COVID19 Positives

[Gerryjo]

I have been working at home all the way through, no furlough and I've kept my job. Positives are:

• Not having to travel to work and back, saving 2 hours of each weekday.
• Eating lunch with my family every day.
• Not being in a crowded office in which I can't concentrate.
• Going for more walks with my family and exploring our surrounding area more.
• Waking up later
• More time for brewing and getting jobs done. The weather has helped immensely too.
• A big excuse not to go shopping in town centres and retail parks.

My employer has stated that working from home will be the new norm even once COVID-19 has gone/settled, so some of these positive are real long term benefits for me.

We have a lot of people who are working from home where its like Marmite you either love it or hate it but it is going to be the new norm with a lot of offices shutting hence saving on overheads and restrictions in the current climate.

 

[marshbrewer]

My employer has stated that working from home will be the new norm

Don't forget to investigate the various tax breaks you get if you permanently work from home. They aren't massive, but it all helps.

 

[Scrattajack]

All this awkward huggy stuff doesn't happen any more. Back to the good old days with a nod and a "good to see ya".

 

[Jordang]

I’ve been fortunate enough to work through, but as a H&S manager my workload went through the roof! Loads of positives though, mostly around life priorities; me and the lass finally decided to commit to our dream of a Smallholding so currently saving like mad. I started home brewing which is excellent Spending better quality time with the kids and Chlo. Just took the opportunity to reassess what was actually important to me

 

[Thonbi]

We've been fortunate as we've been remote workers for ~2 years.

We started brewing kit wine at the start of lockdown. We then did full extract beer, then our first AG a couple of weeks ago. Now waiting on a Brewzilla for the weekend.

 

[obscure]

My commute was door to door about 1.5 hours each way (so 3 hours a day), it is now roughly 30 seconds. I don’t get constantly interrupted meaning I start work at 8AM and finish at 4PM.

Sadly my employer has a serious anti working from home thing so it is likely before long I will be told I have to come back to the office which is idiotic (the company operated absolutely fine throughout lockdown with everyone working from home) but alas a mixture of a bad econpony making me not exactly keen on job hunting and the fact that for the large part I like my job, means its not something I’m willing to quit over.

 

[Graz]

I have been working at home all the way through, no furlough and I've kept my job. Positives are:

• Not having to travel to work and back, saving 2 hours of each weekday.
• Eating lunch with my family every day.
• Not being in a crowded office in which I can't concentrate.
• Going for more walks with my family and exploring our surrounding area more.
• Waking up later
• More time for brewing and getting jobs done. The weather has helped immensely too.
• A big excuse not to go shopping in town centres and retail parks.

My employer has stated that working from home will be the new norm even once COVID-19 has gone/settled, so some of these positive are real long term benefits for me.

Similar for me. In some respects I miss the office and being able to see / chat to other people, yeah I can still talk to my colleagues on MS Teams but it's not quite the same. It is also sometimes a bit of a pain not being able to change my equipment set up easily, reboot a PC that has crashed etc. but we do still have some folk in the office who are happy to go and press a button for you.

But the benefits are huge, no 40 mile round trip / 1hr on the M5 daily, I can get up later, I can go for a run during my lunch break (no showers at the office), when I finish work I can eat my dinner with my wife and kids. I can't see us being back in the office for quite a while yet and it's going to be weird when the kids go back to school. I'm sure I'm more productive at home too because as you say there is less office distraction.

I also ramped up the brewing at the start of lock down, who knew everyone else would too! As a result of that I completed my kegerator by adding a third tap and now have six kegs that I'm trying to keep filled. Also developed a large stock of bottled beer ready for whenever and will definitely be resampling some of this years brews over Christmas.

 

[MickDundee]

I’ve impressed my employer by getting through my first year-end whilst working completely from home with 2 kids in the house, and still easily met all my deadlines.

We’ve painted the horribly cold and dull Taylor Wimpey White walls in our living room, bedroom and all of the bathrooms (although we sickened ourselves of decorating and have decided to bring in a professional for the hall/landing and kids’ bedrooms).

