Playing by the rules

Rules are rules ... and the idea is that if everyone plays by them, the pandemic can be controlled to the point where we can have COVID-free communities. It's sensible, yet for over seven months it's also been a vague kind of idea, lurking out there in the shadowed corners one one's mind. Till Thursday.

What a time to come down sick with all the symptoms of 'flu -- with Victoria under a Stage Four lockdown, with a State of Disaster declared there; and, at the same time, South Australia quarantining and isolating over a thousand people, to contain a cluster of our very own. And with anything up from 25% of travelers returning from interstate and overseas showing themselves to be complete idiots who somehow can't understand what the words "GO home, stay there" mean. 

And one of those quarantine jumpers was in Christies Beach, which is altogether too close for comfort. Sooo ... when I felt unwell on Wednesday night I was watching for the symptoms; and sure enough, I woke up feeling weird, with the scratchy throat, the cough, the exhaustion, the headache --

Yep, time to get tested. 

Luckily, our own surgery ("clinic," for family and friends in the US) has a testing station working every afternoon in the car park behind their building, and Dave took me there for a 3:40pm appointment on Thursday. Which of course effectively isolates the whole house, pending getting results. No problem there. Dave has plenty of sick leave, and the whole thing was arranged with phone calls.

But we're up to four in the afternoon on Saturday, and there's still no results, which probably indicates the backlog, the sheer volume of tests being performed in SA, where most people are doing the right thing. All we can do is sit tight and be patient ... watch the news from interstate and overseas, and wonder how and why people are doing what they're doing...

How to put this? There is a great deal of "silliness" going on in the world (and you may substitute any more caustic word of your choosing there), which is most odd, when one remembers that of of today 278 people have perished in Australia, at one end of the scale, and way over 161,000 in America, at the other end of the scale. SA is still one of the safest places, with just 4 fatalities, all of whom were so dangerously ill before the arrived home here, nothing could be done to stave off the inevitable. 

So -- we wait, (patience, Grasshopper), and we try to be calm and think peaceful thoughts. Hence the images accompanying this post: dawn, about ten days ago, at Bayards Wetlands. 

The worst aspect of this at the moment (three days into the lurgy) is the bloody headache, which only quits for a short time if I take pills by the handful. Ach. It's not migraine, but close to it ... such fun. Not.