The View from the Hermitage, Day 329

Day 329 ... Week 47 ... Year 1? While I fully expect not to have been vaccinated once let alone twice by the one-year mark for this blog, I hope like hell I'm not still going strong this far into a second year. I do know that I won't be jumping right back out into the world even after a second dose of vaccine. I cannot, for example, envision eating out in a restaurant. I can envision going back to working as an officer of election if enough time has passed after the second shot that I feel it's had its full effect. 

Mother Nature, however, may have other ideas. South Africa has halted the rollout of the AstraZeneca covid vaccine because it has shown minimal efficacy against what's here being called the South Africa variant. Fortunately, the vaccines in use here in the US appear to work against what is called the British variant--the more contagious possibly more deadly variant--because the prevalence of that variant appears to be doubling every week and a half. 

I have been told that since The Professor and I have registered with the State Health Department as well as the regional health district folks, we'll get an email telling us when it's our turn to get vaccinated and how to make an appointment. This obviously varies from state to state and, possibly, locality to locality. I read this morning how some other countries are notifying people that it's their turn for the vaccine. Britain is apparently using a letter or phone call, while Israel is relying on text messaging. Notification in Germany varies from state to state, while India is using neighborhood lists. 

As schools locally move to increase in-person K-12 instruction, there may be a new controversy brewing. Some districts appear to be hiring "classroom monitors," to, what else, monitor classrooms in which students will sit at desks for the same virtual instruction they would get at home. They would not be going to school to be in a classroom with a teacher present and teaching. They would just be following on a screen in a classroom rather than on a screen at home.

The Super Bowl, the climax of the season, is this evening. Noteworthy is that the game was scheduled for February 7, 2021, before the pandemic happened. The National Football League, unlike the other professional sports leagues, had no games canceled due to covid. Some were delayed, but all were played. Perhaps more noteworthy is that the season did not happen in a bubble. There may have been a couple of games that were not played in the stadium they had been scheduled for due to local regulations, but only a couple. What the NFL did that other sports leagues did not do or did not do as well was to stress the public health side of the pandemic: distancing, testing, contact tracing, isolation. and so forth. League officials expected there to be cases of covid; the goal was to minimize the spread of those cases. 

The surprise to me was that there was never a case of the virus being transmitted across the line of scrimmage despite large, sweaty, huffing and puffing men crouching nose to nose. There was no transmission even in cases in which players tested positive for covid after having played in a game. The league used genetic sequencing to verify that such a player did not transmit whatever viral strain he had to someone else on the field at the same time. 

Moving on to the Capitol insurrection, researchers at the University of Chicago have been analyzing the backgrounds of the people arrested so far. The average age of arrestees is 40. Almost 90 percent have no known links to militant groups. Forty percent own their own business or work in white-collar jobs. They have one common denominator. They all support Xpot. He is the reason they were where they were on January 6. Having watched video of Xpot's remarks to the crowd that day, I view those remarks as incendiary when delivered to one's supporters. Will enough Republican Senators agree with me? Not bloody likely.

We had snow again today. I left my phone at home when we walked The Family Dog, but I took a shot of the dogwood tree out back through the dining room window.

When we reached the other cul-de-sac, the flakes were large and fluffy. Standing still, looking straight up at them as they fell was magical. I had not realized how much I missed a good snowfall. Now, eight or so hours later, most of the snow has melted. It was wonderful while it lasted, but it didn't last long enough.

I found a recipe for Oatmeal Raisin Pie in the book Son #2 gave me for Christmas, Pie Academy. It seemed like something that might go with the Instant Pot chili I'll be trying to make after I post this. The Professor's favorite cookies are oatmeal raisin, and the description of his pie was that the top was like a huge cookie. The Flaky Cream Cheese Pie Dough used for the crust was a bitch to make since I don't have a food processor. I made two batches, one using my stand mixer and the other using an immersion blender. I ended up using the immersion  blender dough. I don't know how it tastes yet, but I do know I'd never enter a pie using it in a county fair because getting it to look as good as it doesn't in the picture below was not easy.

