Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Friday, May 21st, 2021

On the Water

Summer has truly arrived.

We have had around 30C during the day for most of the week. Nights have, thankfully, been cold at around 12-14C so the Cicadas are emerging slowly. This bodes well for tomorrow’s picnic.

EM and I have spent the evening making “Piroggis”; though not the real thing as we make them with Puff Pastry. They make awesome finger food. Four batches are filled with a raisin-bacon-onion-mix and four batches make the vegetarian options fill with a potato-Brussel sprout-mix. I have also made some forty or so meat balls and now my back is killing me.

The Mums are ready to go, as are the banners and the drinks.Tomorrow we shall need to load that all plus the picnic table and the badminton bats into the "Floh"  and take it to the park to set up at 15:00. I think it will be a fun event for the 68 students and 10 or so teachers who have signed up to join us.

The agrifinance team humored me by coming to my house instead of the usual meeting in the park, given I was without a car, seeing today was Eva-Maria’s very last day of in person classes and she had the car. She did not want to feel she needed to rush home from school.

She took a notepad to school for her teachers to sign, as yearbooks may at best be available at the last day of school. I find this rather frustrating since he administration has known since March when the last day of school for the A-group would be. One would have thought they would have been able to have 550 books printed and shipped to school before the first group to return was done.

After agrifinance team meeting in my garden I headed to Belle Haven to meet C. for a sail. It was a beautiful day to be out on the water. Two hours on a Friday afternoon are worth a week’s vacation, though I do feel a bit sunburned. What a way to start the weekend!

We had a nice breeze, the sun was out, it was just perfect. We agreed that the current return to what was so normal just about eighteen months ago is rather strange. Seeing unmasked people, full restaurants and gyms. Like me C. is going to continue to mask up when in environments with many unknown individuals; rather err on the side of caution. We also agreed that our desire to return to the office full time is rather limited, mostly we do not care too much to see most of the people, but also because one gets so much more done.

The USA reported 30k new cases over the past twenty-four hours to bring the total to 33.87 million. There are of course still those who do not want to get a shot (nothing to be done about those) and those who cannot access one as they may be poor or uniformed. In an effort to reach those more reluctant or harder to reach, communities are getting creative. Barbershops become vaccination clinics and more and more counties are bringing the shots to the people by converting buses into vaccination clinics. Unlike many other countries it appears the virus is under control in the US.

BioNTech/ Pfizer plan to supply 2 billion doses to less wealthy nations as the Serum Institute in India ceases exports and gives priority to Indians. The former is a major step towards inoculation equity, especially since Pfizer will sell the doses to poor countries at cost. One billion will be made available this and one billion the next year. It is unclear if this will be via the global COVAX initiative.

One way or the other, it is a big step towards global safety!