Today I had a first – I scheduled a second online ethics class at 6pm immediately after my established Thursday class at 5pm. The evening timeslots in my time zone seem popular, and by the time the class started I had three new students signed up. These later slots are picking up more students in Europe and the UK. So today I had a total of 6 students – it would have been 7 but one of the ones in the first slot couldn’t make it this week.
This morning, despite trying not to spend time going to the supermarket because of the current COVID outbreak here in Sydney, I had to go to a different supermarket to buy a few things that I couldn’t order from my own local one. Specifically, I couldn’t order a large 5 kilo bag of bread-making flour online – it just says it’s only available in-store. And also my local supermarket doesn’t stock the bran that we use when making our own muesli, so I have to travel a couple of suburbs over to another supermarket that does stock it. And we needed an extra carton of milk, before I pick up the online order tomorrow morning. So I combined all this into one very quick shopping trip, and spent as little time as possible int the supermarket, at 7am when it’s at its emptiest.
The COVID stats here today were bad. NSW had 124 new cases, which is the highest number of cases recorded in Australia for the whole of this year so far. The government is hinting at further lockdown restrictions if the numbers don’t start turning down soon.
New content today:
How is the vaccination campaign going? There was positive news yesterday (my time zone) about those, like yourself, who have had the A-Z vaccine. It seems to be about as effective against the Delta variant as it is against the original strain of SARS-CoV-2.
Vaccination is progressing slowly in Australia. Currently 29% of the population have had one dose, and less than 12% are fully vaccinated. It’ll probably take until the end of the year to get up around the 60-70% mark that some countries are already at. It’s been a bit of a government debacle sourcing supplies of vaccines and distributing them. People under the age of 40 are still not generally eligible for a vaccination appointment.