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Time to hole up?

Toilet paper: check.

Longlife milk: check.

A month's worth of frozen chicken breasts: oops!

Yeah, if we're to believe what we're told, Kiwis should be preparing to hunker-down and get ready for skyrocketing cases of CV19 within the community by laying down extra stores of essentials and limiting their engagement with crowds of others.

The reality is that most of us are probably just tired of all this gloom and doom. We've had two years of "taking precautions", even during the period when we were free from community-transmission.

I expect that most of us are all Covid'd out by now.

It's still a good idea to lay in a couple of week's worth of provisions though because odds are that supply chains may get a little intermittent in the weeks to come.

Although you and I may be fine and perhaps never catch the dreaded CV19 virus, the folk who make the staples we consider essential and those who deliver it to the supermarkets will likely get laid-up at some stage.

There's no point in trying to buy more TP if the shelves are bare and, trust me, you can't wipe your backside on an electronic copy of the NZ Herald.

The good news is that we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

As the UK and a raft of other countries start dismantling their CV19 protection mechanisms and even Australia prepares to re-open its borders, it's starting to look as if things might be almost back to "normal" by next Christmas.

Woohoo!

I'm afraid that we will lose a few valued people along the way, with modellers predicting 460 to 1,450 deaths before we're through the worst of it.

At best, that's just 12 months worth of fatalities on our roads or a year's worth of flu deaths so isn't an unprecedented number.

The up-side is that it will likely raise the average IQ of the nation somewhat, as many of the fatalities will be those who believe that the vaccine is a conspiracy and contains 5G-activated nannites that give some global superpower control of our minds :-)

Speaking with friends in the UK and the USA, the omicron strain is still nothing to take lightly.

Although it hasn't killed anyone I know, quite a few of my friends overseas who have caught it describe the virus as "decidedly unpleasant" and most are still suffering some kind of residual illness a month or two after infection.

I expect therefore, that most folk who catch omicron will be "out of action" for at least 7-10 days and not fully back to normal for quite a bit longer.

Get ready for a sore throat, headache, lots and lots of coughing and a huge degree of malaise. Not fun at all -- but certainly better than hospitalisation or worse.

Still, as Arnie would say "no pain, no gain" and once omicron has run its course through our community we will hopefully find ourselves with good levels of herd immunity and a lingering resistance to possible future variants of the CV19 virus.

So plan for the worst, hope for the best and let's get on with this so that New Zealand can re-open its doors to the world and we can ditch all the restrictions and loss of freedoms that have become part of life over the past couple of years.

Have you taken any extra measures to prepare for the supply-chain issues that will undoubtedly arise and are you taking any steps to avoid (or perhaps ensure) exposure to omicron over the next month or two?

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