Sometimes you drive home on the scooter and you look up at the sky and you think “When I get out of this village I’m going to stop by the side of the road and I’m going to take a picture of the clouds because they’re photogenic.
The reason for them being photogenic today is that they were rippled like the sea, rather than fluffy. Those ripples make you think of the sand underwater by the beach.
It’s nice to see a sky that looks different than usual.
After so many hours spent walking the same landscape day after day you spend more and more time noticing the details. In so doing you notice the sky, you see the fields change, and the crops mature, from a muddy field to a field at full maturity, before being ready to be harvested, and harvested.
For months we had very few clouds. Finally the sky is worth looking at, once more.
Today someone something to the effect “If I go from here to there it will take me two and a half hours so it would require a car.” That’s what I have been saying for years. That’s one of the reasons for which having a sporty life, during the pandemic, is not possible, or at least requires a much bigger commitment.
Summer sporting activities are vulnerable because in times of pandemics car sharing is no longer possible, and is no longer advisable. If you’re in a car for an hour or two each way then the mask will not protect you effectively, especially if the windows are closed. Trains used to have windows that you could open. Now that they don’t their allure is diminished during such times.
The problem, during this pandemic, has been the same for months now. We don’t know where people were when they were exposed so we don’t know what locations are safe, and which locations are not. We’re stuck in limbo. We might have been safe for the entire pandemic, never being within a kilometre of the virus, but we have no way of knowing.
With fourty infections during the last two days is Switzerland back to Pre-21st of June numbers or is the lull simply because those who were most likely to be infected are now on holiday? Will we see a big increase in the number of cases shortly?
As long as that insecurity lasts summer socialising through sports is less appealing. People have also migrated to using Facebook to plan activities and a consequence of this is that if you want to dump Facebook, you have to be creative about finding other groups, and websites, to find activities to participate in.
Imagine an app like Happn or SwissCovid but for sports. That would be really useful. You would not have to spend hours on social networks, looking for opportunities and you would not have to be active about finding things. It would run in the background and if you spend enough time it could give you more info.
It’s like the flyby function on Strava. You go for a ride and you can see who the other cyclists were, that you crossed paths with. In theory, you can then start to plan group activities. We need apps to help us meet new people who live close by so that we can stop relying on cars, public transport, and social media websites.
As the pandemic has reset how we think of time and space we need to rethink how we use modern technology to connect with others. Do we really need to rely on American Social networks to connect with people in Europe? Do we really need to be so centralised?
With Apple Login it would be interesting to create apps that allow us to connect with others, without relying on websites with dubious moralities. With my learning of Ruby On Rails, PHP, MySQL, PHP and more, the opportunity to create such a service is growing.
2020 – The Golden Opportunity to be a Recluse. If you’ve ever wanted a reason not to be social then open society’s behaviour, in regards to the COVID-19 virus, has provided us with a fantastic opportunity to enjoy being reclusive.
During a normal Spring and Summer I would be driving to the mountains to hike, climb and enjoy via ferrata with people but this year those plans have been destroyed. This year we can’t share the same room as others to sleep. We can’t even eat within two meters of other people.
There are no handshakes, no hugs and no “bises”. This year if you live alone you’re without physical contact. This year, the more solitary you like to be, the stronger the appeal of such a year.
In a normal year if you were single or below a certain age you’d be pressured to go out and be social, rather than staying at home to work on projects, read books or otherwise be solitary. This year there is no pressure to go out on Thursday and Friday night, and there is no pressure to go out to do group activities during the weekend.
With its single minded desire to reopen too early society has destroyed any chance of a normal summer being possible. Until the 21st of June it looked as if Switzerland was three or four weeks away from the pandemic being over, or at least wonderfully under control. There was a brief window with just 10-20 infections a day.
Speaking as an idealist I believe that we were so close to Switzerland getting to tens of new cases a day but recently the seven-day average is back to 100 cases a day.
One of the silver linings is that the number of ventilated people declined to zero for several days, the number of intensive hospital cases is staying low and finally, that the number of regular COVID-19 patients was in decline, until two days ago.
At its maxium number of active infections Switzerland was at 98 percent of ICU capacity. Two more percent and triage would have been required.
Depending on whether you work for the airport or think as an environmentalist Geneva airport expects to be at 19 percent of capacity this summer, due to so few people travelling at the moment. It’s great for the environment, but a shame for jobs.
