The View from the Hermitage, Day 414

It's later than usual, after a dinner of Mongolian beef. I spent the afternoon at the optometrist and a computer repair business. My current laptop, Twiggy, has a problem with the camera. Actually, in the testing they did while I was there, it may have a bigger problem. My fingers would be crossed that it doesn't except that would make typing difficult. I do need new glasses, but cataract surgery is off for a few more years. 

I did manage to check a few news sources this morning, enough to say situation normal, we're still fucked. Talk is that scientists and public health experts are concerned that we're not going to reach herd immunity, at least not soon and perhaps not ever. The coronavirus will become a "manageable threat" with smaller case numbers. How small is uncertain and depends on global and national vaccination rates and how the virus evolves. The British variant is now dominant in the US and about 60 percent more transmissible. Lauren Ancel Myers, director of the Covid-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas, Austin states, "We will not achieve herd immunity as a country or a state or even as a city until we have enough immunity in the population as a whole." In other words we've said and heard before, no one is safe until everybody is safe.

The situation in India is same old same old. In the neighborhood, daily cases are soaring on Mt. Everest. Nepal has reported over 7,000 new cases, the highest since October. Doctors at the base camp temporary medical facility say that the Nepalese health ministry won't let them do PCR testing. Altitude sickness looks a lot like covid, so the base camp docs are treating all pulmonary complaints as covid. All international flights into Nepal have been suspended except for two flights each week from Delhi. The Nepalese government has issued a record high number of 408 climbing permits and really doesn't want to absorb the cost of canceling a second Everest climbing season.

I hope to encounter more dire details tomorrow but do have early voting work in the afternoon. I may be writing after dinner again, but it won't be after as labor-intensive a meal as Mongolian beef.