I’ve switched to kegging for my home brew which has been an absolute game changer, even though I’m only on my second kegged beer.

We’ve both been working full time and no gym membership, no school club or nursery fees (until last week), the car finance ceased and my leased car from work isn’t ready yet etc so we’ve also managed to build our savings up a little bit again although that could be obliterated if our holiday refund doesn’t come through - we’ve only had about 30% of it back so far and we were meant to go away the last week in June.

 

[Jordang]

My commute was door to door about 1.5 hours each way (so 3 hours a day), it is now roughly 30 seconds. I don’t get constantly interrupted meaning I start work at 8AM and finish at 4PM.

Sadly my employer has a serious anti working from home thing so it is likely before long I will be told I have to come back to the office which is idiotic (the company operated absolutely fine throughout lockdown with everyone working from home) but alas a mixture of a bad econpony making me not exactly keen on job hunting and the fact that for the large part I like my job, means its not something I’m willing to quit over.

my employer is exactly the same! Rather than looking to take advantage of the benefits of remote working they still have this old fashioned idea that if your not sat at a desk in work, you’re not working fully! Which is bonkers!!! Could save 10’s thousands in fuel and productivity but just aren’t interested

 

[Clint]

I think where there's a business where lots have worked from home and less have actually had to keep going in because they can't possibly work from home,if or when the homeworkers return there could be a real change of atmosphere in some places...I think some homeworkers won't want to return....it's just an impression in getting...

 

[MickDundee]

I think where there's a business where lots have worked from home and less have actually had to keep going in because they can't possibly work from home,if or when the homeworkers return there could be a real change of atmosphere in some places...I think some homeworkers won't want to return....it's just an impression in getting...

The saved travel costs is the only main advantage for me of being at home. With the kids at school now there are no distractions, which is good and I was very very busy on Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday this week although I’m quite a lot quieter today and tomorrow.

However, I miss having colleagues there to ask questions to, have a bit of banter with etc, especially those that don’t work in my team/department who I would chat with in the kitchen or at the photocopier.

I don’t reckon I’ll be back in the office full time for a long time. 3 days form home and 2 in the office or something similar would probably suit me well.

 

[terrym]

so we’ve also managed to build our savings up a little bit again although that could be obliterated if our holiday refund doesn’t come through - we’ve only had about 30% of it back so far and we were meant to go away the last week in June.

If you paid by credit or debit card talk to your card provider if you have not done so already. We had a refund due from Centerparcs who have been very slow in giving refunds and my bank took on a dispute claim on our behalf. All we had to do was provide the bank with evidence that the refund was due. However we had been chasing Centerparcs independently and the day after we engaged the bank the refund came through. Not sure if it was coincidence or what.

 

[MickDundee]

If you paid by credit or debit card talk to your card provider if you have not done so already. We had a refund due from Centerparcs who have been very slow in giving refunds and my bank took on a dispute claim on our behalf. All we had to do was provide the bank with evidence that the refund was due. However we had been chasing Centerparcs independently and the day after we engaged the bank the refund came through. Not sure if it was coincidence or what.

We’ve done the credit card claim for the sightseeing passes because their phone lines are now going dead so we are worried they have gone under.

For the flights we are giving it another 4 weeks because when we spoke to the travel agent on Tuesday (which was 8 weeks from when they told us they had requested a refund from the airline) they said it can take up to 12 weeks. They travel agents have already refunded our hotel and transfers so it’s just the flight left. Unfortunately the flights were that majority of the cost of the holiday!

