Swiss Walks

Today is the day that Switzerland and Denmark decided to ignore the pandemic. They and other European countries have decided to lift quarantines, remove the need to work remotely and other such safety measures. Health indicators shows that there is a consistent rise in new cases in Switzerland and Denmark. They say it’s over but the graphs and data show that it is not.

https://twitter.com/EckerleIsabella/status/1488876782996631553

Switzerland says that since 90 percent of the population has been exposed to the virus there is no need to worry anymore. Several governments have just decided to wash their hands of the pandemic. This moment is insane. It makes no rational sense to just decide that a pandemic is over like this. I think it will come back to haunt these leaders. I want them to be held responsible for their decisions, several months or years down the line.

This week we have the pandemic Groundhog Day and this is the time when we will see if the Sisyphean life continues. Most of Europe is reopening, and although for those who have not read broadly about the pandemic rejoice, others do not. By deciding to reopen now, it is almost certain that next winter will be a pandemic one.

This is the graph for new cases for today. This is the context in which Switzerland is considering the reopening of society.

This speech reminds us that English democracy is not gone, that there are moral people still around, and that we need to get the current Tory government out of power and go back to having leadership worthy of respect.

When you are at events you listen to speech after speech, and they meld into each other. Occasionally you hear speeches that stand out and are worth sharing. This is one of them. It reflects values that have recently been lost in several countries. We need to revert to good moral values. Pandemics are a marathon, not a sprint.

Some of us are confined by freedom. By this I mean that as society is opened up, as people are told that they don’t need to wear masks, that they don’t need to self-isolate and that they don’t need to show covid passes, so the freedom of others is taken away. During a pandemic there are two types of people. Those that hear the word pandemic and think “I need to self-isolate, wear a mask, and vaccinate.” and the others who think “Why should I do what the state tells me to do? I am my own person.”

Although the name of this blog post is bizarre it is inspired by the site of a fountain with a big block of ice, serving as a mirror to the tree, and sun, in front of me. The weather is still nicer, more springlike than it has been. More people are out on bikes cycling together. They are taking advantage of the good weather. In theory we could have rain in the next few days but the likelihood, as usual, is very low. An app said that it could be 90 percent certain, but I think it is 100 percent unlikely.

Today I went for a walk and it felt warm enough for me to skip on wearing a layer. It was warm, around six degrees, and sunny. It felt like Spring, and it feels as though cycling could almost be considered. The cycling season is nice. I speak about cycling because I think that this year, like the last two, will be spent in self-isolation until we have zero new cases for two weeks in a row.

For the first one hundred days of the pandemic it felt long but we had a hope, and the impression that respective governments were working to eradicate the pandemic so that we could resume normal life. Eventually though people against lockdowns, and against other measures began to be heard and so societies around the world reopened, and with the reopening of society so the virus flared up again. In the French part of Switzerland society is opening up despite half of people tested for covid testing positive, and despite knowing that the numbers are climbing by around 30 percent per week.

I went from the iPhone SE to the iPhone 8 plus to the iPhone SE (2020) because the 2016 iPhone was an excellent low budget iphone that did everything you needed, in a small package. I switched to the iPhone 8 Plus purely to use the bigger phone screen with a drone. If you can see what you’re doing then a big screen is worthwhile. Eventually I crashed the drone and the need for such a large screen degraded, and that’s why I eventually settled for the iPhone SE(2020).

Today was a different to recent days because we spent it within the clouds, rather than beneath, or above them. It is hard to be above the clouds when you are near lake level. SRF has two nice time lapses of clouds flowing over a mountain as if it was water, or dry ice. Choose the one you prefer.

https://twitter.com/srfmeteo/status/1486011638956314626

It is estimated that a tenth of the Swiss population could be sick with covid-19 at the moment. If a tenth of those people had long covid then Switzerland is faced with 87,000 people with long Covid.

Yesterday I read that we will have sun for at least a few more weeks due to a high pressure system over this part of Europe and this afternoon I read that it is snowing in Greece. Normally, out of pandemic I would love sunny days because it would mean climbing, cycling, hiking and more. During a pandemic it means solitary mud while avoiding being run over by cars, walking through the mud to avoid couples, and wearing a mask when you have to be close to others.