Societal Self Harm
Speaking from a strictly theoretical point of view we have centuries of pandemics to look back on. We have books such as La Peste by Camus, to turn back to. In theory, we know what to do in the case of pandemics, and how to avoid them. We also know how to control them.
We know that in Medieval times villages would shut down to the outside world for weeks or months at a time. We know that ships were quarantined offshore. In some cases, places of infection were marked.
As we watch the current pandemic we get the impression that lessons were never learned. We get the impression that people never studied plagues and other epidemics and pandemics. We get the impression that people are flying blind. This is a shame.
It’s a shame because we are in the 21st century. We live in an age where we have thousands of hours of documentaries about plagues, disease and epidemics. We live in an age where people can get advice and information straight from medical health professionals. We live in an age where everything can be ordered online. We live in an age where being trapped at home does not mean having conversations has to stop. We live in an age where many of us are information workers.
In light of all of this it seems illogical that we would live through the worst pandemic in human history.
I have seen a lot of discussion about rights but responsibilities have been skirted. The responsibility to wear a mask, the responsibility to keep human to human interactions to a minimum, the responsibility to avoid people rather than expect them to make the effort to be safe.
The self-sacrifice of not going on holiday, the self-sacrifice of not going to sit in a park half a meter from others…
With everything that society, as a whole knows, it is a shame that the pandemic coalesced into such a serious problem because we had the tools and knowledge to ensure that it would be dealt with as swiftly as the epidemics we have already lived through, in our own lifetimes.
At its core Switzerland, until the 21st of June Switzerland was doing everything right, and to a serious degree it is still doing the right thing, with the number of ventilated people being at zero and the number of serious cases also dropping.
At it’s core my only issue is with having a third summer with limited opportunities to meet new people. As long as the pandemic is around it seems more logical to give in, and use dating apps, to meet new people, instead.
The Up-Skilling opportunity.
A few weeks ago I sad that I would try to create my own WordPress theme, but I overshot that goal by learning CSS and redesigning my entire website. I have learned to create a CMS from scratch using PHP and MySQL. Now I’m learning Ruby On Rails and it’s going well. Ruby on Rails looks like an intuitive framework to work with. I’m working on changing my career path.
The pain of optimism during a pandemic can clearly be felt by those who were optimistic enough to believe that self-sacrifice during the pandemic would result in a summer free of the COVID-19 Virus in Switzerland.
We went from a moving average over seven days of one thousand one hundred and twelve new cases on the 25th of May to a moving average over seven days of 17 in early June.
The moving average so far, in July, is of ninety new cases per 7 days. That might not seem like much compared to other countries but it means that masks have become obligatory and that I feel the need to disinfect and wash my hands constantly once more. It also means that car sharing and group activities are ill-advised once again. (no pun intended).
In June I really believed that by July we would have a normal summer with zero new infections per day. When the Swiss government saw the leap in the number of new cases as a result of the 21st of June shift in phase it should have rolled back to the previous phase, and made sure to have two to three weeks of near zero infections.
An increase in the number of cases within six days of Switzerland shifting to the latest phase.
The failure to do so means that I see no reason to put summer tires on a car that will not be driven to the mountains for group activities that are no longer possible. The two-meter rule is impossible to obey in a car, and doing group activities where you stand two meters from people defeats the entire purpose of doing group activities.
Christmas Cancelled
After the cancellation of summer sports and group activities for single people imagine if it lasted long enough to scupper Thanksgiving and Christmas. Imagine if the people, who are least dependent on society being open were the next ones to lose an important season in their calendar. I would find this justice poetic.
When I write blog posts I often do some research, to see whether what I feel is backed up by facts and evidence. In so doing I come across interesting graphs and articles. I find the graph above interesting because it shows that the reproductive rate (R number) went positive on the 25th of May.
According to the graph above Switzerland has the most virulent strain.
Justified Self-Isolation
The more you study the data, the more you see that self-isolation is justified. If Switzerland has one of the highest R numbers then this means that it is one of the places where it makes most sense to self-isolate because it is one of the places where you will most easily catch the virus.
Justified Solitude
I write a lot about solitude because it’s an integral part of my life. If you read books, watch films or television series relationships are always the topic of choice. This means that if you have any questions about living with people you just turn on the TV and find the framework you want to experiment with. Will it be the Big Bang framework, the Friends Framework, the Frasier Framework, or other.
