Juan Convers

Yesterday I met a couple of colleagues from the university here in Basel and we discussed various topics. One of my colleagues is an epidemiologist and the topic of increasing hospitalization rates due to covid-19 was part of our conversations. One of the causes of this phenomenon is that vaccination rates in Europe are still low. According to the ECDC the cumulative complete vaccination rate in Europe is 64.9%, with Portugal being the country with the highest rate (81.3%).

Countries like Germany and the Netherlands, which are breaking daily records with the number of cases, have relatively low vaccination rates (67.1% and 64.8% respectively). We cannot let our guard down and more work must be done to prevent the continent from becoming again, the epicentre of this never-ending pandemic.

Last week when I was leaving work the light was just perfect to take this snapshopt at the EPFL Campus.

I have been reading the news for the last few days as the northwestern United States has experienced a strong heat wave that has broken all records in its major cities including Seattle and Portland.

There are even reports that it is mentioned that part of the infrastructure of those cities is literally melting due to that heat wave. The PDX airport maintains records of the highest and lowest temperatures every day since 1938 (see charts above) and when observing a graph of these data it is clear that the temperatures of the last days are surprising for that region of the country.

I have been saying it for a while in this blog: Global warming is not a joke!

Lausanne is a city that can be quite photogenic, and one of my favorite areas for taking photos is the Ouchy area. This area has stunning views of the lake with the alps in the background. A couple of weeks ago I took this photo of the Éole sculpture created by Clelia Bettua in 1995.

After a long wait, finally I was able to get an appointment today for the first dose of the covid-19 vaccine. I still need to wait another month, but having a spot in the queue is such a relief!. I was curious about what countries have the highest vaccination rate (using data from our world) and I realized that gibraltar has almost all the adult population innoculated.

I know the situation is bad in India nowadays, so I really hope at certain most of the countries will be able to have the same numbers as gibraltar, or the USA for that matter. The new administration definitely did wonders there!.

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