spray which she said would lessen his stress and calm him down — and luckily it did. I was originally going to name him Rolly, short for Roland Rat, but a friend suggested Albi, short for albino, and it stuck. In fact, he’s not albino, he’s got jet black eyes but the rest of him is very pink and white. With a good diet he soon got a healthy coat, and is actually quite handsome in his own funny way., although sometimes known as Albi the alien.

All my animals seem to have ended up with slightly weird names — Busta, (short for Bust-a-gut) is a terrible name here in Italy — they cannot hear the

difference between that and ‘basta’ — ‘enough’ — they think I am telling him off all the time. And if I spell it for them, then it turns out his name is ‘envelope’ or ‘paper bag’.

And Gorgeous George, my much-loved cat, turned out to be a girl!

Saturday, just gone, was World Naked Gardening Day — who knew there was a special day for it? Back in the UK, I had a tiny little splash pool, and was in and out of it, while working in the garden. I didn’t like gardening in a soggy bikini, and I wasn’t overlooked, not if you don’t count anyone with a pair of binoculars, and so the bikini was abandoned. This did lead me to coin a phrase though… ‘pruning roses in the nude is not a good idea’. I stick by that to this day. However, I can still be found, on occasion, in the garden in the buff. Sometimes skinny dipping after dark — it was unfortunate though, the time the cat set off the security spotlight, just as I was getting out.

5th May

Tuscany is still fifth in the list of total infections, at 9,601, with a rise of new

infections of 38 today. Many parts of Italy are now down to nearly zero, with the exception of some of the northern areas. The bulk in Tuscany are in Florence and a couple of the other big towns, with almost none around here thank goodness.

What worries me, is that, as of yesterday, anyone can travel anywhere in Tuscany. So, the numbers of new infections here could rise… I am staying home!

7th May

This morning the Bank of England announced that the hit to the economy, following all the measures to help with the Corona virus, is likely to be the worst since the South Sea bubble burst, in 1720. Apparently, then, frantic bankers thronged parliament, and order was only restored after the reading of the Riot Act. (I always thought that was what parents did to children!)

Three hundred years on, the government did what it had to. Now we inhabit a surreal world, with semi-deserted streets, and people hiding away.