Plus tri

— Day 50 —

Dear Nenad,

Congratulations on the 50^th entry into the diary. Corona numbers everywhere are still decreasing and if you look on the streets you wonder if we still think that we have a virus spreading around. Somehow I believe that it is probably more the warmer weather than our behaviour which is preventing a large renewed outbreak. Although in some places outbreaks still take place. Also here in the meat industry there are still some additional infections, mainly because they work with migrant workers, who live together and travel together to work.

Just to make the comparison, I pulled up today’s figures:

It is still hard to make any conclusion on this. The country with almost no measures at all (Belarus) is in deaths per million very low, but they still might be at the beginning of the virus spread. In Sweden the situation is comparable with the situation here, but they also started later so it might still worsen.

It looks like testing helps (compare Germany versus Netherlands), but Greece and Slovakia are doing well despite less testing (both did start with measures very early though). Probably it will need more time before the results can really tell us anything.

Today I read two more articles. One deals with the fact that the world is slowing down and was already slowing down before corona. The author thinks that this is a good thing because the speed of growth in the last 50 years has been too high and we need a ‘reset’.

The second one referred to the inhumanity of the measures taken, especially when it comes to elderly people in the nursing homes. As the author states, elderly people do not expect too many material things from life anymore, but they most appreciate human contact. This is precisely what we have taken away from them and many people died alone, without being able to see their families. Of course the measures in the nursing homes were taken to protect them, but you might wonder whether they would have chosen this solution themselves.

To be honest after 50 days I am still left with more questions than answers. Whereas it looks logical to me that the measures taken have slowed down the spread of the virus, the question pops up how much government intervention really influenced everything.

I just do not know, but we will in any case have to face the economic consequences in the period to come. In any case the 1,5 m economy will probably still be a reality for some time, but I expect that people will start paying less attention fast. We will see.

What these past 50 days have done is to give me an opportunity to reflect more on what is important in life, despite the insecurity we have been in and are still in.

Let’s indeed move now to a weekly diary, as I think it is still very interesting to see how the whole situation will develop further. I am going to take the Sundays for reflection and writing (and of course I then have some more time to finish the text on Athos).

Today I saw that Serbia is now also preparing to remove quarantine and testing for people that enter the country. (It also means you might win the bet..)

It was good to do the virtual toast from the balcony tonight, looking forward to a non-virtual toast !

Živeli! Robert

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Živeli Roberte i hvala na druženju tokom ovih 50 dana / Cheers Robert and thank you for hanging out during these 50 days.

Jedva čekam da te vidim uživo / Hardly waut to see you live!