I am amazed at the naivety of some of the comments, statements, so-called 'facts', redirect links etc about this virus and the chatter that 'it's soon over'.
How many more posts and how long is it going to take before the penny drops?...

Covid is here to stay, in different guises no doubt just, like influenza and we will have to learn to live with it and cope with various frustrations and restrictions it will cause in our lives including travel issues as and when these arise.

The Halcyon days of travel I have had the immense luck to enjoy are mostly over- just like Brexit, Visas, paper work, we will all have to adapt. They are all a pain but the price we have to pay.
Let us not forget that most people who have/had the time and money needed to enjoy motorcycles/4x4's/camels etc to travel with belong to a very privileged group. A massive proportion of Homo Sapiens spend their lives just surviving from one day to the next. That thought alone may well be a 'whinge killer'.

Meanwhile, here is an artists’ impression of the new variant.
Carpe Diem

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I do not list my vehicles or the places I have travelled to nor do I live my life seeking validation from others.
Any information I place on here is offered freely in the spirit of cooperation.

I was interested in pandemics from a personal safety viewpoint before Covid became a problem and had actually taken a copy of Adam Kucharski's The Rules of Contagion with me as reading material on my Jan-Mar 2020 trip to Morocco. Since then I've taken the view that knowledge and understanding of Covid is the best counter to apprehension and anxiety.

It seems that most pandemics last between 2.5 and 3.5 years, and that over time the virus mutates to become less life threatening and it then becomes an endemic disease that continues to circulate at manageable levels. That's what happened with the 1918-1920 'Spanish' flu pandemic that killed more people than died in the Great War—protection against modern versions of this virus is included in the annual flu jab.

Part of the reason that death rates around Europe were so high in the early Covid waves is that the virus picked the 'low hanging fruit' of the elderly with co-morbidities, running riot in care homes, with many also becoming infected in hospitals. But even when you take these excess deaths into account there's no doubting the dramatic reduction in virulence of Omicron amongst a mostly vaccinated population, as the figures for France so eloquently demonstrate.

In the 22 months to 31 December 2021 there were 126,000 deaths resulting from just under 10 million recorded covid cases in France.

In the 23 days since 31 December there have been another 6.7 million !! cases with projected fatalities likely to be around 7,000.

World health Organisation Europe Director Hans Kluge stated yesterday that “It’s plausible that the region is moving towards a kind of pandemic endgame.” Once the current surge of Omicron currently sweeping across Europe subsides, “there will be for quite some weeks and months a global immunity... so we anticipate that there will be a period of quiet before Covid-19 may come back towards the end of the year, but not necessarily the pandemic coming back”.

Other experts have also said there is likely to be other waves later in 2022 and possibly beyond, so yes, I believe the only viruses that mankind has managed to permanently eradicate from circulation are smallpox (last outbreak 1977) and rinderpest (2001), but we do manage to live with other coronaviruses and we will have to live with this one as well.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

There is an interesting perspective to question about how long a pandemic will run if you look to the 1889–1890 pandemic called "Asiatic flu" or "Russian flu".

>>
In 2020, Danish researchers Lone Simonsen and Anders Gorm Pedersen noted that the clinical manifestations of the 1889 pandemic—runny nose, headache, high fever, severe chest inflammation, speeding up old respiratory diseases, and primarily killing elderly people—resembled COVID-19, a disease caused by a coronavirus, more than flu. They calculated that the human coronavirus OC43 had split from bovine coronavirus about 130 years before, approximately coinciding with the pandemic in 1889–1890. The calculation was based on genetic comparisons between bovine coronavirus and different strains of OC43. While their research had not been formally published as of November 2020, a team from the University of Leuven in Belgium performed a similar analysis of OC43, identifying a crossover date in the late 1800s.<<

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889%E...31890_pandemic


>>However, there is not a scientific consensus that the 1889–1890 outbreak was caused by a coronavirus, with one analysis of the literature suggesting that the evidence for this cause is "weak" and "conjectural<<

Quote from: What we can learn from the dynamics of the 1889 ‘Russian flu’ pandemic for the future trajectory of COVID-19 by Harald Brüssow

Source: https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.w...751-7915.13916

What is certain is public knowledge of past major outbreaks is quite sketchy. Those interested in WWI might have heard of Spanish flu, I only came across Russian flu a few weeks ago.

Another that was news to me was the typhus outbreaks in London in the 1860s that killed 40,000 at a time when London had a population of 3 million.

In our neighbourhood is an abandoned graveyard that is being left to nature. It looks rather like a Hammer House of Horror film set with gravestones leaning over at angles under the gloomy trees. I noticed three gravestones of the same design in a line, touching each other and was intrigued as I had seen this in Commonwealth War Graveyards when several soldiers had died in a shellburst and it was impossible to identify which bodyparts belonged to whom.


Three children from the same family who died of typhus in March 1862

Interesting comment from

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)