Desperation

News blues

Nations turning to D.C. lobbyists to get the tools they need to fight the pandemic? Global health officials say that’s all that’s wrong with the fight against Covid.
Asia Russell, executive director of the international advocacy group Health Global Access Project said, “Lobbyists are being used to help desperate countries get a better place in line for life saving commodities that never should have been rationed in the first place.” Read more >> 

***

The first country to really get hit by omicron is South Africa.
Before the new variant took off last month, coronavirus cases there were low – only several hundred per day in mid November.
But by early December, the tally of daily infections had shot up to more than 4,500 — and genomic sequencing shows that omicron is to blame.
What's more, the variant quickly swept through all regions of South Africa – and has now shown up in about 60 additional countries.
Omicron hasn't yet triggered a global wave, but many scientists who are tracking its rapid spread believe it's only a matter of time.
The reason for their concern? >> 

***

Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm correctly predicted the Delta surge and Covid-19 death totals. Here he discusses the Omicron variant and what he thinks is next for the US in the pandemic >> 

***

Barring a miracle, by tomorrow the US will have reached more than 800,000 dead to coronavirus since the start of the pandemic.
Best advice? Get your first, second or third (“booster”) shot ASAP.  

(Eight more days before I’m eligible for my after-6-month booster.)

Healthy planet, anyone?

Twenty collections of twenty (sobering) photos of the week since July 2021 >> 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Rain in the SF Bay area! Forecast to rain off and on for the next five days. Yay We need it!
Alas, rain accompanied by temperatures into the low 40s and upper 30s. That’s cold for us Bay Area residents. But to borrow a phrase from the Rolling Stones, "You can’t always get what you want" >>  (7:35 mins)

Who knew?

Who knew, this time last year – or the previous year - that Covid-19 would still control our daily lives?
Yet here we are.

News blues

Clarity of communication has not been a feature of this pandemic. Confusion and mixed messaging rules! Spotty information about Omicron continues this pattern. One day we hear Omicron is more transmissible but its effects less dire than the Delta variant. Next day we hear that “it’s too soon to tell…”. A sampling of recent information to sift through:

• “COVID cases and deaths are on the rise throughout the U.S., even before the Omicron variant takes hold"
• “The Omicron variant can likely outcompete Delta — and that could worsen the U.S. COVID epidemic. Omicron is picking up speed in Europe, which has often served as a preview of what's headed the U.S.’s way. It’s an early sign that the already bleak situation here may get worse"
• “Ahead of Omicron, COVID hospitalizations are rising in 37 of 50 states, including several with above-average vaccination rates…and starting to climb in nearly half of the other 13 states, signaling that hospitalizations may soon follow. …Many Americans remain vulnerable to the still-surging Delta variant as the holiday season ramps up and Delta’s heavily mutated and perhaps even faster-spreading successor, Omicron, looms on the horizon.” 
• According to the latest data from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Omicron is projected to become the dominant variant in the UK by mid-December, based on current trends, while there could be more than a million infections by the end of this month – a tally that will be dominated by Omicron. Moreover, two doses of Covid vaccine offer less protection against symptomatic infection with Omicron than with Delta, with a lower level of protection seen against the new variant even after a booster jab. 
• The US state of Michigan had more patients hospitalized for Covid-19 than ever before – a jump of 88% in the past month.
  Jim Dover, president and CEO of Sparrow Health System, said, "We have more patients than we've ever had at any point, and we're seeing more people die at a rate we've never seen die before…. Since January, we've had about 289 deaths; 75% are unvaccinated people. And the very few (vaccinated people) who passed away all were more than 6 months out from their shot. So we've not had a single person who has had a booster shot die from Covid."

More ominous news: 

MSNBC “The 11th Hour” news anchor Brian Williams retired this week and, before signing off, warned his audience - average total audience of 1.6 million viewers - about the “darkness” enveloping America.

Williams revealed that his “biggest worry” as he jumped “without a net into the great unknown” was “for my country,” which in 2021 became “unrecognizable to those who came before us and fought to protect it.”
The “darkness of the edge of town has spread to the main roads and highways and neighborhoods… It’s now at the local bar, and the bowling alley, at the school board and the grocery store. And it must be acknowledged and answered for.”
“Grown men and women who swore an oath to our Constitution, elected by their constituents possessing the kinds of college degrees I could only dream of, have decided to join the mob and become something they are not while hoping we somehow forget who they were,” he continued. “They’ve decided to burn it all down ― with us inside,” he said. “That should scare you to no end as much as it scares an aging volunteer fireman.”

