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This Month's Lunar Shenanigans

 

Now I'm sure many of us (myself included) and running rather low on the alcohol front so I thought I'd share this brilliant website with you.

https://makemeacocktail.com/

All you need to do is click on all the ingredients you have in your home. Spirits, mixers, but also other stuff like salt, tabasco, coffee, sugar, marmalade, milk, chocolate etc. And then.....Hey Presto.......you get a list and instructions of all the wonderful tasty beverages you can make with those ingredients!

There is so much one can do with Tanduay.......

Enjoy!

 

The corona virus crisis and all of the news surrounding it from all over the planet can be bewildering at times.
From cardboard coffins being used in Ecuador, to mass graves being dug in Iran and New York City, to praise being heaped on a few countries like Taiwan and Korea for seemingly "winning the war on covid-19", and scorn on many others for being in the "too little, too late" category, or even willfully misinforming the world (China, Iran).
Meanwhile the reported number of cases and dead keep going up, from a couple hundred in Wuhan just 3 months ago to 2.2 million cases today, with reported death rates wildly divergent across the planet, from 0.3% in Singapore to 18.5% in Lombardia (the worst hit region in Italy) and everything in between.
At the same time conspiracy theories, rumours, and outright lies are part of our daily news diet.
So how to make sense of it all?
Well, first of all it might be good to keep in mind that one day's "outrageous headline" (like with the satellite pictures of the mass graves in Iran, which were deemed to be proof that the situation in Iran was much worse than reported), can be another day's "nothing to see here" newsstory (when New york city had to start digging very similar mass graves on Hart Island).
Next aspect is the wild difference in death rates. I think there are reasons to believe that the true deathrate is pretty much a constant across different countries, of between 1 and 2% overall, depending on government policies regarding lockdowns/social distancing, demographics (countries with relatively old populations will suffer higher death rates), urbanisation level (in urban areas the spread will be faster) and hospital/intensive care beds/ventilator capacity. Basically, as long as medical capacity does not get overwhelmed, death rates should remain between 1 and 1.5%.

So why do we see reported death rates in most of Europe between 10 and 15%? The answer must be that because of testing constraints many many infections are simply missed.
I can offer some proof of that. The Netherlands reports around 30,000 cases and roughly 3,500 dead (11.4% mortality). However, sofar the country reports only deaths in hospitals, none outside, like in care homes. They are planning to change that but in the meantime we can use the deaths statistics from the national statistics office to estimate the difference. My rough conclusion is that the true number of deaths for the Netherlands amounts to about 5,500. That would take the mortality rate to 18.3% of the reported cases. Scary number right?
However, there is some good news, the dutch central blood bank has tested all 7,000 blood donors in the first week of April for antibodies for Covid-19 in their blood and found that 3% of them actually had those antibodies. This is an important number, because it is a very strong indication that the true number of infected people in the Netherlands in the middle of March was around 500,000. Now suddenly those 5,500 dead represent only a 1.1% deathrate, not that alarming high reported number.
Yes there are uncertainties (nobody under 18 and none over 70 among blooddonors, so not quite representative) but I believe it is still a strong indication for the true number of infected.
The reason I think it is important for other countries also is that there is not a single good reason to assume that the virus would behave differently on the other side of a border.
So, the true number of infected in almost all countries (everywhere where a high mortality rate is reported) will be much much higher than reported, and the number of people with minor or no symptons is very high (else hospitals in many countries would have been long overwhelmed).
Nevertheless this disease remains a lot more dangerous than the flu, with a death rate that is 10 to 15 times higher, with older people much more vulnerable than younger ones.
At some point I had hope that the climate might stop the virus in the tropics, but that seems to be idle hope now.
Hope that remains is for an existing medicin to be found effective (developing a new one takes just as long as a vaccine).
In the meantime, until a vaccine or medicin is widely available and priced friendly, the world had better be prepared for a quite different 1.5 meters "new normal" without tourism, with a damaged economy (I read quite a few "worse than the 1930's Big Depression" forecasts).
Governments will have to be very careful when lifting (part of) restrictions, because a "second wave" of infections can come quickly on the heels of the current one. Nobody wants that second wave to be a tsunami after all.

 

I've got too much time on my hands.
And it's ticking away, ticking away from me.

I had trouble sleeping last night because I was pondering the dismal fate of mankind. So I stayed up all night to take in some celestial apparitions which I would like to share.

 

My wife and I went shopping yesterday or should I say tried to go shopping, Hypermarket first, only limited amount of people allowed in, one out one in so the result is a long line of people standing outside in the sun.
Gave up on that and went to Robinsons, same policy there but at least the line was inside and managed like a game of musical chairs, this meant you could move every now and then to a chair someone had just vacated and during the wait you can suck up the free air con.
I am not a medical expert but I would think if you want to avoid the virus the best way is to do your shopping as quickly as possible then go home not spend hours in the vicinity of other people.
The guard told us the shop opens at 10am and people had started queueing at 7.30am.
We did not bother with Citymall but I presume it was the same.
Anyway it will increase the business of the small shops as we and I think a lot of other people went to them and got most of the things we wanted there.

 

Killing some time so where have you been that you liked? Me - Paris, Chester England, train up the Rhine, Cologne Cathedral, Ardenne, Rome, Salzburg, Mt. Fuji, Bangkok, Phuket, Krabi, Bali, Sydney, Singapore, Victoria BC, Hawaii, Seattle, San Francisco, Napa Valley, San Diego, Vietnam Wall.
Places I wish I could have seen - Ireland, Switzerland, Barcelona, Capetown, (old) Beirut, Barossa Valley and Margaret River, Bordeaux (yes
I enjoy wine). I
I wasn’t really much of a tourist. Work took me around and a few vacations. I could have done more and seen more (too many bars). Still, no regrets.

 

One reason why the Philippines has one of the lowest numbers of COVID-19 infections is because of the non-availability of testing kits. Although there had been some donations from other countries but these donations quickly run out and test only a fraction of the entire population. There's a fat chance that many of us could be walking around with the infection. It is scary since many Filipinos trust in what the DOH or Department of Health reports. So if the DOH says the country has only round 200 infected cases, Filipinos will be thanking the heavens for that small number compared to the numbers in Italy, south Korea, Iran, etc.

The goal is to flatten the curve and we (esp. here in Dumaguete) are doing everything to ward off the evil coronavirus. We sanitize/disinfect ourselves and our surroundings, we avoid crowds, wear masks, etc. We hope to conquer this challenge soonest by stopping the spread of the virus.