Life in the Age of Corona
A Daily Diary
Tuesday, January 26th, 2021
Freezing
Maybe I am coming down with something or maybe it is just the weather. I have been feeling mostly cold today. My feet are freezing, so much so that I had to wrap them into a blanket for most of my conferencing today. The conferencing went surprisingly well as the discussions were all guest speakers, so it turned out to be an interesting event. Still before heading to the pool I felt like an icicle.
Last night the rain first turned into ice and later into snow. This morning there was the slightest of powdering left on the lawn. It has been around 0C with a slight drizzle all day, so I had to really force myself to head to practice. And it did not get much better there. We mainly did shapes and moving of the line, all slow moves. As result after an hour I could neither feel my hands nor my feet, so very unlike me I quit practice early to defrost. Now the heating is cranked up to 23C and the fire is on. Slowly I am beginning to feel like a human again!
Today the world broke the 100 million mark in total reported infections, with the USA owning 26 million of those. Still the trend continues downward, with only “152k” new cases reported over the past twenty-four hours. New infections have been trending down over the past week in 42 States, so the spread is being curbed. However, the new variants are so much transmissible that they could be a huge set back to all progress achieved to date.
The Brazilian variant has arrived in the US, specifically in Minnesota. Though for all we know all of the variants could have been in the USA for months, given this country lacks the capacity to test different genomens. It really is a race against time. People need to get vaccinated fast or it - and all of us - will lose the battle, forever playing catch up with the virus as scientists have long predicted that the coronavirus will evolve in ways that could thwart vaccines, though few thought it would happen so quickly. The faster the virus can spread, the more Opportunities mutants have to outsmart the vaccine. At least research about the variants suggest the current vaccines will still be effective. This reconfirms what scientists have been saying for weeks now. Let us hope they are correct; given vaccine roll out is very slow and not enough doses are available any time soon, despite what Pfizer is announcing. After first asking to be compensated for the extra shots in the vials delivered to date, Pfizer is now bragging it will deliver more doses and faster than promised late last year, however, they are not producing more. This miracle is achieved by simply relabeling the vials to contain six instead of five doses!
Meanwhile the vaccination effort is in a mess. The current administration has no idea how much is or will become available. How incompetent was the outgoing administration? Surely one can document how much has been ordered, delivered and distributed to where? Seems not. The status of rool out is no better. There is no federal policy, there are no cpoherent state policies and every county has a different plan. This is certainly true for Maryland, where residence in different counties get vaccinated at different paces.
I ferverently wish the current administration can figure this out quickly and set up a better system, simply because I want a shot!
While we wait to be immunized and more transmissible variants spread, experts are recommending to reduce frequency of any every day activity such as grocery shopping to minimize the risk of getting infected. Likewise, it is now recommended to wear two masks on top of each other! There is some very concrete advice on how to double up on masks. Best of course is N95 with a surgical or tightfitting cloth mask. Triple lay cloth masks seem to be safer.
Looks like I need to buy new masks!
