Monday, Febuary 8th, 2021
EM had very good news this morning. After being accepted into Penn State University in November, which is sort of the back-up college, she has now received conditional acceptance to both IE Madrid and University of Tilburg in the Netherlands. Conditional upon passing her IB and retaining her current grade levels. I think she is pleased that she ahs choices. She has also completed an interview with University of Uitrecht and is expecting to hear back from them in about four weeks. The only two Universities she has applied to but not had a response from are the two in Amsterdam. I think Amsterdam is her preferred location, so she is not too happy about not hearing from them at all.
To secure her spot at IE Madrid we shall need to pay EUR 2.000 in the next two weeks, not refundable of course, but it gives her more time before making her final choice. What a boost though, three out of five have accepted her with two outstanding responses! As of course I knew they would; nonetheless I am very pleased for and with her.
Other than the big news, it was the usual uneventful day for me, though I got lucky at the pool, in addition to the 45 minute slot I had reserved we were allowed in six minutes early, so I got 30 minutes free and 10 minutes each of back- and breaststroke time, which almost my normal swim routine – pre pandemic of course.
For EM it was a little more eventful. She is finishing up her Environmental Science, Math and History internal assessments. Courtesy of my amazing colleague from Bangladesh she has the 100 responses (101 actually) to her survey. On the not so bright side the extended friend group seems to be on a bitching spree. This appears to be the result of her breaking ties with one of her middle school friends in December. J has always comandered a lot of attention to her needs, which with the pandemic became super stressful. Since 8th grade the girls have been friends with varying intensity to the friendship. EM had distanced herself before as she felt J. was taking drugs and generally not a great influence. The friendship was revived at the beginning of the pandemic and was rather intense for a few months.
It appears J. is now bad mouthing her vis a vis common friends resulting in a flurry of text messages from one girl hurling accusations at EM causing her stress which is certainly not needed given the pandemic and academic stress. It seems to be a thing of “she said”, “you said”. Thankfully EM has a healthy attitude to destressing. She took her bike for a spin to work of some of the emotions and thenn headed over to A’s to discuss. Despite our #stayhome policy there is still plenty of social excitement it seems, though I can not help but wish it was a more positive form of excitment, like getting a shot and resuming our old lives. I am getting very tired of #stayhome. I want to go back to travelling, working with clients directly.
Today 73k new cases have been reported, bringing the total to 27.6 million In Maryland currently transmission rates are at 0.4%; meaning each infected person infects 0.4 other people. These numbers seem manageable. In fact, Europe reopened at 0.7%. This has not prevented MCPS from postpone school re-openings - yet again - initially planned for March 15th, while at the same time planning for in person graduation ceremonies for 550 students with two guests each. I think it is safe to assume this planning is moot; all the more reasons for the parents to come up with an alternative.
As of today, the USA has vaccinated almost 10% (27 million) of its population, about the same number as those reported to have contracted Corona. Efforts are underway to speed up inoculations. In addition to procuring additional doses there is a public debate about delaying the second shot and get more people their first shot. Dr. Fauci is warning against delaying the second shots. I am with Dr Fauci on this one. There is a reason for the two-shot regime. Who knows what mutants will appear after a one shot experiment potentially making the vaccine ineffective.
I have similar thoughts on South Africa suspend inoculations with the Oxford vaccine which is shown to be less effective against the South African variant in terms of preventing infections. It is however making the illness far less severe. Part of me thinks it would be good to go ahead if it helps reduce severe cases. The other part thinks this may just be good for humanity as we do not need further mutants becoming resistant to the vaccine. I feel it is hard to tell for a lay person, which is the best path.
Moderna at least is already working on a booster shot to provide immunity against the South African variant. Just sad that South Africa does not have access to this vaccine irrespective of it being the first, second or now third shot. I wonder if people who have received Oxford to become immune against the more traditional strain could get a Moderna booster for specifically the South African variant, which somehow I doubt as one uses mDNA and the other mRNA to train the immune system.
Maybe someone will publish on this.