The ship is free! Long float the ship! I admit to being surprised that they got the Ever Given back afloat in less than a week. They freed the stern overnight, which was the easy part according to the head of the Dutch salvage team. At the time, they said that the bow was still "stuck rock-solid." Freeing the ship required dredging 30,000 cubic meters of sand not to mention 13 tugboats. Last I read, they had moved the ship to the center of the canal channel and were towing it to a lake to the north. There, they'll do a complete technical inspection. They will likely also check the keel of the ship to make sure there was no damage there. Assuming the ship's getting stuck in the first place did not damage the deep center channel, the canal should be back open for traffic today.
In more sobering news, the CDC director says, "Right now, I'm scared." She also confessed to "the recurring feeling I have of impending doom." She said she was speaking not so much as the CDC director but as a wife, mother, and daughter to ask the public "to just please hold on a while longer." Her comments came in the wake of daily new cases having risen from 40,000 or 50,000 a few weeks ago to 70,000 now. Cases are rising ominously in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. The seven-day average of hospital admissions is also rising. If that's the bad news, the good news is that a CDC study shows that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been highly effective in preventing infection in "real-world conditions."
I'm sure there are people who will take the news on the vaccines' effectiveness as an excuse to jump back into life after only the first vaccination, to remove their mask, and not eschew crowds. I know someone who caught covid-19 after her first vaccination. Her case was not so bad as to require hospitalization, but she said it was not at all pleasant. In making my multitude of mostly medical appointments, I made sure that all would be not just two, but three weeks after my second vaccination. Should that vaccination be delayed for some reason, I would reschedule any of the appointments that would become less than two weeks after. I did not live in the hermitage this long to throw it all away right at the end. And while I will go out for the various appointments in May, I do not plan on going out willy-nilly. Son #1 has offered to continue doing the grocery procurement, and The Professor and I have no plans to go out to eat indoors. We will consider going out to eat outdoors depending on the distances between tables and the weather. But back full-tilt to the old normal? Not on our lives!
The joint China-WHO report on the origin of the novel coronavirus is expected to say that a lab leak is "extremely unlikely." The likely source, according to the report, was an animal, with the virus going from bats to some other animals to humans. Having no background in virology and not having had a biology class since grade 9, I cannot comment on the likelihood of that path. A lab leak--someone accidentally exposed who goes into the community?--seems plausible. I see no way it was an intentional release; too many Chinese died for that to be realistic. Unless the animal trail can be determined with confidence, we'll probably never know how it got started on its trip around the world.
Finally, American church membership has dropped below 50 percent for the first time in 83 years. In 2020, 47 percent of Americans reported being a member in an organized church. I would expect generational differences to be responsible for a large part of that. I know many people who claim to be spiritual in terms of their beliefs but who find organized religion not to their liking.
