Corona, Ethiopia, Website

Hello subscribers!

You may be wondering why I am featuring the photo above again (it already was the featured photo for this post last March and it was also part of the post DT & Spheres). Well, it’s about the coronavirus pandemic again. For one thing, Austria, where I live these days (though I’m not Austrian), announced that as of tomorrow it’s going into another full lockdown for everybody, not just the unvaccinated (as had already been the case for a week or so). The rise in case figures is so steep that this drastic measure seems to have been unavoidable. Well, it could probably have been avoided if Austria didn’t have the lowest vaccination rate in Western Europe at just around 65% or so of the population (compare that to Portugal, which has a nearly 90% vaccination rate and correspondingly very low case numbers). I just hope that the desired effect of bringing the figures down (especially for hospitalizations) can be achieved … and that by the time I’m supposed to be flying to England for Christmas the lockdown and relevant travel restrictions will have been lifted again.
  

The second reason for reposting that photo, of an orthopaedic rubber ball that looks a bit like a coronavirus, is that I also had a personal Covid scare. Last Sunday I went to a house party, where twelve adults and five small children were present – the largest private gathering I’d been to since the beginning of the pandemic, as it turned out. The adults were all vaccinated and had a fresh negative test result, but of the kids only one was vaccinated. Then on Tuesday we were notified that one of the adults had tested positive. That came as a bit of a shock, especially since I am in a risk group and hence really want to avoid contracting Covid, and we both also developed mild symptoms. So we stayed home and did another test – at least here in Vienna they are still free and get processed quite quickly. After a good ten anxious hours the relief came: test negative. My wife still has some symptoms, but at least we now know it’s probably just a common cold and not Covid. The person who had tested positive has in the meantime also been tested again and the result was negative. So either it was a false positive the time before, or, as the authorities apparently suggested to him, he may have had the virus at just about enough of a level to be detected, but that, thanks to the vaccination, his body was able to get rid of the infection quickly.

Anyway, I’m taking this incident as a wake-up call – not to get complacent and negligent about the situation. I’ll avoid larger indoor gatherings for now. And I’ve just booked an appointment for my booster jab. For tomorrow. That date is just under six months since my second vaccination, but the city of Vienna opened up booster shots for all even after four months now. Before I had nominally been eligible from 5 December, now I’m getting it a couple of weeks earlier. That way I should be as fully protected as can be by the time Christmas comes, whether in the UK or again in lockdown at home.
  

All this is really “First World problems”, however. In other parts of the world things are far worse in many different ways. And this includes Ethiopia, which has sadly featured on the DT blog and its newsletters repeatedly over the past 12 months for all the wrong reasons. The brutal civil war in the north of the country is continuing, more fronts are opening up, and the humanitarian crisis, famine included, that this has caused is probably the worst in the world right now (see e.g. this recent article).
  

Not much else is to report. This past week I haven’t uploaded any new blog posts, but work on my main website continued. Currently I’m still working on Tallinn for which I have three new chapter drafts, and another one is in the making. But I haven’t uploaded any of those yet because they are thematically interlinked and hence should all go up at the same time. That’ll be in the next few days. I’ll report in next Sunday’s newsletter.
  

So much for this time.

Have as good a week as is possible under the circumstances – and try to stay safe!

Best,

Peter