We are back in the gym! It's such a relief. We are, of course, back to "square one". We now have to work out how to get these boys back to the competitive level they were a year ago. There is hard work ahead of us. However, it's so good to be able to speak directly to the boys again, and of course, they get to do what they have wanted to do all this time... gymnastics. There was never any enthusiasm for Zoom "carpet dancing".
The red shading on the graph shows when we were shut; the blue line is the Covid infection rate.
The statistics are scary. We initially shut down 388 days ago. Since then, the club has been completely closed for 263 days (68%). Of the 125 days we were open, we operated at between 50% and 80% of our capacity.
You can clearly see the effect lock-downs had on the death rate. The up-tick in the death rate shown in late summer highlights the sheer stupidity of the "eat out to help out" scheme. I can only hope there's a politician somewhere who doesn't sleep well at night after that decision.
This time, the pubs are not fully open. You have to stay in the garden with your drink. The weather now is quite cold, especially compared to last year when we experienced a heat-wave during the early part of Summer.
Vaccine rollout continues to accelerate, and the number of deaths continues to fall. Interestingly, we are one of the better countries at convincing the population to get vaccinated. France and Germany have not done so well, and now their cases are rising again.