No longer shielded

I was advised to shield, and have not received any advice to stop. Mine finishes mid June, I hope, I think I can use my own judgement to keep myself and others safe.

Nortsat My wife had a call and a single letter. We are both 69 (I don’t believe for one moment that 70 was anything but an arbitrary line in the sand) and have two sons (one just made redundant) and two grandsons here who I have been home schooling. There is NO WAY that any of us are changing our routine nor going out yet, and the boys are emphatically NOT going back to school before September. I am just really waiting for the second spike to appear.

Hope I am wrong, but long life and acquired “wisdom” advises caution for the next few weeks. Watch and see never hurts and, to adopt an old military adage, time spent in reconnaissance is NEVER wasted

BlueSky I don't know that it is OK but we are very careful. We cross to the opposite side of the road/path if we see anyone and make sure we are at least 2 metres apart. Most people are just as careful as us although we've noticed it is starting to change and we have found ourselves doing some odd manoeuvres recently.

Teacheranne: imo what you’re doing sounds very sensible (and I’m saying this as someone who is über careful !).Could you not get a supermarket delivery, though, rather than do click and collect (although, if you’re using Tesco’s which my daughter does they seem to have got the hygiene aspect nailed: she’s very impressed with them. We’ve been able to get Tesco deliveries which surprised us although it’s one of the most stressful things we’ve ever done and is causing a few arguments. I insisted that we HAD to have some instant mash and everything crashed whilst adding it just as our two hours was almost up: thankfully we got it back but DH was seething!

I had the dreaded letter. Asked two doctors & practice nurse why. None could fathom out why as though I have a couple of things going on none are needing shielding. They all told me that some people were sent letters that shouldnt have & that some who should have had the letter hadnt. All had to be done so fast mistakes were bound to be made so think we all must use our own judgement as we know our conditions probably better than locum doctors. I have had Sky engineers here who were not allowed into my property but thankfully it was a problem with the dish. They were very careful as was the Gas Engineer who stayed one end of my kitchen while I stayed the other end. So life goes on as it has to, we just have to keep being careful until maybe one day this is over. Hopefully soon before some of us, me first, end up in what my DM called the 'Funny Farm'!

My husband is a gas engineer and they are still working, staying in a separate room etc

My letter about shielding was dated 17th April for 12 weeks, so mid July for me

Both my mother and aunt have chronic kidney disease but neither received a letter to shield. We were surprised by that but they have been very careful.

I think I am going to ignore all the Gvt guidelines and do what I feel is safe and right for me. I am not in a vulnerable group but do live alone and have mobility problems so do not want to cope with looking after myself if I catch the virus.

I plan to continue using click and collect orders for food shopping ( hope I can get them, sometimes it's difficult but then I'll just pop to the shops and be quick), shop for most other things online and stay at home. I am prepared to have someone visit me and sit apart in the garden and would go to another house to do the same but I don't think I'll be going to cafes or pubs for a while.

Bobdoesit that's what I wanted to know, if we live in a rural quiet area is it OK to go for a walk, but avoid all other face to face contacts. I guess the general advice had to be stay home don't go out even for exercise as many places would be rather busy.

Would people PLEASE stop comparing UK statistics to those countries with far smaller populations. Houndi compares Ireland (pop 4.9 million) to us (66 million). At least those who worship at the feet of St Jacinda (leader of New Zealand also 4.9 million population) have been less vocal lately!

My husband received a letter to say he should shield but we live in the country so have continued to walk. Food and medications are delivered so we've not visited any shops/towns etc.,

This is the advice on the Government website as of today:
If you’re clinically extremely vulnerable, you’re strongly advised to stay at home at all times and avoid any face-to-face contact to protect yourself.
The Government is currently advising people to shield until 30 June 2020 and is regularly monitoring this position.

In other words nothing has changed.

My shielding letter states that I need to be so until 14th June. I have heard nothing more from the Government or GP. My consultant team have suggested that I will need to remain so possibly until there is a vaccine, or at least for the forseeable future. I expect as I am on immune suppressant medication which impairs my natural immunity I am at risk whilst the virus is still out there. As for the track and trace app. What if you leave your phone at home? What if your phone cannot download the App? I am getting tired of not trusting what I hear from our so called Government.