 

[terrym]

I have to say that Covid has not given me any life positives, it's mostly been negative. My wife and I are of an age where we have had to keep a low profile and I have a few health issues which hasn't helped too. We have lost holidays and had restricted access to our family, although that has eased a little recently. Our social life has taken a dive too, and I have not been in a restaurant or pub for months. Day trips to London and other places to do stuff have stopped. I can do jobs around the house anytime since I am retired, so there was no benefit there. We were going to get the kitchen revamped but have now put that on hold.
But in an effort to be positive, I have found daily watering has meant my potted tomato plants benefit from daily watering with bigger tomatoes, I have appreciated my allotment more this year since it has been somewhere to go and glad I didn't give it up, someone gave me 6 minikegs having had to buy his beer from a local brewery and that how the beer came at the time when the pubs were shut, and we have found buying bread flour in large bags off Amazon is cheaper than buying it from shops, and the bread is just as good. But sadly that's about it.

 

[jceg316]

I quit my job in December as a data analyst and was looking for a new role, but realised I hate working in an office for someone else. I applied to work in a brewery and had a successful interview. Was invited for a trial brew and then lockdown happened a few days before and the brewery shut. I used this time to create my own business which I'm still in the process of setting up. My wife runs a farm and retreat centre and I'm adding a nano brewery and pickle kitchen to it. I'll be making beer and pickles, and as distancing relaxes running pickle and beer workshops as well as other events like food and beer tastings.

 

[GhostShip]

I'm not necessarily promoting this, but I found it really interesting. Written by a retired scientist (biomedical research) and well worth a read;

Blair is urging world govts to massively increase testing both in scale & frequency - everyone & often. This is preposterous. Those with a good knowledge of immunology know with a high degree of certainty that the best way to return towards normality is to do just that. There are very good reasons to believe that the population of U.K. & of many heavily infected countries have arrived at the politically hated state called ‘herd immunity’. This term isn’t political but is decades old & arose from studies of infectious diseases in livestock. It’s how mammals, specifically jawed vertebrates, learned to live with the thousands of viruses that infect every living organism on the planet, not just us, but even plants, fungi & bacteria. The plain facts are that our Govt was & still is advised using a fatally flawed model. Now, if that model was correct, we would be in horrible trouble. We’re told only 7% have antibodies to the virus & the model assumes we started with 100% susceptibility, because the virus is new. So then the logic is the virus hasn’t gone away & must sooner or later return. This is the basis of all the 2nd Wave fears you hear. But the model IS fatally flawed & I will now prove it.

First, I ask you to take the first bit on trust. It’ll be backed up by other science in a moment. I’ve spent my whole professional life in biomedical research. When I see a graph that has particular characteristics, I’m certain to my core that it’s a natural phenomenon, not human made. Look at the daily covid19 deaths vs time curve for UK. That’s a Gompertz type curve & these are typical of natural, biological phenomena, seen time without number, in the thousands of scientific papers I’ve read. It’s the shape of my own research too. So since mid-April, I’ve been looking for the underlying natural causes underlying it. Some very good researchers both practical & theoretical have been hard at work during this time. We now know without a shadow of doubt, that 30-50% of our population already had resistance, call it immunity, to this new virus, before it even arrived. How? Well, SARS-COV-2 is new, but coronaviruses are not. There are at least four well characterised family members which are endemic & cause some of the common colds we experience, especially in winter. They all have striking sequence similarity to the new virus. The way our clever immune systems work, we have certain white cells called T-cells whose job it is to memorise a short piece of whatever virus we were infected with so the right types can multiply rapidly & protect you if you get a related infection. This has been shown in dozens of blood samples taken from donors before the new virus arrived. The paper was published in the top journal, Science, this month. Prior to this, three other excellent groups including the top immunologists in Germany, Sweden & the USA each independently published similar findings. These papers showed this pre-immunity is geographically widespread, but it was only the Science paper that gave us the why & how So we modify the Govts model and say at worst, 70% might have been susceptible. It’s actually even fewer, because children, especially young children, appear much harder to infect. This, too, has a recent & solidly scientific explanation.

