I forgot to include a little WTF item yesterday, so I'll lead with that today. I got two convection oven cookbooks for Christmas. Looking for recipes to try, I came across Zucchini-Flavored Chocolate Cookies. Now, I've made, had, and liked zucchini bread, but why zucchini mixed with chocolate, with a name implying that the chocolate taste is secondary to the zucchini taste? I'm sorry. That's one recipe I will not be trying.
Olympics covid update. Through yesterday, 308 people had tested positive inside the closed-loop or on arrival at the airport. Athletes or team officials constituted 111 of the positives. Not counted anywhere, though, are the athletes who tested positive before leaving their home country and decided not to come if their event was scheduled such that they would not be recovered in time to complete.
"The path to freedom is the vaccine mandate." So says the Austrian Chancellor as the vaccine mandate is signed into law. Letters will be mailed to all citizens giving them one month to comply. There are a couple of exemptions including pregnant women, people with a medical reason such as an allergy, and people recently recovered from covid. Beginning in mid-March, police will conduct random checks of vaccination status. Currently, 76 percent of those coming under the mandate are already fully vaccinated. Germany is considering a vaccine mandate. Italy has one for people over 50, while Greece's covers people over 60.
I have been trying not to cite numbers that I know have a fudge factor, but I can't not include that the US death toll is now over 900,000. Given that the last 100,000 deaths have been since December 13, when will we hit 1,000,000? I'd like to think that a million deaths would slap some folks who aren't yet vaccinated and motivate them to get vaccinated. Four of the five states with the highest shares of population-adjusted deaths over the past month have less than 60 percent fully vaccinated. At the top of the list is Tennessee, with 73 covid deaths per 100,000 people and 52.8 percent fully vaccinated. At the bottom sits Hawaii, with 10 covid deaths per 100,000 people and 76 percent fully vaccinated. The fact that Hawaii is an island probably helps.
The Guardian asked some leading scientists what they'd gotten wrong during the course of the pandemic so far. One said he had not expected the vaccines to be successful. Another regretted having supported school closures. A third said that at the outset he felt scientists should not be involved with policy-making. As might be expected, there was one who doubted that masks would be valuable. Skipping over several, I think my favorite was the scientist who said he'd been wrong in predicting the course of the pandemic because of the unpredictability of human behavior. Really? He must have slept through some psychology classes.
There are two worrisome trends, transportation-wise, that have developed during the pandemic. One is how fewer customers there are on public transit, putting some systems in dire financial straits. Commuter rail ridership has seen a 79 percent decline. Trips on all modes of public transit are around half of what they were before the pandemic. Car-related deaths meanwhile are up 27 percent. Some of those deaths may have been people who otherwise would be taking public transit. Go figure.
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