Sunday, March 7th, 2021
I woke up to a brilliant sunny day this morning with polished blue skies. Of course, this is deceiving as it is rather cold, a clear crisp day, the morning of which was spend on a news forage. We then headed to Trader Joe’s for our weekly grocery shop and to stock up on wine, for tonight’s get-together and for the quaraniversary on Friday.
I was so impressed with the sausage grilling on a stick at book club yesterday that I have decided to copy this, and we stopped at ACE to buy grilling forks.While there I also acquired a new set of fire place tools, something I should have done a long time ago. The Turksih set whilenice, was on its dying days and has now been relegated for use with the outside pit.
EM kindly helped not only with the shopping, but also with putting the groceries away. She is such an awesome kid. Lunch was duck breast with cabbage, hopefully the last of the winter dishes. EM fretted about what to do with herself as I headed for the pool. Her plan had initially been to paint outside, well that never happened. But she did go for a bike ride just as I returned from fifty happy minutes in the pool.
I donned make up, seeing there is no reason to do so on any other day, and set out some cheese and crackers as well as a lovely South African red before starting the fire in the pit. At 17:00 my new French neighbor friend and my work friend with her husband came over. The plan being to introduce them to each other as they only live a few houses apart and have kids the same age.
I think this intro went well. M., like everyone else I have recruited in my mission to make C. and her family feel welcome, was generous and happy to make further introductions to French and Italian families in the neighborhood. We chatted around the fire for two or so hours, when it became a little to fresh for us to stay and people headed home to make dinner for their respective kids.
EM and I are on two meals a day, so no dinner plans for us. I did start a fire inside though and cranked up the heating as just tidying up outside was really cold and I am chilled to the bones, so I need to warm up now.
New infections remain stable with 58k reported over the past twenty-four hours to bring the US total to 29,6 million reported cases. Meanwhile scientists are grappling with how variants will affect the efficacy of vaccines and the recovery. This of course is a key question to many of us. This article is excellent at explaining how and why virus mutations occurs and what the effect of current mutations on immunity is likely to have.
Firstly, sequencing capacity to even identify and understand mutations is critical.
Secondly, mutations occur either because of rampant community spread or, and these are the most severe mutations, through months long infections in autoimmune suppressed people, where the immune system even with all available drugs is never strong enough to stop the virus and can only beat it back. This is the perfect setting for the virus to learn evasive responses. Hence, we may need to be particularly observant of such patients to ensure they never get infected, or if they do, keep them isolated hard as it may be. From all I have read none of those with autoimmune issues have survued, the dieing just takes longer.
All in all, though scientists believe vaccines will still work, they may just not completely eradicate the virus.
From what scientists are able to tell based on genomic sequencing the spread of the UK variant is growing tenfold every week to become the dominant variant in the USA shortly. Its contagiousness is causing concerns of another surge, amid a rapidly expanding vaccination campaign. The US population is urged to increase rather than decrease protective measures. We shall see how that goes in Mississippi and Texas, who are allowing all businesses to operate at full capacity and have retracted mask wearing mandates.
While vaccine roll out in the USA is certainly flawed, there is progress. Not so in the EU and I am trying to understand the European vaccination debacle. Yes, they placed orders later and spread orders across different producers, but why is AstraZeneca not able to deliver the doses it had promised? For both March and April it will ship only half the doses it had agreed to. Why?
Given AstraZeneca has not even applied for a license in the US yet and is weeks away from doing so, some of the shots produced for the US market could surely be exported to bridge the supply gap in the EU.