To school? Or not to school?

Given surging infections, there's  no way I’d send my child to school –in SA or in USA, yet...

News blues…

It appears schools and school children have become the latest coronavirus hot potato.
In the US, Sec of Education Betsy Devos, well, obfuscates and demands children return to school 
In SA, the biggest teachers' union, the South African Democratic Teachers Union has resolved that schools should close amid a peak in Covid-19 cases in South Africa…
That politicians, teachers, parents, secretaries of state, teachers’ unions, and by-standers argue about risking children’s lives by forcing them back to school is as astonishing as, well, people arguing about whether or not to wear masks.

***

The Lincoln Project: One Day  (0:56 mins)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I recommend spending a day mixing compost, hauling by wheelbarrow the sweet-smelling, earthworm-rich compound, and dumping it into garden frames you have constructed.
Every step of the process nourishes the spirit and exercises the body.
Just add compost and your day becomes as good as possible under Lockdown.

That we’re expected temperatures dropping below zero tonight and tomorrow night just means a slight delay in sowing seeds. A seed worth its seediness won’t quibble if it’s planted today or next week.
What’s more, all the seeds I planted and set in the cold frame/greenhouse are sprouting. They’re tucked in and, I hope, ready for the cold spell.

Talking about hot potatoes… potatoes are easy to grow and each plants produces a dozens or more spuds.  If a few potatoes remain in the ground, they’ll sprout the following year, too.
It’s a win/win.

One grows potatoes by regularly mounding soil up the growing plant stem – until the plants’ leaves turn brown.
One harvests the fruit by feeling around underground, pulling up spuds, digging carefully, feeling some more, pulling up more spuds – work your way all the way down to the end of the roots.
It’s thrilling to pull fresh potato after fresh potato out of the soft earth. And thrilling to cook and eat them, too.

Contemplating this year’s garden, I’d carried home several free old tires with an eye toward using them as planters.
I realized they’d be ideal for growing spuds: simply add another tire when the mound grows too high - and keep going….
I thought this was a terrific idea – and unique… until I conducted Internet research.
Other gardeners have already developed and perfected such potato production. Take a look…

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Repeated repetition

Repetition is the act of repeating or being repeated while repeat is an iteration or a repetition.
Hmm....
These days the news is repetitive: numbers of coronavirus infections break records; wear masks, wear masks, wear masks… stay home, stay home, stay home…

News blues…

• The US posted yet another daily record of confirmed cases on Saturday night, with 66,528 new infections, while the death toll rose by almost 800 to nearly 135,000.
• Last Thursday, California, Texas, and Florida reported new record daily highs for deaths:
  - California: 149 deaths
  - Florida: 12 deaths (more than 12,000 infections in one day – another record broken)
  - Texas: 105 deaths (ditto on another record set for the third-straight day)
• South Africa recorded 12,349 new cases on 10 July, taking the cumulative total to 250 687 (with 118 232 recoveries).
  Deaths rose by:
  - 140+ in the Western Cape,
  - 39+ in Gauteng,
  - 24+ in the Eastern Cape and
  - 11+ in KwaZulu-Natal
  - Total death toll (today): 4,079+

Ominously:

• Oxfam reports, "The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that the number of people experiencing crisis level hunger will rise to 270 million before the end of the year as a result of the pandemic, an 82% increase since 2019.
  ‘This means between 6 000 and 12 000 people per day could die from hunger linked to the social and economic impacts of the pandemic before the end of the year, perhaps more than will die each day from the disease by that point.’
• Hunger is worsening in the US, too. 
• Meanwhile, the White House takes aim at Fauci as he disagrees with Trump on virus 
• Dr. Fauci on why he's not being allowed on TV.

***

Ramaphosa speaks: President Cyril Ramaphosa Nation Address | 12 July 2020
Takeaways:

• Country remains at Alert Level 3
• Tighten up on mandatory wearing of masks
  (let’s hope – insist? - “tighten up” does not mean “beat up”) 
• “Mask” defined as anything – t-shirt, cloth – that covers nose and mouth.
• Curfew from 9pm to 4am
• Reinstituting the ban on the sale of alcohol as of last night.

***

Alas, TV presenter and journalist, Justice Malala writes, “The ANC and those who voted for it aren’t victims. They chose the mess SA is in.”

