It'll all end in tiers (or Piers)

Welcome, optimistic reader, as we enter what I'll be calling the second year of the pandemic. Let's hope it's also the last, but I gave up trying to predict the future round about June last year. Anyway, for now I can confidently say it's the latest year of the pandemic.

And the wave of optimism sweeping the planet is certainly felt here in the US. President Biden's keen to go on a PR offensive about how he's turned around the vaccination programme: as he promised, he appears to be on track to vaccinate 100 million people in the first 100 days of his presidency, and this week announced... well, I'm not entirely sure what. I think he's going to ask each state very nicely to make the vaccine available to every adult as of May. This appears to be a very deliberate choice of words: there's a limited amount that the President can compel the states to do, and making the vaccine available is not the same as actually sticking it in people's arms. I think it's likely that "making the vaccine available to everyone" actually makes progress strictly slower, as you move the bottleneck to the appointment booking and distribution systems, but I guess that's someone else's problem.

Here in Santa Clara county we're enjoying Red Tier status, and accelerating towards the Orange Tier:

Pretty, isn't it?

Now, stepping back from this for a second, it's not entirely clear to me what the tiers are supposed to achieve. As far as I can tell, the situation isn't actually that different to what it was 3 or 6 or 12 months ago: there's plenty of virus out there, there's no herd immunity, hospital capacity is either the same or lower than it was. As such it's surprising to me that we feel we can make relatively large changes to which activities are considered safe and which aren't. Just to prove I haven't entirely given up predicting the future, I'm expecting these relaxations, and in particular the return to school for a lot of the area's kids, to lead to an uptick in cases about a month from now. Whatever, I kinda like the purple tier anyway.

So the other big news this week was Oprah doing that interview with her new neighbours, giving Piers the excuse he needed to quit his day job and take up that lucrative new role at GB News. What was fascinating to me was how this was reported over here: Piers did actually get plenty of airtime (I guess they still remember his similar exit from CNN), but there was a lot of surprise about the idea that maybe the Royal Family isn't the most progressive institution under the sun (perhaps they've not been studying their Prince Philip quotes), and a lot of surprise that the British public didn't seem to care all that much. Really this is just a commentary on cultural differences between the two countries, but also a result of the disappointing realisation over in the old country, manifested over the last 40 years or so, that actually the Royal Family are just people like you and me. Well, the version of you and me that have a net worth of £500m and don't pay an awful lot of tax; that's just like you and me, right?

Just to blow my mind a bit more, the clocks go forwards here today, two weeks earlier than they do in Europe, so we'll be just 7 hours behind UK time for a couple of weeks. This measure, introduced by Bush in 2005, apparently saves 0.03% of annual electricity consumption. Make your own minds up on whether that was worthwhile!

Anyway, I'm being trusted to shop at the market solo this morning, as Helen prepares to do an online cake workshop from which I'm excited to see the output! My shopping list is a whole 3 items long, so let's see if I can resist the temptation to pick up things that just look nice...