Monday, May 3rd, 2021
When I woke up this morning, I found to my dismay that it had rained overnight and cloudy skies with showers were forecast for the day.
This meant my patio furniture was wet and chances for it to dry rather slim. Oh well, tomorrow is another day and as long as it rains at night, I am fine. My flower bombs will like the rain and the following humid warm day. I just pray it will not rain on Friday late in the afternoon as that would seriously sabotage our PhotoPROMenade on the mall.
Currently, there is a 60% chance of rain forecast with temperatures of 16C but no rain on Thursday. I am hoping the forecast is inaccurate as per usual.
I have mostly dried the patio cushions and covered them up in anticipation of more rain tonight. Tomorrow is going to be a hot and humid day with temperatures forecast around 30C. With the dry covers I can work from my outside office. Very much looking forward to that.
EM will have her second shot tomorrow with her appointed time just having been moved from 14:30 to7:30. This means another email to the school’s attendance office. I had asked for her to be able to leave during lunch, now I have to ask for her to possibly be late.
Beyond me being home all day with work, EM at school and my daily swim at 17:00 nothing exciting happened in our life today. The PhotoPROMenade mums will have a final preparation and planning call tonight. Admittedly I am rather excited about the event. We have close to 300 students, including their guests, signed up!
The total count for infections reported in the USA stands at 33.2 million today with only 32k new cases reported. That is a new low and may be a reason to celebrate, even if herd immunity may never be reached given vaccine hesitancy. The Covid news today is a bit of a Potpourri. California is reporting 29 cases per 100k citizens, which is six times lower than Florida and well below Oregon and Washington State, where infections, like in Michigan, are soaring. It is shocking, but hardly surprising, to read that over 100k doses have been wasted especially in the early days of the vaccination effort under the former administration. At the same time vaccine demand is slowing down and most new cases occurs in the 15-35 age group, who have been slow to get inoculated. And as most of the older folks have been vaccinated or have recovered, 22% of all newly reported cases occur in children. And finally, it seems almost certain now that booster shots will be coming.
The most interesting news item is a summary on vaccine development efforts. Currently two pills and seven nasal-spray COVID-19 vaccines are in clinical testing, although they would likely not become available until later in 2021 or 2022, and there is no guarantee that these next-generation formulations will succeed in testing and hit the market. Around the world, 277 vaccines are in development, with 93 in the human testing stage, according to the World Health Organization. This is cause for optimism that the world may get vaccinated and not just the US, UK, EU and Israel.
Celebreties are making their voices heard calling for vaccine equity, something I am passionate about. Whether the world needs a retired prince to be among those voices is questionable. While royal born Harry is just a US resident now, so who cares about his opinion?