Here's hoping I don't struggle as much with the Instant Pot chili as I did with the Flake Cream Cheese Pie Dough crust. And here's hoping both the chili and the pie are tasty.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 328

I think I'll stick with news on the lighter side today. I'm not mentally ready to give deep thought to viruses or politics except to note that POTUS has said that Xpot should not get the daily intelligence briefings due to his "erratic behavior." That's probably putting it politely.

I learned that there exists something called the Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums. It houses over 2,500 pigments. I learned this in the summary of an article on a new blue pigment, the first discovered in some 200 years. You can see a sample here, which is not the summary I read this morning. It's a very pretty blue, but I'm not going to spend $179.40 on a small tube of paint.

Here's hoping you weren't planning on an Alaskan cruise this summer. The Canadian government has extended its ban on cruise ships through February 2022, effectively shutting down Alaska cruises. Most of the ships sailing out of US ports to Alaska are registered in foreign countries. US maritime law says that foreign-registered ships can't go between two American ports without stopping at a foreign point in between.

POTUS has gone home to Delaware for a combination Super Bowl and son's 51st birthday weekend. Security and time-wise, the easiest, possibly only, way to get him there was via Air Force One. The Air Force One seen on most news blurbs is a Boeing 747. There is a second one, a Boeing 757, that is used to land at smaller airports, such as the one in Wilmington, Delaware. ("Air Force One" is the call sign of any plane holding the President.) The plane used by the Vice President is a Boeing 757, meaning that POTUS is familiar with that size plane. His comment on the one he flew on to Delaware? "A great plane. It's the same plane we had as vice president--only it's much nicer." I should hope so.

Finally, I found cited in a Facebook post some song lyrics from Paul Simon that seemed very relevant to the world today. 

God only knows                                                                                                                             

God makes his plan                                                                                                                       

The information's unavailable                                                                                                         

To the mortal man                                                                                                                            

We work our jobs                                                                                                                       

Collect our pay                                                                                                                         

Believe we're gliding down the highway                                                                                   

When in fact we're slip slidin' away 

Time to slip slide into tomorrow, the start of the 47th week of our personal lockdown here in our hermitage. And with five inches or more of snow forecast for tonight, we really might be slip slidin' tomorrow.                                                                                                               

The View from the Hermitage, Day 327

I've decided to rename Mr. Biden to POTUS as a dig at Xpot. I don't expect that Xpot will know or care, but it suits me to do it this way. Speaking of Xpot, his time in office was a boon for The New York Times subscription-wise. I guess people developed a real taste for the fake news he said it ran. Digital-only subscriptions rose by 6.7 million during Xpot's time in office, compared with 3 million for The Washington Post and 2.46 million for The Wall Street Journal.

There won't be a glitzy new Budweiser Clydesdale ad during Sunday's Super Bowl, but Anheuser-Busch is running an ad that might moisten your eyes a wee bit. Parts might make you laugh or smile, while others might pull at your heartstrings. It's a good commercial considering the times in which it is airing. 

The governor held a coronavirus briefing this morning, catching me by surprise. He says the covid-19 numbers are improving to the point that he wants all school divisions in the state to be offering some form of in-person instruction by March 15. He did concede that should things worsen, he is quite willing to revert to virtual only. He also called on school divisions to craft some sort of summer school that will help bring kids up to speed on what they should have learned last spring and this year. It will not be mandatory, though, which makes me wonder if they will suggest to some families that their kids attend or make it totally voluntary. I guess we'll see.

I watched the governor's briefing on Facebook with a comment feed open. A surprisingly large number of angry faces wafted up on the sidebar, but that often happens during the briefings. What really caught my eye were the comments posted while the governor was discussing vaccinations. A very large number of people noted that they were not going to get vaccinated because they were scared. A noticeable number of those posted that people had died, sometimes within minutes, after being vaccinated. I guess I'm not reading, watching, or listening to the same news sources these folks are. 

The US recorded over 5,000 covid-19 deaths yesterday, but I'm happy (?) to say that the magnitude of the number was due to Indiana's inclusion of a backlog of around 1,500 previously unreported deaths. Don't get your hopes up, though. A newly released model predicts over 630,000 covid-19 deaths by June 1. I haven't seen an analogous number for the US, but the UK covid variant now accounts for 6 percent of cases in Germany.

