The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 96 (596)

Halloween passed uneventfully, and The Professor has taken the leftover candy to the physics department. Any that he brings home today will immediately get "packaged" to go with us to the polls tomorrow as a contribution to the officials' break table. I also just finished two batches of oatmeal raisin cookies. Most will go to the break table, some will go to my mom, and The Professor can save me from the rest. 

So Johns Hopkins University says that the global death toll from covid is now five million. This is almost certainly an undercount. How big is five million? It's the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950 or the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. That total makes covid the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and stroke. The director of a global health center at Columbia University in the UK says, "What's uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries. That's the irony of Covid-19." The high-resource countries have larger proportions of elderly people or cancer survivors, two especially vulnerable groups. The poorer countries tend to have larger proportions of children, teens, and young adults, three groups less likely to have serious symptoms or to die. Perhaps the best summation of the current death toll comes from an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health: "This is a defining moment in our lifetime. What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don't get to another 5 million?"

People protesting against Italy's health pass this past weekend wore striped bibs and compared themselves to prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Protesters in France a while back wore stars of David and compared themselves to Jews during the Holocaust. How has the Holocaust become so trivial as to be misused in these ways? Some of it may not be so trivial, though. Nine hundred people gathered in Predappio, Mussolini's birthplace, to mark the anniversary of his march on Rome and to protest the health pass. The need for a health pass to enter some venues or conduct some activities may have helped Italy's vaccination rate, though. As of Monday, almost 83 percent of the population ages 12 and over are fully vaccinated.

Russia recorded another 40,402 cases and 1,155 deaths in a 24-hour period. All 85 regions across 11 time zones have vaccine mandates in place for certain types of workers. Israel will now recognize Russia's Sputnik V vaccine and allow vaccinated Russians entry into Israel as of November 15. Australia and Thailand are reopening their borders. Right now, only Australian permanent residents and citizens are free to enter. Priority will also be given to fully vaccinated foreigners arriving on skilled worker and student visas. Vaccinated tourists from Singapore, home to one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, can enter effective November 15. Four Australian states and one territory still have restrictions in place on crossing state lines. An Australian who flew to Sydney from Los Angeles was frustrated that he then had to apply for an exemption to enter Western Australia to visit his dying mother. Indonesia opened Bali, but with so many restrictions that few tourists have come. Finally, Vietnam and Cambodia plan to reopen selected areas to foreigners at the end of this month. 

US covid cases rose slightly in the past week driven by increases in the interior west from Arizona to North Dakota. Alaska leads the nation in cases per capita with 89, while Colorado has the fastest rate of case growth despite 61 percent of residents being fully vaccinated. Deaths are down to about 1,400 per day from 2,000 in parts of September. There are, on average, six times as many cases in unvaccinated people as there are in vaccinated ones. Deaths are about 12 times as high for the unvaccinated.

Finally, a bit of trivia. The Oxford English Dictionary's word of 2021 is ... drum roll ... "vax." Part of the citation noted that "[N]o word better captures the atmosphere of the past year than vax." I have to give the OED credit; the words of the year I thought of captured the atmosphere were a bit more, no, a lot more profane than "vax."

The View from the Hermitage, Day 191

When the husband's mother lived in British Columbia, we tried to visit her every year or two. We would combine visiting her in Kamloops, BC with touristing. One year, we planned on taking the coastal ferry from Vancouver Island up to Prince Rupert then driving south to Kamloops stopping along the way at a restored old West town called Barkerville. While perusing a BC guidebook, I learned that by going 137 miles (one way, so 274 miles round trip) out of our way, we could visit the easternmost town in Alaska, Hyder. Hyder sits just across the border from Stewart, British Columbia. Even more exciting, we could do this on the weekend in which Canada Day, July 1, fell on Friday and Independence Day, July 4, fell on Monday. How could we not do this? We'd be able to check Alaska off the list of states we had visited. 

I explain all this because Hyder and Stewart are in the news again. When we went there, you could wave at the border patrol station and go between the two towns. People went back and forth at will. Both Hyder and Stewart are small. Hyder's population is under 100, and Stewart's is 400. There got to be so few children in Hyder that the local elementary school closed. The elementary-aged kids started crossing the border and going to the school in Stewart. 

As you might have thought, border crossing has become problematic in the age of covid-19, but it's not the US causing a problem. Canada closed its border with the US, and that includes the border between Hyder and Stewart. One person from each family in Hyder may cross into Stewart for three hours once each week to obtain needed supplies, meaning that the kids can't go to school. Stewart has asked the federal government for an exception given that exceptions have been added to a couple other towns in similar situations. So far, no exception has been granted to Stewart. The residents of Stewart may cross into Hyder with no problem; however, they must quarantine for two weeks when they cross back into Stewart.

And we're worried here about in-person vs. hybrid vs. all virtual school. At least the kids here have a school they can get to. The city schools here may move to hybrid early in October rather than wait until the end of the nine-week grading period in early November. It's not clear yet how parents and teachers feel about this. For those for whom all virtual is working well, it may not be a big decision. For people paying for a program in which their kids are monitored and connected to complete their virtual learning, it might be different, especially if they're paying for multiple kids. Some of the programs I saw mentioned were in the neighborhood of $300 per week for each child. That adds up fast.

It's becoming pretty clear that HWSNBN will get whoever he wants named to the Supreme Court. Mitt Romney and a senator from Colorado were seen as the most likely to join Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski in not supporting a decision made by anyone other than the winner of the November election. There were two op-ed pieces in today's Washington Post proposing a term limit of 18 years on justices. The justice could be re-appointed, but the proposal does away with automatic lifetime appointments. What is so scary about appointments now is that they are until death do us part. Academic tenure is one thing; lifetime appointment, another.

The local university just put up their new covid-19 numbers. They do not look that bad. The concerning thing, though, is that I don't think they've added the positive cases found in the testing done by the athletics department. And if they are leaving those out, what else might be missing. I need to do some digging and find out what the policy is for students who test positive on an outside-the-university test. Are they expected or even required to report that result to the university? This inquiring mind wants to know.

My cell phone just sent me a notification about the CDC's warning to parents about traditional Halloween activities. They warn parents not to let their kids go trick-or-treating door-to-door. They also advise not attending crowded indoor costume parties. Some localities have already banned trick-or-treating. When Los Angeles tried to do so, though, public outcry prompted them to reinstate it but encourage parents not to allow it. In skimming the article, I saw no mention of what some churches do here, trunk-or-treating car-to-car in a parking lot. That would have the advantage of being outdoors. I will likely have some candy on hand in case the few kids here come knocking as they did last year. All in all, though, another reason to be glad our kids are adults ... even if they don't always act like them.