Tuesday, February 16th, 2021
I have a couple of presentations to deliver in a series of webinars. One on Thursday starting at 6am and then a more comprehensive one in three weeks. For both I have now run through the deck once and developed scripts. I think the one for Thursday now works well. I will just need to talk through the deck a few times. The other one I am finding still needs a lot of work. The content on the slides is fine, but the script does not flow at all. Luckily, I have some time to perfect it. What did give me peace of mind when talking a colleague through my thinking was that the flow at least works. I am now reserving Friday to do a complete rescript.
Our day has otherwise been largely uneventful, with the exception of my 50 minute swim slot and Aikido in the park tonight. There is no more outrageous political news on a daily basis, just the bliss of a functioning administration. Whatever the GoP does to disenfranchise voters, suppress the vote, attain power and so on I have decide to ignore. It is for the Americans to fix their broken system. Even virus news is very quiet.
Daily reported new infections have been 10k lower each consecutive day for the past 3 days. 52k new infections have been reported in the USA over the past 24 hours. The total tally today is at 28.35 million. The USA is waiting for the J&J vaccine to receive emergency use approval to increase the availability of shots significantly. Vaccination roll out continues to be ramped up, so all in all good news on that front.
Only South Africa is making headlines now. It is starting large scale trials with the J&J vaccine while discontinuing roll out of their AstraZenca supplies. These will however not go to waste as South Africa is planning to share its vaccine supply with other countries in Africa. South Afirca is also looking into Sputnik V and Sinovac for effectiveness against the South African variant. Given AstraZeneca is working on vaccine modifications to ensure greater effectiveness against the South African variant, it might not be a bad thing that they are going to seek FDA approval only in March this year.
Maybe it is best to be in line for one of their modified shots in May.