And now a couple of non-covid comments. The Virginia House of Delegates yesterday voted to end capital punishment. The governor has already indicated that he will sign the bill, which makes us the first Southern state to end capital punishment. Weatherwise, we are about to experience a Siberian front that will take temperatures in the Upper Midwest down to the -30F to -50F range. In Tisdale,he tiny Saskatchewan town in which The Professor's brother lives, the high temperature Sunday is forecast to be -24F with a low of -31F. Yes, the -24F is the forecast high temperature. When The Professor comments that he is from Canada, he cites temperatures such as this as one of the reasons why.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 326

I spent much of the morning in one of my happy places, in front of a sewing machine. I started a new project to use up some of the fabric glut. I'm far enough along that I now need to decide how I want to arrange things. I have photos of various arrangements and, while those incubate, I'll have plenty to do with the sampler for my pandemic quilt. One commentator mentioned using fabric stabilizer for that. I tried this, and will definitely use it when I do the real deal. 

The CDC is concerned about the coronavirus variants, saying that we could have over 530,000 deaths by March 1. A model out of Columbia University holds that a loosening of restrictions nationally this month could lead to an additional 29 million covid-19 infections. Yes, we now have vaccines against the coronavirus, but the data suggest we're worse off than we were last spring when the first lockdowns took place. Some people complained then, but a larger number of people complied, and things got better, at least until things started to reopen. People have started to get complacent, thinking that things are getting better and will continue to do so, so why worry about masks and distancing?

On a better side, global confidence in the available covid-19 vaccines is growing. Maybe we'll have more than enough people getting vaccinated to give a start toward herd immunity. COVAX, an initiative of the World Health Organization, has announced plans to distribute 330 million doses of vaccine to developing nations by July 1. That would certainly improve the global picture. 

Closer to home, Virginia's governor has said that tomorrow he will announce a plan to keep K-12 students in school longer in the summer to make up for what they may have lost due to virtual learning. A psychology professor at the local university suggested this a short while back. The professor made the point that summer instruction needed to be for all students, not just those needing remediation. It needs to be seen as something for all and not something that singles out a subgroup of kids. 

I saw the summer school announcement on Facebook and, based on the comments there, shit's gonna get real. Several parents were saying that their kids did not need to take part. They (parents) said that they had invested time and energy all year to ensure that their kid(s) learned what they needed to learn and would be getting all As as final grades. Sleep-away summer camp was cited by several as being more important to their kids. Various aspects of summer camp were cited as reasons for its being better than school--leadership, special programs, etc. To top it all off, though, one parent noted that they needed the time away from their kid, that they loved their kid but needed the break from parenting. 

The Sons did residential academic programs for gifted kids during their high school years. Did I enjoy my time away from one or both of them? I enjoyed that they were in a very happy place and would come home talking about what class they might want to take the next summer. (These were real academic classes, for which their high school awarded them credit.) Did I need time away from my kids? No, though they might have needed time away from me. 

Intriguing item with which to end today's post, here's a quote from a blurb I read this morning: 

"Eavesdropping marmosets understand other monkeys' conversations and judge whether they want to interact."

I wonder how they would feel about summer camps' being put on  hold.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 325

Some 325 days ago when I started this series of blog posts, there were many days--most days even--in which every article on the front page of The Washington Post concerned the novel coronavirus. That didn't seem to happen in the daily local, but the novel coronavirus generally occupied maybe half of the front page. Today, the only front-page mention of the virus in the Post can be found in two teasers of articles inside the front section. One, about the death of Capt. Tom Moore the 100-year-old British vet who walked around his garden and raised $45 million for the UK's National Health Service, mentioned that this was done "early in the pandemic." The other plugged an article about Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine. The first mention of the coronavirus in the local paper was on the fourth page. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind?

I'm worried that the existence of the various vaccines is diverting attention from the mitigation measures that would slow the spread and help with the totality of getting hundreds of millions of people hundreds of millions doses of vaccine. I check in on a couple of area listservs, and the reports of which businesses enforce mask-wearing and/or distancing have in large part been replaced by reports of "why can't we get vaccinated now?" or "why are [insert group name here] getting the vaccine before [insert another group name here]?" Maybe it's general impatience, a fed-up feeling that this has gone on for as long as it has. I can be very impatient but am not really feeling that way now. It's going to take a while, folks. It's going to take a while. 