To do you harm, viruses need to get inside your cells. To do that, they exploit as ‘grappling hooks’ receptors on the outside of those cells, in the case of the new virus, at blazing speed, scientists determined it is an enzyme called ACE2. It turns out that the levels of ACE2 are highest in adults & much lower in children, the less, the younger they are. That’s a wonderfully lucky break, and goes some way in explaining why they’ve been spared. Anyway, so now it’s at least 35% who are resistant / immune & will neither get ill nor participate in viral transmission. This is so crucial to understanding where we are. The proportion of the population that need to be resistant to an infection, in order to stop it spreading, depends on the proportion who were originally susceptible AND the reproduction number, or R. If 100% truly were susceptible, then we’d need 65% infected for that to happen. That would have resulted in very many deaths than sadly we’ve had. But if, as we are now sure, a much lower % are susceptible, it takes far fewer to catch the virus before there are too few susceptible people left & so increasingly, the virus couldn’t find the next person to infect. That is exactly what has happened. The observation that only 7% have antibodies to the virus is NOT the same as saying only 7% have been infected (though our media often & wrongly assumes so). This is because the antibody system is but one of several tools our immunology has to defend us. There have been at least 2 independent papers published showing that roughly, for every one infected person who goes on to develop enough antibodies for us to easily see them, two further people develop those magic memory T-cells. So who knows, perhaps 21% of the population have been infected.

 

[GhostShip]

Continued....

It’s my view based on a complex calculation, which may be wrong, that roughly 28% had been. But these estimates are at least in the same range, and this is about to be crucial, too. Other epidemiologists, including some who are regarded as world leading, have crunched numerous formulae. They show that, with the extent of prior immunity that we now know about, only 15-25% of the population is completely sufficient to bring the spread of the virus to a shuddering halt. There are a couple of final scientific but sad components to this horrible understanding. We saw, early on in the pandemic, the number of daily deaths absolutely soar. We did not know then where it would stop rising. But we do now have a good explanation for the very steep rise & much slower fall. It’s that it’s been shown previously, and we appeared to have forgotten it, that the most easily infected people got infected earliest. Sounds obvious & in a way, it is. We vary hugely, not only in our responses to viruses, but also in the ease or difficulty the virus finds as it tries to invade us. The most susceptible were those already elderly and/or ill, some very ill, and so we saw very high death rates initially. Once that super-susceptible group were consumed by the virus, it began a slower march through everyone else, slowing all the time, as the % susceptible fell & fell towards the herd immunity threshold. That is where we now are & that is why the virus is disappearing from the environment. While there are some ‘cases’ they are the hardest to infect & I think in large measure they are mostly the least vulnerable medically. That’s why deaths have almost ceased, having fallen over 99% from peak. All the numbers monitored carefully fallen like this, too: the numbers being hospitalised, numbers in hospital, number in intensive care, all way to 99% lower than peak.

You might be asking, where is the 2nd peak? The truth is, that generally doesn’t happen. You don’t generally get infected by the exact same virus twice, certainly not close in time. It’d be a poor immune system which let that happen & we’d probably not have made it to the 21st century if that’s how it worked. So there’s an expectation of some duration of immunity. It needs studying, but my experience suggests it you’ve memory T-cells, durability can be very long. One small study showed that people had robust T-cell responses to the first SARS & that was 2003! So what now? Well, the tests we’ve used to date have served us well. The PCR test for virus is good enough to confirm infection in someone with symptoms. Is it flu or is it covid19 was easily answered. What it’s very poor at is what is being asked of it now, in mass, community testing. We don’t know exactly what the false positive rate is, but it is widely believed to be greater that the actual, remaining prevalence of the virus! The result of continuing to use this test alone is to generate a high proportion of false positives. Note that recent so-called’spikes’ were never accompanied or followed by people getting ill, going to hospital & dying in elevated numbers. I truly believe most of the positives from mass testing are false ones. I don’t think the test now helps us at all & IMO it should immediately cease.

