Thursday, December 3rd, 2020
Today, like the past few days, I am not terribly inspired. There is not much going on in our lives. Sleep, eat, swim, work/ online school. Also, we are winding down our activities – safe for the Christmas open house on Saturday, which will be followed by a series of COVID tests which I arranged today. Sadly, the only viable option for PCR tests returning a result in 24 hours appears to be with the lab I vowed to never visit again.
Beyond sorting things out at this end, I am busy preparing for our arrival in Germany. Again, everything seems to be very difficult. The data SIM I have ordered will be shipped to our quarantine house and I doubt it will arrive as it seems I need to identify myself to receive it. Presumably that means an illigimate trip to the post office on Monday morning to pick it up. I may need a plan B to ensure EM can attend school on Monday; possibly procuring a data sim at the airport. No idea how to do that given I am about 10.000 kilometers away. Likewise, I ordered envelops for express shipping of EM’s passport to the US embassy in Berlin. Again, I suspect I will need to procure these at teh post office. Everything in Germany is so difficult and convoluted to do online. It is just frustrating to get things set up and organized.
Likewise, I have created a new professional email account with Protonmail – well since I paid for it on Sunday it has not really worked and has now been disabled for supposedly fraudulent activity, which is rich, seeing I could not even log on! And of course, customer support is basically none existent. I have now threatened to cancel my payment.
Workwise, I spend the day reworking a proposal and am getting increasingly frustrated with comments and inputs; so much so that I escalated it today. Why is it that within the organization we keep making our lives so much more difficult than need be? All in all, today has been a struggle to get things done.
Today the US reported just under 200k new cases of Corona infections, bringing the total to 14.5 million cases out of globally 65 million. Hospitalizations and death are at an all-time high and everyone expects numbers to increase in coming weeks. It is just frustrating beyond believe. How hard is it to wear a fucking mask and maintain social distancing? Very it seems, especially when looking at the shining leaders of this country.
As the virus is rampant in the US California is the first state to reinstate stay at home orders, because people just lack basic disciplin. As states as well as people are taking measures to protect themselves and the general populatio,n the administration hosts reckless indoor parties for hundreds of people; doing the best they can to increase the spread. As does the WH hosting numerous indoor holiday parties. There is nothing like leading by example!
Three former presidents pledge to support acceptance of the vaccine by volunteering to get the shot and have this happening screened on national TV. On the one hand the vaccine will remain in very short supply for the next four to six months and States are struggling with who may be the first to get access to a vaccine, indicating that at this stage no advocacy may be needed. On the other hand, there are increasing concerns over the safety of the vaccine being expressed and it will only protect everyone if some 70-80% of the population achieve immunity either through contracting and surviving an infection or through immunization via a vaccine.
Apparently there have been attempts to hack cold chain distribution and storage. While I find that uninteresting, what is interesting in this article, is the illustrated cold chain for the Pfizer/ BioNTech vaccine distribution Meanwhile the first batch has arrived in the UK awaiting distribution. It will be interesting to see who will get the shots first. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned for the world. The 40 million doses will be enough to immunize a third of the British people.
Just another day struggeling with life in the age of Corona I guess.