In more general coronavirus news, Dr. Fauci is saying that  70 to 85 percent of the US population should be vaccinated before the country can start returning to normal. Yes, I typed that sentence right after an admonition for us to be patient. As long as enough people get vaccinated and the virus doesn't throw an unexpected curve ball, we'll get there. Dr. Fauci is also counseling against hosting or attending Super Bowl parties on Sunday. The Super Bowl could be a super spreader. We usually watch the Super Bowl more for the ads than the game, so it was disappointing to read that some companies traditionally associated with the classic commercials will not be running them this year. It was not disappointing to hear that some of them are using the money they would have spent on ads and air time for coronavirus relief. 

People who still decline to accept the seriousness of the coronavirus should perhaps be told of an incident in California's prison system. A covid-19 outbreak at one men's prison led to the transfer of high-risk inmates from that prison to two other prisons that between them had had only one case of covid-19. One month later, those two prisons between them had more than 1,300 cases. The virus is all too real and all too deadly.

There continue to be issues with vaccine availability. Demand from European countries is slowing delivery of vaccines to Canada, possible leading to Canada's ordering from an American company. China says that it will provide 10 million vaccine doses to developing nations, but I don't know how those countries might be chosen. I can't be sure, but I don't think Mr. Biden has said anything specific about how the US might help vaccinate the Third World. 

It did not surprise me to read that younger adults and middle-aged people cause the most covid spread.Through mid-August 2020, 75 percent of new infections came from adults aged 20 to 49 with the 35 to 49 year-old subgroup contributing more than the 20 to 34 year-old subgroup. The group dying the most from those transmitted infections? Yes, mostly older people. I remember most of my 20s. I did things then without thinking that I would not do now after thinking twice and twice again. I can't say for sure that I would have been adamant about mask-wearing and social distancing then. There's a certain air of imperviousness in that decade. 

It also did not surprise me to hear that Dolly Parton twice declined the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Xpot. The first time, she said that her husband was ill. The second time, she said that she did not want to travel during the pandemic. I hope conditions change so that she can accept the medal from Mr. Biden. The same with Bill Belichick, who also declined Xpot's invitation.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 324

My normal early morning read-through of news sources got sidelined when I came across an article in The Guardian about Virginia's being on the brink of becoming the first southern, formerly Confederate state to abolish the death penalty and the 23rd state nationwide. I learned more about the history and practice of capital punishment in Virginia from an English newspaper as opposed to a home-grown one. Or perhaps it's easier for a foreign source to lay bare the bad side of the death penalty Virginia style. As might be expected given historic settlement patterns, the first execution in what is now the United States occurred in Jamestown in 1608. Again perhaps because of history, Virginia has carried out more executions than any other state, 1,390. There is a definite racial bias in Virginia's capital punishment history. Between 1800 and 1920, Virginia executed 625 black people and only 58 white people. Again looking historically, formerly Confederate states account for 80 percent of all executions. 

Besides all the above issues, what other evidence is there in favor of abolishing the death penalty? Try that 4 percent of all capital prosecutions are estimated to end in wrongful convictions. A sentence of life with no chance of parole can, if found to be mistaken, be reversed. The wrongfully convicted person can at least get some of their life back. The wrongfully executed person has no life to reclaim. 

Some bad news on the coronavirus front is that the monoclonal antibodies that have been used to treat the original covid-19 appear not to work against the variants. The study has yet to be peer-reviewed, so we can hope the researchers got it wrong, but I'm betting they didn't. If I were into writing science fiction, I could imagine an intelligent virus that consciously mutates to block treatments and/or vaccines. The US, while leading the world in many of the bad aspects of the virus, is woefully behind in terms of tracking viral mutations. We have shared the genetic sequence of only 0.3 percent of our covid-19 cases, not 3 percent, but 0.3 percent. That puts us 30th in the world behind such countries as Portugal, Latvia, and Sierra Leone. I wonder if Sierra Leone was one of the blank-hole countries Xpot was ranting about in a past life. 