For solitude you need to write your own code and programming language. You need to choose what is important to you, and what you want to achieve. Yesterday when studying Ruby I accidentally tried to run RB files in IRB and it took a while before I understood my mistake. Eventually I exited IRB and started running them through RUBY and the code worked once again.
I mention this because during the Pandemic I have enjoyed learning PHP, MySQL, CSS, Ruby, Ruby on Rails and more. It has replaced the Wednesday trip to the indoor climbing gym and the weekend hikes and Via Ferratas in the mountains. In June we would have expected that by July we’d have gone back to being social, but as conditions are not ideal more is to be gained from experimenting with new knowledge.
Relational Databases
One key skill, during this pandemic would be to learn how relational databases work, and how they can be implemented and used. Every bar, cafe, restaurant and night club needs to track who was where, when, and with whom, so that if a case of COVID-19 is detected, that all those that are at risk may be informed.
You would have one table for customers, a second for the day they visited and possibly a third to specify whether it was breakfast, lunch, dinner, or evening. With primary, and foreign keys. The data would follow ‘single-to-many’ relationships. The code could be written so that after two weeks the data is erased.
In theory an instance of the SwissCovid contact tracing app could be written and run in shops so that it gathers the same data as the app on our phones, and thus provide an automatic means by which to track people.
Swarm, Facebook Check in, and Google Latitude
These three apps track who was where, when, and with whom. If they were still fashionable, then contact tracing during this pandemic would have been simplified and there would have been no reason for every country to write a new app for every country, or trade region.
Until recently every time Switzerland moved from one phase to another the number of new cases per day increased slightly but with the latest phase the number of cases has increased by four or five times the number of new cases.
From March until mid June we could go to the shops with the recommendation that we should wear a mask but not the obligation. I wore a mask anyway. From Wednesday onwards masks will become obligatory for people visiting the shops, and on public transport. In theory the change is not that big. Wearing a mask to the shops and on publlic transport is not a dramatic change.
Until you consider outdoor sports, in the mountains, where car sharing is an integral part of event organisation. If a shop, with tens of thousands of litres of air is deemed to put people at risk of being infected by the virus then sharing a car with people not in your household becomes impossible.
The summer social season is now impossible. The Swiss government missed three or four opportunities to wait an extra two weeks for the disease to be eradicated from wild transmission before moving on to the next stage. Now, not only is the virus making a comeback, but the measures are stricter than at the peak of new infections in Vaud and Geneva.
Although the virus was almost eradicated from wild transmission in Switzerland the latest phase as ensured that the virus will be around until the end of summer.
For single people, like me, who do almost all of their socialising during the summer months, through summer sports this mistake in policy means that some of us will have another solitary summer, waiting until next summer to socialise.
I’m tired of getting hopeful that we will be able to do outdoor group activities, only to see the progress being nullified and voided, again, and again by the government saying “let’s open up more.”
The truth is that if I’m not driving to the mountains to socialise through climbing, via ferrata, hiking or other outdoor sports then I am not spending much money. I’m not buying petrol. I’m not buying drinks at café at the end of the activity, I’m not buying new gear.
When I walk locally I’m not using the car, I’m not going to cafés, I’m not buying new sporting equipment. I’m not buying snacks and I’m not buying funiculaire tickets.
The notion that we need to risk a resurgence of new COVID-19 cases to restart the economy is a deeply flawed one and we have seen, with every phase, that it makes things worse, at least temporarily. With the latest phase change months of sacrifice have been undone.
We’ve gone from 0-20 new cases a day to 160+ a day.
The graph is steepening again
We have gone from a moving average of 13 new cases per day to a moving average of 77 new cases a day.
For a brief window the virus no longer seemed to be out in the wild but “Le COVID-19 regagne du terrain” and now we’re back to anti-social pandemic mode. Socialising this summer is no longer worth considering.
In conclusion although we’re not in “confinement” we are confined. Until the 21st of June we could live with the hope that the pandemic would almost be over, and that we could socialise with people who like the same sports as us. Due to the government’s policy decisions those plans are destroyed, and we might as well continue studying new skills at home, and going for solitary walks, because nothing else is possible for as long as “economic recovery” gives the virus new opportunities to become virulent again.
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