Indeed. When the s*** hits the fan, don’t say Republican extremists didn’t warn the rest of us… 
Question is, will We the People heed the warnings and get involved? Or will we go shopping, business as usual?

 

The Lincoln Project:

Protect America  (0:55 mins)

Healthy planet, anyone?

Consider the spider, how it balloons - or doesn’t….
The ubiquitous spider’s talents on display although few humans understand those talents.

It is commonly believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. But that doesn’t entirely make sense, especially because spiders balloon only during light winds. Spiders don’t shoot silk from their abdomens, and it seems unlikely that such gentle breezes could be strong enough to yank the threads out—let alone to carry the largest species aloft, or to generate the high accelerations of arachnid takeoff. Darwin himself found the rapidity of the spiders’ flight to be “quite unaccountable” and its cause to be “inexplicable.”
But Erica Morley and Daniel Robert have an explanation. The duo, who work at the University of Bristol, has shown that spiders can sense Earth’s electric field, and use it to launch themselves into the air.

Read more >> Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Hmmm, social distancing and winter present unexpected challenges: feelings of isolation and lack of motivation (tinged with depression?)
Always anti-shopping, I stick close to home. That isolation is wearying. I gotta get out more but ….
Moreover, temperatures are dropping and fewer hours of daylight:
Today, the sun rose 7:14am and will set at 4:50pm
Eleven more days to California’s winter solstice.

Year 3 of the Covid Era

December 12, 2019: a cluster of patients in Wuhan, China’s Hubei Providence, begin to experience shortness of breath and fever.
Early 2020, after the December 2019 outbreak, the World Health Organization identified a new type of coronavirus: SARS-CoV-2. 

SARS-CoV-2, triggering what doctors call a respiratory tract infection, quickly spread around the world.

CDC Timeline for Covid, from 2019 to present 

Below, today’s Covid numbers compared to numbers this time last year : 

Worldwide (Map) 
December 9, 2021 – 268,100,000 confirmed infections; 5,283,715 deaths
December 10, 2020 – 68,849,000 confirmed infections; 1,568,750 deaths
Total doses of vaccine administered: 8,246,30,377

US (Map) 
December 9, 2021 – 49,547,400 confirmed infections; 793,350 deaths
December 10, 2020 – 15,385,00 confirmed infections; 289,500 deaths

SA (Coronavirus portal) 
December 9, 2021 – 3,071,100 confirmed infections; 90,100 deaths
December 10, 2020 – 829,600 confirmed infections; 22,580 deaths

News blues

SA passes grim Covid-19 milestone as 90,000 official deaths are recorded. SA's NICD reported this week that the official death toll was 90,002 after the latest data was released by the national health department. 
We don’t know how severe Omicron is, but we do know it’s spreading very fast.

If you’re in the mood for detail, WHO obliges with a technical brief, “Enhancing Readiness for Omicron (B.1.1.529).” This reviews priority actions and “main uncertainties” for member states, including:

(1) how transmissible the variant is and whether any increases are related to immune escape, intrinsic increased transmissibility, or both; (2) how well vaccines protect against infection, transmission, clinical disease of different degrees of severity and death; and (3) does the variant present with a different severity profile. Public health advice is based on current information and will be tailored as more evidence emerges around those key questions.

Download the pdf (8 pages) >> 

The Lincoln Project:
Last week in the Republican Party  (1:45 mins)
Road map  (0:26 mins)
Meidas Touch: Politics Girl  (2:43 mins)
Want more Politics Girl? Check her out >> (1:22 mins)

Healthy planet, anyone?

Life: a force that adapts and evolves. Take, as example, the many coastal species living miles from their usual habitats finding affordable housing on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, halfway between the coast of California and Hawaii.

Plants and animals, including anemones, tiny marine bugs, molluscs and crabs, found on 90% of the [Patch] debris.
[A recent study] examined plastic items more than 5cm (2in) in diameter gathered from a gyre - an area where circulating currents cause floating debris to accumulate - in the Pacific.

Neopelagic communities are composed of pelagic species, evolved to live on floating marine substrates and marine animals, and coastal species, once assumed incapable of surviving long periods of time on the high seas. The emergence of a persistent neopelagic community in the open ocean is due to the vast supply of durable and highly buoyant plastic pollution as suitable habitat for both pelagic and coastal rafting species. Examples of pelagic rafting species are: (a) gooseneck barnacle Lepas anatifera,(b) flotsam crab Planes major, and (c) bryozoan Jellyella tuberculata. Examples of coastal rafting species commonly found on floating plastic debris on the high seas include: (d) podded hydroid Aglaophenia pluma,(e) Asian anemones Anthopleura sp. , and (f) amphipod Stenothoe gallensis.
Illustrated by © 2021 Alex Boersma.

