The View from the Hermitage, Day 323

Not needing to go to work or school, I find Monday pretty much like any other day. The same goes for Friday. Still, the first things I found looking at the news this morning were enough to cause flashbacks of Monday as the worst day of the week. First, there was Singapore's education minister saying:

"It may take four or five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the start of a post-COVID normal."

Then, there was Dutch officials of some sort saying that there "are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics," one from the original coronavirus and a second from the variant(s). Also put forward was the estimate that with the more transmissible variants, we may need 85 percent to achieve herd immunity. I'm thinking that there are probably enough anti-vaccination types out there that 85 percent will not come easily. The CDC is stepping up its efforts to find what variants are at play here in the US, offering one more way in which to raise my anxiety level.

It is now February. January, with over 95,000 deaths, has the distinction of being the deadliest month since the pandemic began. Vaccinations are still troublesome. The two feet of snow expected in New York City today is going to slow things up there. If you can't get vaccinated but know someone in Europe, though, you may be able to score a fake negative covid certificate. They're apparently a hot item on the black market there.

The social psychologist in me (social psych was my master's degree major; I returned to the quantitative realm for my PhD) found the results of a survey reporting that covid deadliness depends in large part on cultural differences in willingness to follow rules. This is not as counterintuitive as many other social psych results are, but still very interesting to me. The study considered the US, UK, Israel, Spain, and Italy to be "loose" cultures as opposed to the "tight" cultures in Singapore, Japan, China, and Austria. Controlling for other factors, loose cultures had five times the number of cases as the tight cultures and over eight times as many deaths. Perhaps more interesting, loose cultures were less afraid of the virus even as their case numbers rose. Nearly half of respondents in loose cultures (49 percent) reported being "very scared" of the coronavirus as opposed to 70 percent of respondents from tight cultures. It appears that people in loose cultures fear mitigation measures more than the virus itself. 

I have been very open since the start of all this 323 days ago about being terrified of getting the virus. This is one reason Son #1 has gone out of his way to see that I do not have to leave the house except for dog- or exercise-walking and pretty much only leave the subdivision to take The Family Dog to trail walk in a nearby park. And the nearby park is early Sunday mornings only. That very real fear is a big factor in my not minding at all playing hermit. A little fear isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

Going in a totally different direction, Amsterdam is moving its (in)famous red light district out of the city center. An "erotic center" will be set up elsewhere in Amsterdam in a purpose-built center. The aim is to attract a different type of tourist. I have to wonder, though, just how many people visit Amsterdam with the main purpose of getting laid. I can think of so many other reasons to visit, having lived just down the road for a year. There is another proposal to ban tourists from buying weed, but that one is not garnering a lot of support. There is concern that enacting such a ban would hand the drug trade over to dealers on the street. That actually makes a lot of sense. 

To close on a totally weird note, Alan Dershowitz has nominated Xpot's son-in-law Jared Kushner and his deputy Avi Berkowitz for the Nobel Peace Prize, recognizing their work in the Middle East. The article in The Guardian reporting this noted that "the bar for nominations is low." Other nominees include Greta Thunberg, Alexei Navalny, and the World Health Organization. These three are backed by Norwegian lawmakers, who are said to have a good track record of picking the winner. Stay tuned til October, a month by which coronavirus things may or may not have improved.