Blog | Ville Vartiainen

2 years of Covid-19

Today marks a year and a day since the United Kingdom imposed a lockdown due to the spread of Covid-19, a virus that was seen to be causing devastating numbers of deaths and hospitalisations across the world, in Europe and was taking effect in the UK.

Finger wagging

It’s easy to point fingers. You might even say it is natural human behaviour. So much easier to find fault in others, to shout angrily, to condemn and tut your way to feeling some kind of victory against all the bad things that regularly happen in the world.

RSS

I made a conscious decision to pretty much stay off twitter earlier this year. It is a terrible time-suck, it is a firehose of all kinds of things that will rob you of your sanity and faith in humankind. It also did not help my state of anxiety at the time.

First vaccine dose

I cycled this morning to get my first dose of the Astra Zeneca vaccine for Covid-19. I’m really impressed by the number of available centres and the way it has been organised, and I’m really happy to have done my bit.

History teaches us everything about pandemics

We are living through a major pandemic.

Yesterday the UK ‘reflected’ on its 1 year anniversary of lockdown. This is fact, it’s not fiction. Wishing that it weren’t so changes nothing.

I was thinking back to last spring when I would stare at people wearing masks on public transport, thinking “Oh that’s a bit much!”. On reading news articles that were raising the alarm I brushed it off as media hype, because some information suggested that it was not going to be a global threat.

1 year on

It is hard to believe that a year has passed since the start of our first lockdown in the United Kingdom, and we’re now in our third which had required the schools to close for about 2 months from the beginning of January.

3 Vaccines in under a year

We cautiously prepared not to expect any vaccines for at least a year, and that getting them would take even longer.

We now have at least 3 seemingly viable vaccines, with jaw droppping efficacy rates of up to 90%.

One type is based on introducing mRNA into the host, inside a lipid container, where it gets taken up by cells and they then begin to manufacture the spike proteins found on the Covid-19 virus. This stimulates antibody production and Helper T-Cell which attack the virus if it’s present.

The other uses an attenuated form of the virus, and stimulates an immune response.

Having studied Immunology I think this is hugely exciting (I tried something vaguely similar for my thesis at University). As an operational achievement it is also amazing. Probably the biggest public health pandemic initiative since things like Polio.

Science rocks.

Cascading memories

A friend of mine complimented me on my tiny ‘rebrand’ on twitter (it actually began on Slack), which was very nice. So I decided to align the branding of this site with that.

New cat

After resisting for a few years, and then being at home all the time, we finally decided to fulfil our daughter’s dreams by getting a rescue cat. We wanted a pair but the demand is very high at the moment!

Will post some some updates soon, but for now he is in the living room, a little freaked out. We’ve called him Lumi.

The name of the game for the next 4 weeks is ‘containment’ and getting to know each other.

7 months later

I write this on the day that the USA goes to the polls, after 4 years of having an openly, unapologetically terrible man as the President. I don’t think that the country had been perfect before he took office, but I think removing a leader who gives validation to the very things that hold back humanity would be good.