The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 271 (771)

It seems that locking down Shanghai, where there were over 19,000 new covid cases and 51 deaths yesterday, is one thing. Areas of Beijing are being locked down after the discovery of only 70 cases there. Having seen the food shortages in Shanghai, many residents of Beijing are stockpiling non-perishable food. Beijing is testing some residents and workers three times this week. Two other Chinese cities are being locked down, one on the border of North Korea.

The pandemic has changed our lifestyles to the point that builders are redesigning homes to meet those changes. Rooms are becoming smaller to function as offices, playrooms, gyms, and the like. Bathrooms are getting bigger to account for the increased use they're seeing. Houses in general are becoming more like office space. A countertop island in a kitchen or between a kitchen and another room can function as a conference table. Family members meet there then go to their own spaces for other purposes.

Welcome to World Immunization Week! That's all immunizations, not just the ones against the coronavirus. Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean regions are the hardest hit in terms of children missing out on basic vaccinations. Vaccine hesitancy is a spectrum, from rockhard resistance to questioning. This spectrum has, though, become more polarizing and political during the pandemic. A fact about this polarization that I found just fascinating is that in the US, right-leaning voters are less likely to be vaccinated, while in the UK, Tory voters are more likely to be vaccinated. While personal beliefs don't dictate attitude toward vaccinations, those beliefs can serve to harden hesitancy into refusal. 

Health experts put forward steps that can improve vaccine uptake. First are presumptive recommendations. These would include a doctor's saying it's time for a child's vaccination as opposed to asking whether the parent wants to schedule an appointment for a shot. Don't ask, but tell, factually and politely. In motivational interviewing, doctors open a dialog, inviting parents to voice concerns or ask questions. WHO offers the 3Cs of vaccine hesitancy: convenience, complacency, and confidence. All have a definite impact on why a person believes what they do. And sometimes it just comes down to asking people why they are not getting vaccinated or getting their children vaccinated. Orthodox Jewish communities in London initially had low covid vaccination rates not because people opposed or were afraid of the vaccines. They simply did not want to haul children on public transit to vaccination sites across town. When vaccination sites were set up in or near those communities, vaccination rates were no longer an issue.

I read an article today saying that one complication of people returning to the office was the increase in transit crime. The number of incidents may not have gone up, but the rate has risen because fewer people have been using public transit. I openly admit that I spent most of the last two years driving myself only to medical appointments or to visit My Mom. I had to ask The Professor whether it was my imagination that there were more bad drivers out there now. There is one stop light on our way to or from town through which I used to see a car or two cross on red because they were accelerating and almost in to the intersection when the light turned red. I recently saw four cars run the red light full on. That would be four cars (two per lane) crossing on a full read light after the cars that were accelerating to get through as the light was changing. I have had more cases of people cutting in front of me than I can remember having in the years before the pandemic. Are people in more of a hurry now? Do they think if they drive fast enough they can drive out of the pandemic? I hate to tell them, but that's not gonna happen no matter how much they want it to. And The Professor said he could not disagree with my statement about there being more bad drivers now than two years ago.