A couple of closing points, which I can’t ignore, even though they’re embarrassing & some are totally tragic and scandalous. First, lockdown. I think there is no solid evidence that it played any role in slowing transmission. That’s not so terribly surprising because a little later, we realised that the vast bulk of transmission was going on in & around hospitals & care homes. This is no criticism: it’s where ill people are & these viruses are almost impossible to prevent moving between people. But given that, general lockdown simply couldn’t be a big factor bearing down on the pandemic. Knowing what we know, we don’t need to conceive lots of transmission going on between strangers in the street. Different on the Tube, I shouldn’t wonder, but in general, it is my view that we needn’t have locked down. I’m going to confess at this point that I myself was scared around that time. I’m accepting that had I been anywhere near that big call, I would have voted for the 1st lockdown & possibly the first extension. Beyond there I believe it was abundantly clear we were gaining nothing from it & we were destroying the economy as well as people’s spirit & mental health. I was truly shocked at recent lockdowns: by then it was certain they don’t work & in any case at that point the pandemic was drawing to a close, less & less lethally. The other point I’d make is that the evidence that masks, especially cheap face cloths, block transmission is extremely weak. In the one really large, properly randomised study of respiratory virus transmission generally, the evidence was stark: the worst outcomes was in the group using face coverings. I don’t think the evidence of harm is other than weak, either. But they’re not useful. My final blast is I’m afraid at the position of the NHS. I say right now, it’s not the NHS I blame for its state, but those who’ve asked that it remain ‘Covid19 ready’. The only explanation I can think of is that our Govt sincerely believes there’ll be a 2nd wave. I don’t think that at all & no scientist I’ve conversed with thinks so, either. It’s tragic that there is no doubt at all that a large number of people have died avoidable deaths in recent months. I don’t have any means to assess this, but I’ve heard that, if this position isn’t changed in the next four weeks & certainly long before winter, the effect of our responses to this virus could kill as many people as the virus already has.

We have good & improving tests, for covid19, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus & more. If we get excess winter deaths, which every country in our latitude does, we will be able to diagnose what they suffered from. The virus can’t sneak up on us. If it emerges, we will spot it before it spreads. I expect there will be local, small & self limiting mini outbreaks, hopefully without many deaths. But we must see our precious NHS orientated back to its normal shape & excellent services. I salute those brave NHS staff & care home workers who kept on going to work, especially early on, when we knew too little to guarantee their safety. That’s courage, professionalism & humanity right there. Thank you. So in closing, what are my hopes? I sincerely hope seniors advising HMG discuss all this, not only with me (I’m a retired scientist with no profile & no wish for one) but with some of the authors of the papers i mentioned by haven’t formally referenced here. I’m helping craft a formal Advisory paper which I hope will be considered in the coming v few weeks. We need to move fast, but the thinking must be honestly pressure tested. All I hope for are 3 things: normalise the NHS by end-Sept; halt random mass testing within two weeks; lift the mask mandate (please). In finishing, please note that every single one of these observations & ideas, (most of which belong not to me, but the scientists who provided the scaffold for this climb), are being cognitated & ruminated on by our peers in all heavily infected countries. I don’t know what the position is outside a handful of European countries. But people in France, Italy, dare I say Sweden, may have differing or convergent views. So some intergovernmental talking is probably in order.

 

[Sandimas]

I've been amazed how much I've been able to work from home. I've not missed the commute at all. I think (hope) a mixture of office and home working will be the future, I can concentrate much better at home then in a noisy office.

I've spent a lot of time in the garden and it's the best it's ever been, including my tomato and chilli crops. It would have been perfect apart from the blackfly infestation that destroyed all my beans.

But most of all, my values have changed: I don't really want new "things" any more, I value experiences much more e.g. there was an advert for a new car on the other day, I couldn't even get a tiny bit excited about it, the cars we have are sufficient. We're living within our means much more.

 

[AdeDunn]

My parents moved back down from the Hope Valley in the Peak District to a place closer to Wolverhampton (a bit....) when they were forced to realise just how isolated they were up there?

Sorry, but that's about it for us.

 

[MmmBeer]

I have started a new job recently.
Because of the work, (being far more active and less drinking on school nights) I have lost nearly a stone and feel a lot fitter.
I have noticed the roads being far quieter, if only there was somewhere I needed to go.