Lead researcher Dr Linsey Haram, who carried out the work at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre, said: "Plastics are more permanent than many of the natural debris that you previously have seen in the open ocean. They're creating a more permanent habitat in this area."

[The downside?] Scientists are concerned that plastic may help transport invasive species.

…
The world has at least five plastic-infested gyres. This one is thought to hold the most floating plastic - an estimated 79,000 tonnes in a region of more than 610,000 square miles (1.6m sq km).
"All sorts of stuff ends up out there," said Dr Haram. "It's not an island of plastic, but there's definitely a large amount of plastic corralled there."
Much of that is micro-plastic is very difficult to see with the naked eye. But there are also larger items, including abandoned fishing nets, buoys and even vessels that have been floating in the gyre since the Japanese tsunami in 2011.
The researchers, who reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications,  initially embarked on the investigation following that devastating tsunami. The disaster caused tonnes of debris to be ejected into the Pacific ocean, and hundreds of coastal Japanese marine species were found alive on items that landed on the shores of the North American Pacific coast and the Hawaiian Islands. 

Read more >> 
What can you do? It’s depressing to see the hows and whys of our unique planet’s slow succumbing to humans’ abuse via refusal to address and end the reign of plastics, fossil fuels, manufacture of toxics, etc. One can easily feel disempowered by the enormous complexity and apparent lack of effective action. Yet, We the People can take small steps to address our complicity. Here’s one small swap that can make a difference: Switch to bar soap for… everything 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

During my daily walk I noticed a familiar tree blossom. Close attention revealed a coral tree, native to SA and KZN. 

I know coral trees grow in the hotter Los Angeles, but I’ve not seen such a large specimen in my San Francisco Bay Area town. 

In KZN, coral trees blossom after leaves fall, bare limbs acting as frames for spectacular displays. This local tree displays both leaves and blossoms simultaneously. 

Turns out coral trees – Erythrina  with approximately 112 different species – also are found in Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, Asia, Australia, and Hawaii.

***

Here, days are colder and daylight shorter (sun rose at 7:13am today and will set at 4:49pm). Time to remember KZN’s summer birds:

Wooly necked stork dries its wings.

Masked bishop.
Photos (c) S.Galleymore

Socially distanced

News blues

Update on Omicron in US and in SA  (7:00 mins)
Dr Salim Abdool Karim, epidemiologist and former co-chair of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on Covid-19, speaks to the latest developments in the data regarding the Omicron variant's spread in South Africa >>  (1:28 mins)

 
An analysis by NPR shows  that since the vaccine rollout, US counties that voted heavily for Donald Trump have had more than twice the COVID mortality rates of those that voted for Joe Biden. 

Editorial comment: Gosh! How surprising! Hmmm, maybe residents should try vaccine instead of cultish ideology?

Healthy planet, anyone?

Another foray into the life and times of bees: Honeybees survived for weeks under volcano ash after Canary Islands eruption: For roughly 50 days, thousands of honeybees sealed themselves in their hives, away from deadly gas, and feasted on honey. To humans this “is a very empowering story,” To bees? It’s business as usual. Eating honey, after all, is why bees make honey.  

Editorial comment: Hmmm, maybe humans could learn from bees to take better care of ourselves and our planet. Instead, we gamble when the stakes clearly are beyond our capacity to handle the outcomes – as in ignoring that:

Coal ash, an umbrella term for the residue that’s left over when utilities burn coal, one of the United States’ largest kinds of industrial waste. Coal ash contains metals — including lead, mercury, chromium, selenium, cadmium and arsenic — that never biodegrade.
…John Howard, who lives in Mobile County and has been fishing in southern Alabama for decades, said, “We’ve got an A-bomb up the river. It’s just waiting to happen.” Past environmental calamity spills include immediate fallout with ash blanketing up to 400 acres, killing hundreds of fish, damaging more than a dozen homes and polluting nearby waterways. That clean-up took years and cost more than $1 billion.

Read more >> 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Cold outside today so I entertain myself with culinary experimentation.
Despite being more interested in simplicity than in owing more kitchen gadgets, I fell in love with a friend’s air fryer. After many delicious and easy to make meals made with said air fryer, I splurged and purchased my own. The outcome? My love life has expanded: I love my own small, easy to use air fryer, perhaps more than I loved his air fryer.
My air frying learning curve includes making my own falafel – a dish I never made at home in the past due to antipathy toward frying food. Now? Delicious falafel that involves no frying comes out of the gadget.

