Day 171 of coronavirus in France
Day 36 of de-confinement after 55 days of enforced confinement
My daughter is now enjoying the voluntary return to the classroom two days a week complemented by two days of distance learning that has been in place since May 19th. This schedule offers the best of both worlds with plenty of benefits, allowing her to see her friends and also learn better study habits as a result of increased supervision all while discovering first hand a good work ethic as she can reap the benefits of getting her work done in the morning and having the whole afternoon to play as she wants.
Probably one of the biggest advantages of this schedule is that I have more time to dedicate to helping her navigate her emotions and varying my own schedule means I’m more recharged to be able to manage that most important task.
New Developments
- Restaurants terraces have been open for a few weeks.
- Starting today restaurants can open indoor seating, but tables must be 1m apart.
- Starting tomorrow anybody can take public transportation without a special permit.
- Starting the 22nd return to the classroom will be compulsory, that will increase class size significantly, but we await word as to how many days a week our local school will be able to provide.
- Large gatherings are still prohibited: theaters, concert halls, and town festivals.
- There were more new cases confirmed in the state of Indiana today than in all of France.
- Friends in America say my deconfinement looks like their confinement.
- Testing is at a max. A neighbor just got tested yesterday, negative.
Precedented
There is a precedent for unprecedented times. History is littered with hardships and not all were naturally occurring. We are not all that exceptional, but France has exploited knowledge gained from history and other countries in hopes of getting back to normal as fast as possible. Their drastic restrictions were criticized.
Alice
Alice is a doctor who volunteered to be transferred to the COVID-19 ward. She said the experience was haunting. Too many deaths. Watching bodies curl as every muscle tensed with the struggle for life, the medical team administered doses that relaxed the muscles offering the only solace they know how.
Day after day she went back to that work environment, knowing what was awaiting her, knowing she was grateful to be helping out, knowing she was grateful to have a job.
Alice is not French and her medical degree is not French. This fall she plans on studying for the French equivalency exam, but it costs a fortune. We are grateful for the exceptions that were made to pull us through the worst of the outbreak.
There are still new clusters of outbreaks in the greater Paris area, but in our zip code there have been no new cases in a while.
New Hypothesis
Supposedly, the sun and heat break down the envelope around the virus cell, so that in cool weather it would survive for hours or days, in the hot dry summer weather it only survives a few minutes making transmission and reproduction more difficult.
Hospitals are preparing for an outbreak in October when cooler wetter weather hits.
Meanwhile Singapore and other warm dry locations are seeing huge spikes right now adding to the unpredictability of this pandemic.
We didn’t understand why the children were carriers but very few children were hospitalized, and now everyone has a different theory.
The children were carriers because they had active immune systems that built self-immunizing antibodies and never presented with symptoms. Adults however have no immunity, and some with insufficient immune responses suffered greatly.
Parents of young kids belong to a separate category, those that are strong and healthy fabricate immunotherapy for the family and will have produced antibodies just as if they had gotten sick.
Specialists explain that school children are used to fighting infections, because of vaccinations and small repetitive infections in the playground, and therefore children have a much better immune system. The same studies show that the pulmonary system in the youngest children is not fully developed and does not allow the virus to penetrate their organism. At least that’s Alain Ducardonnets explanation. (source)
Or… perhaps a large portion of the population has antibodies because we all caught the bug before it had a name and our family doctor called it a bad outbreak of viral bronchitis.
Or as William of Ockham, a Franciscan friar in the12th century, once taught us, perhaps the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is actually the correct one.