March 29, 2024

Chapter 5 – Life in times of Corona – The new and newer normal

We´re currently on the back side of what might be termed the second wave in central Europe. The numbers are slowly going down but I have an uneasy feeling when looking at data concerning the proportion of mutated forms of the corona virus. These are now detectable in data, for example, from the southwest federal state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany and seem to be growing exponentially „under the cover“ of total current numbers.

Recipe for Bor-Jine

This recipe is a new variant of an old family favourite which was originally a lamb tajine which I have modified in various steps into a veggie tajine using fried aubergine to replace lamb. This worked surprisingly well taste-wise and has the additional advantage of dramatically reducing the cost as lamb is quite expensive here.

Chapter 5 – Update on various topics

Here is a quick update on various topics that I´ve mentioned recently, I´ve divided them up into paragraphs. Hopefully something interesting in here for any readers.

Challenges for “new normal” life – part one

Today, I got an email from my oldest daughter´s school with advice for parents of school children about how school might be restarted after the Corona “break”. Among various guidelines was a line which caught my attention along the lines of “the mix of regular school attendance and learning in a home based situation can be expected to last well into the next school year”. It was well hidden amongst guidelines and advice for travel to and from school and what to do and not to do when in school.

Living in the Corona Era

Flicking through today´s news items I stumbled upon several short articles dealing with the issue of immunity after SARS-Cov-2 infection. There is certainly no current consensus on the issue and, at the current time, no hard data to prove things one way or the other. This made me think about possible scenarios after the current first wave of infections. If the immunity that those who have been infected develop lapses within a year or two then we may well enter into a cycle of waves of infections, each modulated by the levels of social distancing and the numbers of infections in the region. This would imply that we might need to significantly reduce the density of interaction and concentrations of people in all areas of our lives.

The Corona crisis and a view forwards

The world is undoubtedly in the grip of a major current crisis in April 2020. The major current crisis is the coronavirus crisis and it has thrust itself dramatically ahead of other ongoing crises such as the climate crisis and the inequality crisis to name but two. After detection of this new threat to global public health and its rapid expansion across the world we are now in a semi-lockdown situation. Things that we have taken for granted in recent years such as freedom of travel, accessibility of services and goods and functional supply chains have ceased to be reliable or are currently not available.

About the last SARS outbreak in 2003

I have collected some interesting files about the last SARS outbreak in 2003 and about the family of Coronaviruses. I have put them all in pdf format for ease of reading, they should all be readable in full-page format.

Rueful Britannia

The day had been a long time coming, there had been ups and downs as in all long relationships, finally, Brit had said she was going. Some had said it had always been a marriage of convenience, others said they´d seen sparkles of real love at times, several aged relatives mumbled that they were just too different.