Today’s culinary experimentation: homemade potato cakes made from “real” potatoes – Yukon Golds (potato cakes aka aloo tikki). I’ll freeze most and pull them out when I make my easy version of chole aloo tikki chaat.
I also made cilantro pesto and tzatziki.

Perhaps it’s the holiday season (SA dubs it the “festive season”) or perhaps the cold weather, but experimental cooking is on my daily agenda. 

After not making a cheese cake in decades, last week I made my version of cheese cake that uses plain yogurt instead of sour cream and includes a layer of lemon curd.
Roll on, festive season!

***

Working to ameliorate the isolation of social distancing, I became obsessed over tracking my cell phone’s battery usage.  

The reward of an ISP contract is a cell phone battery that last longer, sometimes twice as long, than a phone not logged onto a private wireless network.

Battery charge durations illustrated.
(Left) 2 short durations. (Right) 1 long - + 24 hour - duration.

With Covid’s social distancing keeping me home, I “twiddle my thumbs” making assorted “designs” with battery charging colors. Shown above, left, design created with short charge cycle pre-ISP contract - compared, right, to long charge post-ISP contract.
I pray the ISP contract relieves me of this obsession with battery charging .

Silver linings

News blues

Update on Omicron in US and in SA (7:00 mins)

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Reality check for naïve, out-of-touch me! Or the silver lining: expect the unexpected - and love the results.
Yesterday, I assumed my “free” TV box offered “free” access to news.  Today, with “assume” having made an ass out of me, I’m older and wiser – and more satisfied. While I’ve NO free access to TV news (comes only with a subscription that I’ve no intention of purchasing) I discovered something more generative, less demanding and anxiety-provoking, more soothing and relaxing, and that also demands less fraught attention than the news. I’ve discovered free music – and lots of it.
I log onto YouTube (free) and, using the voice activated remote, I search for, say, “acoustic blues,” and I’m served hours of astonishingly terrific music and film footage from way back – y’know, the 60s: young Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter. Way, way better than today’s news.
Bring on the music.

***

A sunset walk along the beach presented:

Night heron

Stilt

Greater and Lesser Egrets with coots

Brown pelicans' feeding frenzy.

King tides... the ebb tide

All photos (c) S. Galleymore

Downtime

The weekend downtime from Covid news. Instead, enjoy The Lincoln Project’s Work  (0:55 mins)

Healthy planet, anyone?

Between an ideal and an oil can? After shabby treatment during which I was refused a refund for the portion of my airfare impacted by flights cancelled due to Covid lockdown in SA, I cannot bring myself to purchase another long-haul flight with FlyUs or British Air. Alas, British Air is taking steps at least to try to address pollution associated with air travel. (Hmmm, I feel a dilemma of principle coming on.) 

British Airways has signed a deal for aircraft fuel made from recycled cooking oils and other household waste to be produced at scale in the UK and to be in use as early as 2022 to help power its flights….[purchasing] thousands of tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which it said would add up to the equivalent of 700 transatlantic flights on a Boeing 787 with net zero carbon emissions.
BA has committed to power 10% of its flights with SAFs by 2030, and has forged partnerships with US fuel suppliers as well as invested in a future waste-to-fuel plant to be constructed in the north-east of England.

Read more >> 

On the plastics’ front: 

Companies rethink recycling as costs increase

For retailers and shipping companies, the holiday season is the time for delivery. All those millions of tons of cardboard boxes will need to be recycled, along with the plastic and glass bottles and metals that make up half of the 292 million tons of waste we produce each year. The mountain of waste we generate has prompted new ways to think about how we recycle – and who pays for it. Read more >> 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

Television? Not a fan. Not a fan of a TV blaring in my living space. Not a fan of being forced to watch TV ads (ever listen to the “fine print” accompanying the many, many of the ads on American that push prescription drugs?). Not a fan of fiddling with controls, remote or not. 

However....

I am a fan of the Internet. And my recent purchase of a contract for Internet came with a “free” TV “box” and “free” access to “free” TV programs via the Internet. 

I’d placed this box in storage, expecting it to live there for the duration of the ISP's contact.
Truth is stranger than fiction: that still packaged TV box began to niggle. I like to watch TV news…and "free" TV comes with the contract... and I'm not forced into buying any more gear, cables, or "boxes"....
On an off chance  and never expecting success, I suggested a friend check the thrift stores in his area for a small, cheap TV. (This friend owns a large TV with all the bells and whistles. He has patience with and understands the intricacies of television and television set up, including how to use a remote.) Amazingly, he found a small TV – at about 22 inches it’s perfect for me – that cost $25, discounted down to $18. Great balls of fire! 

