Showing posts with label US vaccination rates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US vaccination rates. Show all posts

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Babes in the woods?

The following Covid numbers compare today with the numbers 7 weeks ago, Week 61, Day 427, on the eve of my departure from South Africa - after an unplanned stay of 1.5 years. Still grim.

Worldwide (Map)  
July 22, 2021: 191,945,000 confirmed infections; 4,126,300 deaths
May 27, 2021: 168,418,000 confirmed infections; 3,499,000 deaths
Tracker for worldwide vaccination rate >> 

US (Map
July 22, 2021: 34,226,300 confirmed infections; 609,900 deaths
May 27, 2021: 33,190,300 confirmed infections; 592,000,000 deaths

SA (Tracker
July 22, 2021: 2,327,475 confirmed infections; 68,200 deaths
May 27, 2021: xx ,645,600 confirmed infections; 56,100 deaths

News blues

New study presents most comprehensive picture yet of true toll of pandemic in India, finding the true COVID death toll is likely in the millions .
Read in The Guardian >> 
***
An unbelievably large segment of Americans refuse to accept a free, life- and community-saving vaccine. Meanwhile, millions of people around the world would love, love, love as easy access to a vaccine that so many Americans eschew.
Again, Americans display to the world their myopic, self-centered and self-absorbed, navel-gazing worldview.
Science, medicine, and, yes, growing experience show that Covid-19 breakthrough infections do happen, are preventable, but that it's going to take a big effort to stop them. 
Question is, how? 
As long as charlatans masquerade as news journalists on Fox and Republican politicians promote distrust about the vaccine, all people, Americans foremost, but all people across the world, are exposed to the high likelihood of more virulent variants in the future.
Read more >> 

America’s vaccination rates have fallen off a cliff, and nothing seems to help
***
The Lincoln Project Fox is killing us  (0:57 mins).

Healthy planet, anyone?

The heatwave in one of the world’s coldest regions has sparked forest fires and threatened the Siberian city of Yakutsk with an “airpocalypse” of thick toxic smoke, atmospheric monitoring services have reported.
High levels of particulate matter and possibly also chemicals including ozone, benzene and hydrogen cyanide are thought likely to make this one of the world’s worst ever air pollution events.
Local authorities have warned the 320,000 residents to stay indoors to avoid choking fumes from the blazes, which are on course to break last year’s record.
Read more >> 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

It’s not easy, in California, to take a page from Italy’s playbook and siesta during the hottest hours of the day. Here on the river, the hottest hours of the day are about noon to 6pm. That’s most of the day. I can't siesta for most of the day: too depressing.
Swimming cools things down. So does regularly wetting my t-shirt or tank top. In the end though, it’s a losing game: small boat, hot sun, drought, and, oh yes, runaway climate change with no constructive response by politicians and destructive response by corporate apparatchiks.
***
One thing for certain: help is hard to find. While I was still in South Africa and since I’ve returned, I’ve tried to find a carpenter-type handyman-type to fix the bathroom floor in my apartment that the last tenant destroyed. No dice. People advertise their availability, sometimes even makes appointment to evaluate the work, then simply never show. Turns out this is a feature, not a bug, of carpenter- and handyman-types all over the planet. Is that called a “lifestyle”?
Similar trend at the marina. Lots of talk, no follow through. I did, however, finally get someone stronger than me to lift the too-heavy-for-me small 15 hp outboard motor onto my Sea Eagle inflatable. Took me weeks to get to this point. Now I’m “girding my loins” to install the sun canopy and then start the thing – with a pull rope.
Sometimes I wonder what the *** I’m doing, trying to live a quiet life on an elderly houseboat. I’d say I’m a babe in the woods, but I’m not a babe. More like, senior citizen in the woods or bright-eyed senior citizen in a circus.