The city center of Morges can be quite beautiful when there are snowy days in these winter months. That was the case a couple of days ago as you can see in the photo above this post.

On this first day of 2022 I had the opportunity to enjoy this beautiful sunset on the shore of Lake Geneva, with the church of Morges in the background. I felt at that moment that in spite of the difficult beginning of 2022, I had hope that everything would be better and that it would be a great year!

In a couple of days, the year 2021 will be over. It seems incredible to me how fast time passed and how the seasons and months went by so fast that this period is indeed going to end. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present serious problems, particularly with the new Omicron variant, and perhaps that is one of the reasons why this year and last year have passed.

By the way, I'm not sure what you mean by "passed." I think you meant "gone" or "ended."

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The US Department of State published a list of the countries invited to the virtual "Summit for democracy" that will take place next month.

Although certainly the USA does not have at this moment a great moral authority to lead such conferences (cough January 6, cough new voting restrictions laws across the country), in any case it is a very good initiative to highlight how democracy is a right that should be protected and should not be taken for granted.

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.

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