Wednesday, December 9th, 2020
I spend the better part of the day attending the New York AI Summit and I must say it is a very interesting event with a surprisingly large number of people reaching out to me to connect. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.
Otherwise, it was a perfectly normal day in quarantine .I swam. I managed to have extra keys for the house cut. Strosnider was very good. I called upon arrival and someone came to the curbside to pick up the key from me (masked) had them cut and brought them back out with the change. All in all, a 10 minute affair and completely COVID compliant.
Also, we did test two of three. I am a bit disappointed as the results may not be back in time and I have to physically pick up EM’s results as she is a minor. If they do not get in Saturday morning, they will be useless to us. I do hope I will have Sundays and Friday’s test results by Saturday as we need to attach them to the travel registration required by the German authorities. This will decrease our quarantine time on the other end. Guidance is we can test on day 5 after arrival and will then be allowed to go, if the results come back negative. O had already booked a test upon arrival, which seems a pretty uselessundertaking given we are only at risk during the flight and an infection contracted there will not show for three to five days. So I wrote to the people and asked to reschedule. Instead of reacting to this request they gave me the official lingo: Quarantine for ten days unless you take a test which comes back negative after five days. Dah, I know that, hence my request to reschdeule the test to day five. What a production this all is.
What happened to the good old times when one could just hop on a plane and go. How I wish we could go back to those times.
In the meantime, Germany is increasing its lockdown measures as more people are dying. And things in the USA are also not looking good. The country begins to see the post Thanksgiving travel outfalls with 220k new infections reported today, bringing the total to 15.75 million with 295k dead. The world has 68.5 million know infections since the beginning of this pandemic. 44.2 million have recovered but over 1.56million lives have been lost to Corona over the past ten months. It is scary.
In this environment Dr Fauci, USA’s top infectious disease experts is calling on people to overcome denial and pull together. Why is this so hard? China managed. Vietnam managed. Australia managed. Taiwan managed.
What is not on is 22 family members sharing a Thanksgiving meal. This truly happened and now they all share Corona; every single one of the 22 attendees tested positive. This and next week is when experts expect to, see the increases in infections caused by Thanksgiving travel and gatherings. I sincerely hope our plan to go home for the holidays is not foolish and putting mum in danger. We are testing, quarantining, testing, quarantining and testing and only if all come back negative will we go to her house.
No matter how often I do this (6 times so far) having the swap stuck up my nose is not comfortable At least I no longer have the urge to sneeze. I am also finding that each testing site does the test differently. Today’s outfit took our temperature, our oxygen levels, and wanted to know when we had our last period before sticking the swap up our noses, but not before making us blow our nose, which in my case was a completely futile exercise.
Otherwise there is more news on the vaccine front. I am not generally a vaccine sceptic, but I am not going to be first in line for Pfizer and am more than likely to avoid Moderna, especially when reading about the rather unpleasant side effects phase 3 trialists experienced. Warnings to avoiding the BioNTech/ Pfizer vaccine if one is prone to allergies is also not confidence inspiring.
China’s vaccines, leveraging traditional methodologies, are also far advanced in phase 3 trials. One vaccine is already been given to over 1 million Chinese, the other is currently distributed to Indonesia, Turkey and Brazil where phase 3 trials are almost completed. China is already committing delivery to African and Asian countries alongside providing those governments loans to pay for the procurement of these vaccines. Of course, China will exploit the delivery for economic and political ambitions. Nonetheless, I would prefer the Chinese shot over Moderna!
I am hoping Oxford/ AstraZeneca will apply for a license soon as that is the one I feel the most comfortable with after all I have read.