Tier 4

Well, that went downhill fast! Three weeks ago the Covid rate for our local authority area was 55 per 100,000 people; now it has gone up to over 300 per 100,000. On Thursday it was announced that our area would be moved from Tier 2 coronavirus restrictions to Tier 3 from today, then today we were told we would be moved into a new Tier 4 from tomorrow. It seems that the rapid spread in London and the south-east of England, which has now moved up to us, is due to a mutation of the virus which may increase transmissibility by as much as 70%. As a result the government has effectively sent us back to the same lockdown restrictions we had for four weeks during October and November. It as also, so far as Tier 4 areas are concerned, cancelled any relaxation of the measures over Christmas and no households in Tier 4 are allowed to meet up. 

We were expecting a small amount of mixing to be allowed over Christmas, so had planned our usual Christmas Day gathering, with R and her boyfriend, H's boyfriend and my brother coming to us for Christmas morning and dinner (at lunch time), with the older girls going to their partners' families later in the day. However, we will now just have the four of us who live here together. While it is disappointing not to be able to see the rest of our family, keeping well is more important, especially with the vaccination programme already under way. My brother lives a few minutes walk away, so we will take his Christmas dinner and gifts round to him. We had already ruled out any further socialising over the Christmas period, so it isn't going to mean any other changes to our arrangements. Two other minor disappointments are that my planned trip to visit Stonehenge is off - we are not allowed to travel out of our area - and so is our visit to see the Waddesdon Manor Christmas lights on Wednesday. We keep reminding ourselves that it is just one year, and we will enjoy everything all the more next year when (we hope!) life should be pretty much back to normal. 

All secondary age school children have been asked to take a Covid test, as it seems that is the age group where the virus is spreading fastest. Fortunately for us, our immediate area still has quite low Covid rates, and N's school has been largely clear. She did a home test on Thursday afternoon, but we haven't had the results yet - someone (not me!) missed part of the instructions and we didn't register the test online when we should have done. I have now done it retrospectively, so hopefully the test result will get correctly matched up to the right details. If no result comes back by Monday, we may have to do another test. I'm not over worried as it is just precautionary. M is still doing his lateral flow tests regularly and getting negative results. 

To brighten a slightly grumpy post the photos are from a walk along the canal with neighbours on Thursday, and some other neighbours' cheerful Santa and snowman.