Speaking of Xpot, the outline of his defense was provided to the Senate today. The principal argument is that he cannot be tried because he is no longer in office despite the fact that some other people have been. A secondary argument is that because he firmly believed he lost the election due to electoral fraud, his comments at the pre-riot rally were merely expressions of that belief and perfectly okay under the first amendment. I know what the outcome of the trial will be, but it will be interesting to see how those arguments fly and if Xpot has the nerve to appear as a witness.

The Super Bowl is this weekend. Back when The Sons lived in, the traditional Super Bowl dinner was chili or nachos. The Sons won't be here this year, but I can still make chili, this time using my Instant Pot. I also discovered a type of pie named after The Professor's favorite cookie, oatmeal raisin. The recommended crust is flaky cream cheese pie dough. This will be very interesting. I shall report the outcome of both resolutions on Monday.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 323

Not needing to go to work or school, I find Monday pretty much like any other day. The same goes for Friday. Still, the first things I found looking at the news this morning were enough to cause flashbacks of Monday as the worst day of the week. First, there was Singapore's education minister saying:

"It may take four or five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the start of a post-COVID normal."

Then, there was Dutch officials of some sort saying that there "are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics," one from the original coronavirus and a second from the variant(s). Also put forward was the estimate that with the more transmissible variants, we may need 85 percent to achieve herd immunity. I'm thinking that there are probably enough anti-vaccination types out there that 85 percent will not come easily. The CDC is stepping up its efforts to find what variants are at play here in the US, offering one more way in which to raise my anxiety level.

It is now February. January, with over 95,000 deaths, has the distinction of being the deadliest month since the pandemic began. Vaccinations are still troublesome. The two feet of snow expected in New York City today is going to slow things up there. If you can't get vaccinated but know someone in Europe, though, you may be able to score a fake negative covid certificate. They're apparently a hot item on the black market there.

The social psychologist in me (social psych was my master's degree major; I returned to the quantitative realm for my PhD) found the results of a survey reporting that covid deadliness depends in large part on cultural differences in willingness to follow rules. This is not as counterintuitive as many other social psych results are, but still very interesting to me. The study considered the US, UK, Israel, Spain, and Italy to be "loose" cultures as opposed to the "tight" cultures in Singapore, Japan, China, and Austria. Controlling for other factors, loose cultures had five times the number of cases as the tight cultures and over eight times as many deaths. Perhaps more interesting, loose cultures were less afraid of the virus even as their case numbers rose. Nearly half of respondents in loose cultures (49 percent) reported being "very scared" of the coronavirus as opposed to 70 percent of respondents from tight cultures. It appears that people in loose cultures fear mitigation measures more than the virus itself. 

I have been very open since the start of all this 323 days ago about being terrified of getting the virus. This is one reason Son #1 has gone out of his way to see that I do not have to leave the house except for dog- or exercise-walking and pretty much only leave the subdivision to take The Family Dog to trail walk in a nearby park. And the nearby park is early Sunday mornings only. That very real fear is a big factor in my not minding at all playing hermit. A little fear isn't necessarily a bad thing. 

Going in a totally different direction, Amsterdam is moving its (in)famous red light district out of the city center. An "erotic center" will be set up elsewhere in Amsterdam in a purpose-built center. The aim is to attract a different type of tourist. I have to wonder, though, just how many people visit Amsterdam with the main purpose of getting laid. I can think of so many other reasons to visit, having lived just down the road for a year. There is another proposal to ban tourists from buying weed, but that one is not garnering a lot of support. There is concern that enacting such a ban would hand the drug trade over to dealers on the street. That actually makes a lot of sense. 

To close on a totally weird note, Alan Dershowitz has nominated Xpot's son-in-law Jared Kushner and his deputy Avi Berkowitz for the Nobel Peace Prize, recognizing their work in the Middle East. The article in The Guardian reporting this noted that "the bar for nominations is low." Other nominees include Greta Thunberg, Alexei Navalny, and the World Health Organization. These three are backed by Norwegian lawmakers, who are said to have a good track record of picking the winner. Stay tuned til October, a month by which coronavirus things may or may not have improved.