***

Daily Maverick webinar: “Inside Track: Hotspot Gauteng”
Hosted by Mark Heywood with Doctors Nathi Mdladla and Jeremy Nel.
Takeaways:

• “In terms of people, we never actually instituted Lockdown. We went from hard Lockdown to softer… the reverse from what the rest of the world did. We behaved like Sweden.”
• “We’ve lost control of the pandemic. … We can intervene, but escalating higher level of lock down now may lose more benefits than gain…”
• Hospitals in Johannesburg are groaning but still managing – for now.
• Predominantly a respiratory disease although often affects other organs. 
• Oxygen is the primary therapy for Covid 19. Getting right the delivery of oxygen is essential. 
• Stocks of oxygen depleted. Oxygen delivery more important than ventilators.
• Infrastructure – hospitals, oxygen, beds, and personnel – remains the challenge.
• Systems are getting better at managing care.
• Integration of private and government hospitals across provinces is vital; all must cooperate/ network to provide best delivery of scarce resources.
• Obsession with numbers isn’t helping people feel safe…. (Mea culpa – guilty!)
• Seeing more young people affected but SA is a country with many young people. This will help keep mortality rates down although co-morbidities don’t help rates of survival (diabetes, hyper-tension, obesity, etc.).
• Flattening the curve: more important than ever to wear a mask – the best prevention - practice social distancing, sanitize, stay home, and avoid groups of people.
• We are going into peak risk period.

Whackjobery*
Young Americans tempt fate and attempt – fatally - by trying to prove the pandemic is, as Donald Trump claims, “a hoax.”

A 30-year-old patient died after attending a ‘“Covid-19 Party”, believing the virus to be a hoax, a Texas medical official has said.
“Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not,’” said Dr Jane Appleby, the chief medical officer at Methodist hospital in San Antonio.

*Whackjobery: term promoted by Steve Schmidt of The Lincoln Project to denote virulent Trump supporters who’ve given up common sense in favor of Trumpism.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I instituted a set of protocols for anyone entering the property – beginning with the gardener.
I placed hand sanitizer and viral guard throat spray on a table near the gate and txt’d him instructions.
That went off without a hitch. He appeared to find it novel, rather than intrusive.

Temperatures overnight expected to drop below zero for the next week. This, just as seedlings emerge. Let's hope the cold frame/greenhouse protects them.

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"Staggering failure of governance”

In South AFrica, I find it difficult to receive regularly updated updates on Covid-19.
Until this latest cycle of load shedding, Eskom’s app, EskomSePush, published daily updates on gross numbers: total infections, new infections, total deaths, new deaths….
Alas, load shedding alerts have coopted those updates.
Incongruous, perhaps, for a national power grid to publish Covid statistics but Eskom’s daily Covid updates were the easiest place to find gross numbers. More conventional avenues for stats – health dept, etc. – appear to update only when someone remembers to do so. That hit-or-miss quality could be disconcerting to “normal” people. To a control freak, 14,000 miles from home, locked down in someone else’s household with someone else’s domestic workers and someone else’s seven pampered mongrels, it triggers massive anxiety.
Ironically, to date, every upcoming load shedding event proclaimed on EskomSePush has failed to appear - electricity remains on.
Eskom sends out alerts prior to, immediately prior to, and simultaneous with shedding then … nada, zero, zilch, niks.

Tracking US Covid-19 Response – a state-by-state map of infection

News blues…

(Not so) Lone ranger …

or the Businessman’s Wedge

Click to enlarge.

(Not so) Lone Ranger 
Is what I call the “Businessman’s Wedge” a strategy of businessmen everywhere?
This picture shows Trump leading the sharp edge of a wedge with his entourage fanning out behind him. The stance aims to intimidate business rivals.
Here, Trump, finally masked, looks as if he and his gang aim to rob a bank.

You’d think President Donald Trump had just discovered a medical cure the way his campaign team figuratively fainted at his feet Saturday. But no, he was simply, finally wearing a face mask during a visit to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center as a COVID-19 safety measure — months after just about everybody else in the world.

In the White House and in Trump’s entourage, “You get made fun of, if you wear a mask…. There’s social pressure not to do it.”

Facing no threat of enforcement, the Trump campaign has continued to make its own rules on coronavirus protections, said the individuals, who requested anonymity to speak freely. For instance, staff have been told to wear masks outside the office, in case they’re spotted by reporters, but they’ve been instructed that it’s acceptable to remove them in the office, the individuals said, adding that staff also publicly joke about the risk of coronavirus and play down the pandemic’s threat. The individuals described an environment where campaign staff have been discouraged from telling colleagues whether they were exposed to the virus, particularly after a series of negative headlines about multiple campaign staff testing positive ahead of last month’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla. Instead, campaign staff have been encouraged by officials to quietly self-quarantine when they are thought to have come in contact with the virus.

***

Rare air…

(South African) Doctors report that “happy hypoxics” are showing up in numbers at clinics and hospitals – patients with oxygen saturation levels so low they are in danger, but who do not realise they are in the red zone.
“Usually a little bit of oxygen at a clinic can get them through. You can prevent complications that way,” says Dr Francesca Conradie, deputy director of the Clinical HIV Research Unit at Wits University, adding that “We are beginning to run short of oxygen in public hospitals and clinics.”
You don’t need ventilators for this stage of illness but can deliver oxygen through a mask or use high flow nasal oxygen, which has worked well in the Western Cape….
At clinics, the first port of call for eight in 10 people in Gauteng and Johannesburg who are sick, tanks of oxygen are running out.

