Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Given temperatures were again at 35C throughout the day yet another day for us to seek refuge in the comfort of our well-tempered home, moving between different rooms of the house to give the various rather strained seats a break. I may just need to have my Chaise reupholstered as it is becoming rather threadbare at the foot end.
It was largely uneventful day, apart from my daily lap swim and as I write this I realize I neglected to log to sign up for Friday’s lap. I was so excited about Aikido practice and pleased to see not only Sensei by Lou for the first time in 130 days, that I just forgot to sign in at 19:00, of course they are now all booked. Oh well, I will just need to make up for it on Saturday and Sunday. Twenty minutes into practice it started to thunder and sure enough ten minutes later the first droplets came. I dashed to the car to close the roof, hoping it would just be some light rain and practice would continue; it did for all of ten minutes, when the proper downpour started, we were all drenched in seconds. The Floh did well swimming home, by which point in time the rain of course stopped.
The other event was another math melt down caused by EM's inability to ask about what she did not understand. Fortunately there was a check in Zoom and the teacher could explain so she has proudly announced that she has completed unit two of five, each unit is meant to be done in a week, but she is working hard to stay ahead. As a result she does have very little time for anything else and was even going to cancel dive practice, but I will have none of that and made her go. No one can spend eight or ten hours doing nothing but math. Plus she needs to work on her CAS projcet, which is developing a resource website for students explroing options overseas. That is fortunately going well as she hsa managed to recruit two more people to work on it and between the four of them they have divid up the work by continents, skipping North America as of course there are a lot of college resources available for this part of the world.
I came across some great tweets today why anyone can wear a mask, not matter what. Even the moron in chief has turned coats and supports mask wearing on Twitter. Let us hope this will not help his re-election bid!
Russia surprises with a vaccine they plan to distribute widely as early as August 12 after initial trials indicate it is safe and effective. Who would have thought Russia might beat U.K. and China in the race? I would not put it past Putin to make it available for Turmp to distribute throughout teh USA as part of te Russian election influencing ploy. Trump is the best thing that can happen to Russia - and to a certain extend to China - as the current foreign policy void allows both of these countries to expand their regional power base. At the same time four Europena and American companies claimed today they would have a viable vaccine ready in six weeks; ready to be deployed in millions of doses by the end of the year. On the one hand this is of course welcome news, on the other I worry that it plays into the hands of the current resident of the WH, helping his reelection campaign. Even if a vaccine may be viable it still needs to go through licensing process and would not be ready for distribution before the election. However, knowing the rhetoric, I am sure the moron in chief would claim credit for a vaccine. Also, the vaccines being developed by Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca are proprietory, which may mean these companies might charge an arm and a leg for a shot.
On that count I could not agree more with Dr Pearson, who upholds that since governments all over the world are bearing the cost of the vaccine development and production as well as the risk of investing in failure, Pharma has no right to charge for the vaccine.
The USA today reports 4.02 million cases and death have exceeded 141k. Breaking down the 4 million US infected means one in every hundred Americans has COVID-19. As a result, even more countries have shut their boarders to Americans, most recently the Bahamas. US citizens can now only travel to nine countries in the world.
A new test could deliver results in just 20 minutes. Given increasing calls for people to produce negative COVID-19 tests before boarding, with a China the latest country making this a requirement, this is great news.
Looking across the pond towards home there is good news from the EU, where the heads of state have agreed on joined fiscal measures to support recovery.
One more step towards the united nation sod a Europe.
22.07.2020 15:25
David
I very much doubt the Russians have a viable vaccine.