Ireland had no deaths yesterday.England 412 .They have no idea,what they are doing.My husband who is NHS frontline said this government can stick their claps.

I have British Gas out 5 times to look at my boiler problem so yes they will come out!

With the second of my "shielding" letters there was a step-by-step graph of medications, along the lines of : if you take this and this you need to shield, if you take this and that you need to take care" : thing. I've told my Director I'm to shield until 30 June - my office is the other side of London, I'd have to travel on the tube.

I do think there will be another leap in cases as people use less precautions. And get complacent.

I had a phone call telling me that i wasn't extremely vulnerable after getting the letter. I agreed as I don't have severe COPD it's mild. Couldn't understand why I had the letter in the first place

Mags55
We had a new boiler fitted. Our boiler is in the loft which is accessible from the hall. We sat in the conservatory.
They told us they hadn't stopped working at all.

A friend who has leukaemia and a heart condition has had a letter to say that she must stay in until June 30th.

Janipat, one of my daughters got a shielding letter pretty late. Before that she had been going into her office each day in Londn, and several of her staff had got and recovered from this virus. She hates having to work from home. Has discussed this with her GP, who -obviously, will not take the risk of saying she can return to normal working. My daughter will be very, very happy when she gets a letter or notification saying she is no longer shielded. She is fit and healthy normally, but did have her spleen removed thirty years ago.

MissAdventure - do not be too taken in by any photos you have seen of crowded beaches. Special wide lenses can make a nearly empty beach look as if all the people on it are virutally touching each other. I was on the promenade locally, last weekend, and actually commented on how well spaced out all the individual family groups were, loads of space between them. - and was astonished to see the pictures of the same beach in the newspapers the following days looking as if everyone was huddled together, Indeed, a local photographer was so incensed with these press photographers that he followed them, taking his own pictures of the beaches, with everyone a long way apart, so those could be compared with the ones in the national press!!!

Dining room! Our divining room is stuffed full of .....?

Magsmay we had our Dish washer repaired last week, I cleared all of the surfaces and stacked the stuff in the divining room, I put everything else Away in cupboards, the only thing left out was the microwave which I covered with a cloth.
The repair chap came in the back door straight into the kitchen, I stood at the door to speak to him, 6 feet away and I offered him a can of cold drink, which he refused, but I watched and made a note of everything he touched. All the windows and external doors were left open wide.
When he left I kept the windows open, after an hour or so I used a bacterial cleaner on all Surfaces ( and washed the floor) including things that he hadn’t touched, I didn’t move the stuff back into the kitchen until the next day. I asked him to take the broken part away with him plus the packaging from the new part.
Thankfully The boiler isn’t being serviced until August!
What a palaver, but I felt safer for having done it.

NfkD - the 3 page letter I had seems to have been the one written at the start of lock down, it said 12 weeks shielding. My decision was that as I'd been shielding since mid March, that meant some kind of review of the shielding issues by mid June.
The risk the virus poses to those of us in the shielding category hasn't diminished. There isn't a vaccine yet and may not be for a long time. I recognise the rate of infection is dropping, though here in the n.w. it remains higher than in some other areas. My current thought is that I'll continue to be very careful. I'll avoid any crowded places, particularly indoors. I will visit loved ones who live nearby and sit in the garden with them - but not with my grandchildren. That's the real big one for most of us isn't it. The children are going to start going to school, or bumping into friends at the park so the risk they may pass the infection to us remains.
Keep safe everyone

DH was in the first tranche of letters and that said to shield for six weeks from the date of the letter. That’s 13th June.

I realised I needed to shield because I'm on immuno suppressants, so I did from about 15 March. I couldn't get a supermarket delivery slot because I hadn't had the shielding letter. My GP and Consultant both responded to my query by saying I needed to be very careful but wasn't in the shielding category.
I then received the shielding letter dated 21 April. The upside of this was tesco contacted me to say I was now on their priority list. Its been so good not to have to go into supermarkets, which felt very scary to me.

I suspect given the size of the task for medics in going through their patient list to identify the shielding group, that some mistakes will happen. I hope if I'm removed from the shielding list, I don't lose the supermarket deliveries.