The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 115 (615)

I've been cleaning which mostly means straightening the piles into which items seem to have fallen. In the process, I have found numerous things of interest including the starts of several things I thought I might write about. I also found the original list of 50 things I thought I'd try to do the year I turned 49, aka, my 50th year. Son #2 suggested the list when I commented that a business would celebrate their 50th year all year long so what should I do during my own 50th year? There are six left that I will try to complete while in my 66th year. There's one I'll have to twiddle; it's read a book in Spanish that I no longer have. I'll have to substitute something there. In the meantime, there is more cleaning. Company is coming for Thanksgiving dinner. Company gives me an unavoidable excuse for cleaning and straightening. 

Starting in Europe, where a number of demonstrations have taken place protesting whatever mitigation measures the country's governing bodies are instituting. The mayor of Rotterdam called Friday night's demonstration there an "orgy of violence." The protesters started fires and threw rocks and fireworks at the police who then fired warning shots. The unrest stopped some time after the police used a water cannon to cool things off. The Dutch government wants to introduce a law that will allow businesses to restrict the covid pass system to include fully vaccinated or recently recovered people but exclude people presenting negative test results. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know how I feel about negative test results. Testing negative yesterday could mean testing positive today. The Dutch government has banned New Year's Eve fireworks for the second year in a row. Having spent a New Year's Eve in the Netherlands, I can attest that they do like their Eve fireworks.

Europe continues to be the epicenter of the pandemic. On October 1, there were 110 new daily cases per one million people. Thursday, six weeks later, there were 446. Protests continue in Austria even as there were 15,809 new cases within 24 hours on Saturday, another record. Far-right groups were urging their members to go to Vienna and join the protests, raising the fear of violence. Other protests were planned or held in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland.

There have been protests in Melbourne and other cities in Victoria state over a proposed pandemic bill designed to govern the state's future pandemic responses and powers. The law would give the state government a legal basis for lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and curfews. Some amendments have been offered, but the main points of the original legislation would

• shift the power to declare a pandemic from the chief health officer to the premier;
• allow pandemic status to be declared for up to three months at a time with no outer limit;
• give a health minister broad powers to make public health orders;
• and create an independent pandemic management advisory committee composed of public health, human rights, and community representatives. 

The health minister says that the proposed law reflects what they have learned during the current pandemic. The amendments proposed so far concern stronger human rights protection, a stronger threshold for declaring a pandemic, and faster publication of public health advice. 

Remember the 150 Cathay Pacific cargo pilots and employees who got sent to government quarantine centers in Hong Kong for three weeks after staying at a Frankfort hotel at which three Cathay Pacific pilots contracted covid? Those three pilots have been fired for leaving their rooms while on layover. Strict enforcement is carried out strictly. 

The US is struggling with a shortage of nurses getting worse as they get burnt out with anxiety, depression, and exhaustion. Many are leaving the field rather than just stepping away for a while. With cases rising--they are up 20 percent over the past two weeks--we may be needing all the nurses we can get. The CDC is now recommending boosters for all adults, though it's not clear how fast vaccinated adults will step up to get them. It also does nothing about the adults who remain unvaccinated. 

Finally, a sobering research finding. Pregnant women who had covid when they delivered a baby were twice as likely to have a stillbirth. The study looked at 1.2 million deliveries in the US between March 2020 and September 2021. The arrival of the Delta variant really upped the risk.