• Forms of life get very small, I am unsure but I think that viruses are the smallest. Strands of ribonuclei acid , RNA,wrapped up in a coat to protect themselves when not happily reproducing in some other living organism. So here is a highly magnified image I found on the internet

What do I know about this Covid 19?

• As viruses go it is quite large and heavy reducing the distance it can easily travel through air
• It invades lung cells of humans where it happily reorganises things so it can reproduce itself. I think it kills the cells it invades, taking over the reproductive mechanisms of the cell to make more of itself.
• It has swept across the world getting into human bodies via their mucous membranes in noses, mouths and eyes .
• It gets there in a droplet of moisture coughed or sneezed by an infected person, landing on a surface where another host human transfers it to their mouth or nose or eyes where it can move in our mucous off into lung tissue
• Lots of people get infected and survive after an unpleasant time of fever and coughing
• Some people die
• The mathematical models indicate that the rate of spread is fast because every one person can infect three others, those three then infect another three each and so on
• Reducing physical contact slows the rate of infection, the virus has nowhere to go
• ‘Lockdown’ has been effective in slowing infections
• But ‘Lockdown’ is creating more problems both now and almost certainly for the future

Things that are changed

Our behaviour towards one another, can we care, can we still find ways to communicate, touch and soothe?

Or are we gradually seeing the fault lines opening both at an individual and social level?

Our attitude to some of the lowest paid workers in our societies, people who keep us clean, help us when we are ill, care for us in old age and often when we are very young, move us around on public transport, grow and deliver our food, keep the lights on and water running, bins emptied and sewers unblocked, bury the dead and deliver the newborn, the list is long, people on it invisible,  until they are not.

Like that tiny virus

So how am I going to live with the fear of dying? As I write that I think it sounds like an oxymoron. I know that being alive means that I have to die.

and the economy

This seems even harder to unpick. If those with wealth have 42% of it from private pensions where did that money originate?

Somehow the conversations around fairness and furloughing, value and money, money and wealth, education, inheritance and upbringing merge into a tangled web.

A little like the tracing the spread of that tiny virus.

What steps do I need to take to untangle the knots?

Each one of us may have a different answer

Right now we are denied the chance to physical sing, dance and feast together

Right now some people are working in difficult conditions, with lack of sleep and lack of solace

Right now new connections are being made

Just like that tiny virus