Sorry for having been a bit quiet - but Covid finally caught up with us... Today I was allowed back out so I very much enjoyed going back out into our local area and trying out a possible camera option for the trip.
Testing Positive
It all started 2 weeks ago when a first complaint of a blocked nose from my son prompted an LFT and he showed up as positive. It's not really surprising - Covid has been rife in our local schools. The surprise was really that it's taken so long to get to us. A quiet day or two for him and he was over it - although according to current policy he was not allowed back in school and the rest of us were having to do daily LFTs. It didn't take long before I started to feel cold like symptoms, and slightly longer before the two red lines appeared on my test too which meant that I was now stuck at home. Having thought in early January that that would be the perfect time to get covid - in that it would minimise the likelihood of getting it in March - I suddenly had a realisation that the UK guidance is that you should not have a PCR test within 90 days of having covid as there is a risk residual RNA material can cause a false positive... What would this mean for the tests I was expecting to encounter between here and Antarctica in approx. 60 days time? A quick call to Trailfinders confirmed that entry to Argentina would be OK without a PCR as long as I had confirmation of a lab test now and a certificate of recovery so I duly headed off for a PCR to follow upon the LFT (which unsurprisingly confirmed the positive).
Pandemic Complications
I was pretty lucky in that my only symptoms were really those of a bad cold. Maybe thanks to the booster I'd had just before Christmas - who knows!? However, we are still in the throes of a global pandemic and for the Explorer's Passage, the Expedition organisers, there are many more complications to deal with.
Firstly, while I was at my most covid-y there was an email pushing back the sailing date of the Ocean Victory, the ship that's taking us to Antarctica, so that there can be additional cleaning carried out between groups. This means that the flights I had booked now need to be arranged to fly home a day later. I'd not booked flexible flights so was concerned that this was going to end up expensive however initial cost estimates from Trailfinders weren't too horrendous. But, I still hadn't found out what the testing regime for getting onto the boat was going to be - and didn't want to spend money changing my flights if there was going to be a requirement for a negative PCR that there was a risk that I wouldn't be able to meet.
Full steam ahead
I'm pleased to say that I've now had a call with the organisers and the current plans (which let's face it, is as much as we can go on at the moment) are for LFT tests in Ushuaia prior to boarding rather than PCRs. I'm not aware of any increased risk of testing positive on those having recently had covid so it's back to full steam ahead in the preparations - with the dawning realisation that it's only just over 5 weeks now until I fly!
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