Mixed metaphors

News blues…

Cresting the third wave between a rock and a hard place?

SA’s deputy health minister Joe Phaahla recently admitted the department would not meet its target of vaccinating 1.5-million health-care workers. Instead, he said it was likely that 700,000 would be vaccinated by the end of April.
Professor Glenda Gray, a co-lead investigator for the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine trial, predicted this week that 500,000 health-care workers would be vaccinated by the end of April - if there were no delays.
With fears of a third wave likely to erupt at the end of April, this means most of SA's health-care workers will still be unprotected. 

American youth, meanwhile, parties on…”
Miami Beach Police fired pepper balls into crowds of partiers and arrested at least a dozen people late Saturday as the city took extraordinary measures to crack down on spring breakers who officials have said are out of control.

Saturday night, hundreds of mostly maskless people remained in the streets well after the 8 p.m. curfew. With sirens blaring, police opened fire with pepper balls - a chemical irritant similar to paint balls -- into the crowd, causing a stampede of people fleeing 

India reports 46,951 new coronavirus cases, the highest single-day rise since November 12 and the sixth consecutive daily increase in infections….

The country has recorded a total of 11,646,081 cases, including 159,967 fatalities, since the beginning of the pandemic.
The jump in infections comes almost a year since India's first nationwide lockdown.

Brazil experiences a surge of Coronavirus cases with the country's health systems increasingly overwhelmed. In nearly every state across Brazil, occupancy rates in intensive care units (ICUs) are at or above 80%. Some of them are at or above 90%, and a few have have exceeded 100% occupancy, forcing them to turn some patients away.

State governors, city mayors and local medical personnel now say they are running out of supplies to treat even the Covid-19 patients who have been allocated precious ICU beds. Stocks of medicines that facilitate intubation could vanish in the next two weeks, according to a report from the National Council of Municipal Health Secretaries. And Brazil's National Association of Private Hospitals (ANAHP) has predicted that private hospitals will run out of medicines necessary for intubating Covid-19 patients by Monday.

The president of the country advises Brazilians: “Enough fussing and whining. How much longer will the crying go on?” 
And I thought Donald Trump was awful! (Hint: he was. Birds of a feather and all that...)

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• Tracking Covid-19 vaccinations worldwide 
• South African experts to follow for up-to-date and accurate Covid information… 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Plotting my getaway. I’ve still have too little information to make a firm decision about returning to California next month, but I’m trying out various possibilities. One possibility is hiring a house-sitter. Another is offering free accommodation to a manager type person. This option is risky. Manager type people tend to not manage, or over manage, as soon as one’s back is turned. They tend also to refuse to depart when the agreed upon departure date arrives (claiming “squatters rights” is legitimate in SA).

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South African days getting shorter while nightfall happens earlier:
March 20 was the formal southern hemisphere equinox.* 

Feb 26: sunrise 5:47am; sunset 6:33pm.
March 9: sunrise 5:55am; sunset 6:21pm.
March 16: sunrise 5:59am; sunset 6:13pm.
• March 20: sunrise 6:01am; sunset 6:08pm.
March 21: sunrise 6:02am; sunset 6:07pm.
March 22: sunrise 6:03am; sunset 6:06pm.