Change is afoot! I last owned a TV in the 20th century, before the move to cable, the kind of TV that required aerials and rabbit ears. 

Could this TV, now resident in my home, signal a shift in how I perceive the half of me that’s American?
The other half. The half of me that is not American is floored by the headline, “Over 100 Michigan School Districts Closed Due to Threats After Deadly Shooting. More than 60 schools closed earlier in the week due to copycat threats.”
Say what?
Surely, no sane country would normalize the day-to-day reality of children (and adults) killing children in schools. Yet the US has done just that.
How many shootings in 2021? “… at least 144 incidents of gunfire on school grounds, resulting in 28 deaths and 86 injuries nationally." 
With a TV in my house and in my life, I’ll regularly confront the insanity that is life in contemporary America. Can I survive it? Time to buckle up for a wild ride.

***

This sunlit tree caught my attention as I sat on the patio of a local taqueria. 

Fiat lux!

Squirrely

News blues

Another week, another variant. This one, Omicron, seems to carry higher Covid reinfection risk. Scientists warn of higher rate of repeat infections but say vaccines appear to protect against serious illness.

With the World Health Organization warning that the Omicron variant of the coronavirus poses a "very high" global risk  - it appears to spread more easily and might resist vaccines and immunity in people who were infected with previous strains – the variant arrives in the US. New York and Hawaii are the latest to announce infections, and officials in both states said there is evidence of “community spread.” Cases have also been detected in California, Minnesota, Colorado, New York, and Hawaii. The Minnesota patient recently attended a New York City convention that drew thousands of people. 

Read more >> 
Meanwhile,

…Omicron’s effect on the course of the pandemic will be determined by three factors: its transmissibility; the degree to which it evades our existing immune defenses; and its virulence, or the severity of the disease that it causes. If Omicron turns out to jump between hosts with ease, blow past our neutralizing antibodies, and cause unusually dangerous complications, we’ll all be in deep trouble. But it could also turn out to do a lot of other things, with more subtle implications. If Omicron ends up being super contagious, for example, but mild in its symptoms, that might even be a good thing.
At this point, living with the coronavirus for years to come is all but inevitable. In many countries that have had vaccines in hand for the better part of a year, inoculation rates still aren’t close to 100 percent. Even if every human on Earth gained a degree of immunity from vaccination or infection, the virus could retreat into its many animal hosts, only to reenter the human population in a slightly different form. “There’s no reasonable person, I think, in public health now who thinks that eradication or elimination or having zero COVID is a realistic goal,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Read “Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios” >> 

Healthy planet, anyone?

Nurdles: the worst toxic waste you’ve probably never heard of: Billions of tiny plastic pellets – “nurdles,” a colloquial term for “pre-production plastic pellets” – a toxic waste that floats in the ocean, cause as much damage as oil spills. Nurdles, however, are still not classified as hazardous 

…the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets - - nurdles – in May 2021, have been washing up in their billions along hundreds of miles of the Sri Lanka’s coastline, and are expected to make landfall across Indian Ocean coastlines from Indonesia and Malaysia to Somalia. In some places they are up to 2 metres deep. They have been found in the bodies of dead dolphins and the mouths of fish. About 1,680 tonnes of nurdles were released into the ocean. It is the largest plastic spill in history, according to the UN report.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

With the Biden administration's new, stricter Covid-19 testing requirements for all travelers taking effect this coming Monday, my return to South Africa in December looks less and less likely. Moreover, while I am a US citizen and could – legally and medically – return, at least in theory, reality suggests flights may not be available. I simply cannot afford to be locked down in South Africa or locked out from the US, for months again.
This means many more photos of amazing critters as I visit the beach near my California home. Not a bad scenario. A look at today’s denizens welcomes great egrets - Ardea alba. Adult great egrets range in size from 37 to 41 inches in length and have a wingspan of 51 inches. Moreover, the elegance!

 

All photos (c) S. Galleymore

Ground squirrels – never before mentioned here in a post - are ubiquitous along the beach and on the lawns. Members of the squirrel family of rodents - Sciuridae – they burrow into the ground rather than nest trees. Western gray squirrels – tree critters - live in the park's oak, cedar, and sycamore trees, too. Indeed, many visit my patio to plant nuts, seeds, and acorns in pots. 

Viva creatures of the air and the earth!