***

New York Times columnist and author, Nicholas Kristoff writes,

One of the puzzles had been that even as coronavirus infections were rising over the last month, Covid-19 deaths were still dropping. President Trump bragged that this was because the United States was doing the right thing. Epidemiologists said that was simply because of lags: It often takes a month after infection for someone to die. They were right, for deaths are now swinging up again, up about 50 percent higher than they were a week earlier.
We may have 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in America by Election Day, and that’s by the undercount that we’re all using (the real total may be about 30,000 higher, based on “excess deaths” reported by local authorities). This toll reflects a staggering failure of governance, for the United States has 4 percent of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s deaths.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

A recent email update from the City of Alameda (where I live in California):

As of this morning, there are 121 cases of COVID-19 in the City of Alameda, up from 92 last week. Alameda County has 7,725 cases with 140 current hospitalizations and 148 deaths. The State of California has 304,297 cases and 6,851 deaths. The US continues to lead every other country in the world in cases and deaths with more than 3 million cases and 134,349 deaths. Across the world, the caseload increased by over 229,000 yesterday, with over 12.5 million cases and 561,311 deaths.

Now, that level of detail makes this control freak happy.

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Broken records

The United States broke another record for daily rates of confirmed infections - for the seventh time in 11 days.
New US cases surpass 68,000/day while the WHO reports 228,102 new cases.

The number of COVID-19 cases in South Africa has risen to 250,687 – more than a quarter of a million. Infections continue to surge around the country, including villages around here.

News blues…

Follow the money? Major US corporations and companies linked to Trump associates got business loans. Payroll Protection Program funds went, instead, to Trump pals and not to the protection of tax-paying, working people. Yet another case of Trump being Trump?

Republicans agree to work together to force Trump from office in November.  (8:36 mins)

***

The Lincoln Project, The MAGA Church.   (1.08 mins)
Sarah Cooper does:

• Trump on the 4th of July (4:14 mins)
• How to mask (0.58 mins)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

After three days of warnings about the impending once-a-decade weather system, it came … and it went! (Our immediate area got off lightly in comparison to the hail storms that hit close by.)

For the first time in a week, I ventured out for a quick walk around the neighborhood. By the time I arrived back home, daylight had turned to twilight and thunder drummed in the distance.
Soon, a smattering of hail the size of marbles fell, followed by sheets of rain.
I signed with relief: at least the rain would extinguish smoldering embers from fires that had raged last night.
I had been working on my laptop, my back to the picture window, when I’d heard rustling and cracking.
Alarmed, I wondered if my abuser had returned?
Instead, when I looked out the window, I saw walls of flame shooting high into the air.
Smoke-laden wind gusted, and flames danced as I dialed frantically to alert someone, anyone, that our house could ignite.
Where were the darned fire trucks and fire fighters?

The flames receed.

I reached our new security services providers who explained that the “fire brigade” was occupied with other fires - one in Mpophemeni and two more in the adjacent village. They’d attend to this fire as time allowed.

Frantic, I knew that if the tinder-dry trees surrounding the house ignited, the house could ignite.
I needed to “liberate” my mother.
For, somehow, she and her two domestic workers have evolved a convoluted night-time sequence that locks my mother and her seven pampered mongrels inside overnight and liberates them early next morning.
Anyone paying attention to the details would realize that the complicated mass of keys and locks and procedures involved means that my mother cannot quickly evacuate the building in an emergency. She forgets she has a set of keys and she awaits the workers to unlock the doors.
I’ve worried about and tried to alert her to the dangers.
I successfully addressed her habit of lighting a candle at night by purchasing and placing a small fire extinguisher next to her bed.
But a small extinguisher cannot handle a conflagration. “Besides,” she’d laughed, “I can’t remember how to use it.”
Naturally, she pooh-poohs my concerns.

As the fire raged outside, I roused one domestic worker and we unlocked my mother’s doors and burglar guards.
Tellingly, my mother, surrounded by dogs and happily watching TV, had been blissfully unaware of the fire. This, even as she watched the security monitor display billowing smoke. She’d judged it fog.

After the flames receded, we locked up my mother and her dogs, again … and went to bed.
Takeaways?
1) I’ve lived away for so long, I’d forgotten that “veld fires” are a feature of South African winters, indeed, burning is part of Africa’s natural ecology. (As a child growing up in a rural area, I’d loved joining informal firefighting crews armed with wet sacks to beat back flames.)
2) I’ve become accustomed to life in California where fire trucks and fire fighters are the solution to fires.
3) “veld” and brush fires are a far cry from the infamous climate-change-related wildfires that, over the past decade, have burned hundreds of thousands of acres of rural California.
4) And, this household needs a plan everyone can buy into that ensures my mother is safe at night – and easily liberated.

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