Coping

News blues…

Category 2 tropical cyclone Eloise pummeled Madagascar and Mozambique and heads into Limpopo, Mpumalanga and northern KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) .
This part of Midlands (KZN) is getting off lightly with steady rainfall, no thunder and lightning, no hail, and no wind.

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KZN has moved into second place with its Covid-19 numbers of infected (293,050) only behind Gauteng (373,100), the most urban province in the country.
South Africans should expect a third Covid-19 wave in 3 to 4 months – and the crisis hits world headlines  (2:03 mins)
Biden responds to this news by preparing to impose a travel ban for non-U.S. citizens traveling from South Africa. (2:23 mins)
Theoretically, I could still depart SA although the UK is stopping flights from SA into that country.
Dubai is a stopover possibility. That country is a favorite destination for desperate South Africans.

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Exactly one year after its first confirmed case of Covid-19, the US passes 25 million confirmed cases. 

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Boogieman of the conspiracy crowd, Dr Fauci, now President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, spills on working for Trump:

Fauci frequently contradicted Trump’s baseless claims about COVID-19. In his interview with The New York Times, he recalled Trump’s repeated claims that the virus would simply “go away.”
“It isn’t like I took any pleasure in contradicting the president of the United States,” Fauci said. “I have a great deal of respect for the office. But I made a decision that I just had to. Otherwise I would be compromising my own integrity, and be giving a false message to the world. If I didn’t speak up, it would be almost tacit approval that what he was saying was OK.”
“That’s when I started to get into some trouble,” he continued. “The people around him, his inner circle, were quite upset that I would dare publicly contradict the president.”
Asked if Trump ever confronted him for contradicting him about the pandemic, Fauci said the then-president would express “disappointment.” 
“There were a couple of times where I would make a statement that was a pessimistic viewpoint about what direction we were going,” Fauci said, “and the president would call me up and say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you more positive? You’ve got to take a positive attitude. Why are you so negativistic? Be more positive.’”
“He would get on the phone and express disappointment in me that I was not being more positive,” Fauci added. He said Trump didn’t explain why he was upset that Fauci didn’t have a more upbeat attitude about the deadly pandemic.
…In his interview with the Times, Fauci said he’s received numerous death threats in the last year stemming from “right-wing craziness.”
“It was the harassment of my wife, and particularly my children, that upset me more than anything else… They knew where my kids work, where they live. The threats would come directly to my children’s phones, directly to my children’s homes. How the hell did whoever these assholes were get that information?”
In one alarming incident, Fauci said he opened a letter he had received and a “puff of powder” exploded onto his face and chest.
“That was very, very disturbing to me and my wife because it was in my office,” he said. “So I just looked at it all over me and said, ‘What do I do?’ The security detail was there, and they’re very experienced in that. They said, ‘Don’t move, stay in the room.’ And they got the hazmat people. So they came, they sprayed me down and all that.”
The powder was tested and the results showed it was “a benign nothing,” Fauci told the Times.
“But it was frightening,” he said. “My wife and my children were more disturbed than I was. I looked at it somewhat fatalistically. It had to be one of three things: A hoax. Or anthrax, which meant I’d have to go on Cipro for a month. Or if it was ricin, I was dead, so bye-bye.”

Dr Birx unloads on Trump, too…. 

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Pineapple on pizza? MSNBC news anchor (“presenter”) Ari Velschi was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised in Toronto, Ontario, son of Murad Velshi, the first Canadian of Indian origin elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, and Mila, who grew up in South Africa.
Perhaps it’s the southern /northern hemisphere connections or being an immigrant (like me, he lives in the US), or simply that he’s smart and eloquent, but, here, he expresses ideas with which I’m on board … . (And, I’m a “no” on pineapple on pizza.)

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Steve Schmidt, co-founder The Lincoln Project, Republican Party Is An Organized Conspiracy  (12:30 mins)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Lots to cope with these days: Fast moving Covid, extended and unanticipated stay in SA, a typhoon, trying - so far, unsuccessfully - to maintain and sell my mother’s large property, find congenial homes for 3 mature dogs, find work for a longtime employee, a gardener ill with Covid, and a mother dying. 
Time to catch my breath and ponder….