It’s a year today since the first cases of Covid-19 were identified in the UK, at a hotel in York, in a family who’d recently returned from Wuhan. At the time, it was worrying, but we certainly couldn’t have seen what lay ahead. It’s a grim anniversary.
Meanwhile, the wonderful pharmaceutical companies which have done such amazing work in creating effective vaccines so quickly, and hopefully offering us all a way out of this nightmare, and which deserve the highest honours which every country and organisation in the world has to offer, are being rewarded for their superlative efforts with threats of legal action from the European Commission (against AstraZeneca) and the Italian government (against PfizerBioNTech). Seriously?! I’m sure they’re doing their best, but there are bound to be teething problems with producing such vast quantities of new products. And one of the issues is that production’s been interrupted whilst they try to increase capacity, which they have to do because it may well be that the entire population of the world has to receive a dose of the vaccine every year. Nothing like this has ever been done before. They should be getting Nobel Prizes, not threatened with lawsuits. It’s extremely unedifying behaviour from the politicians concerned.
On a happier note, how glorious to see live tennis in front of crowds, at the exhibition event in Adelaide. Particularly glorious in that Rafa won his match in straight sets 🙂 , but, hey, just glorious generally. Well done and thank you so much to Tennis Australia and the wonderful Australian people for everything they’ve done.
There’s been widespread publicity about some of the “issues” involving the quarantine procedures for the players and those accompanying them. OK, being stuck in a hotel room for 14 days, and, if you were unlucky enough to be on one of the flights where someone tested positive, not being allowed out to practise as originally planned, must have been pretty grim. Especially if you had mice in your room. But, hey, if being shut in a room for 14 days, even with an entire family of mice, means being able to see your family and friends, go to sporting events, go out to restaurants, etc etc, at the end of it, then give me the address of the hotel and I’ll be there as quickly as I can. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be like that for most of us – as Rafa said, Spain’s been badly hit, and so have the UK, the US, Brazil, Mexico, France, Italy and so many other countries. Portugal seems to be suffering particularly badly at the moment.
But, oh, how brilliant to see tennis in front of crowds! Thank you, Australia <3. And thank you Eurosport – exhibition matches aren’t usually televised, but this one was special!
The Year Without Wimbledon 