Juan Convers

Nice picture of the moonlight through a tree branches shadow a couples of days ago in Morges, Vaud, Switzerland

Almost two years ago I created a dashboard to track the Covid-19 cases based on data provided by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. When I deployed that little application, I thought it would only be useful for a couple of months.

Almost two years later, it is still useful for tracking cases in different countries and following trends at the national or global level. In the different podcasts I follow, they have mentioned in the last couple of weeks that the omicron variant is different, in the sense that it is way much more contagious, but does not affect the lungs in the same way as the previous variants did.

Last night I was checking my dashboard and indeed the number of cases has skyrocketed, more than with any other variant. Fortunately the number of deaths associated with the virus has remained stable as you can see above. It is still true that this huge number of cases will necessarily add additional stress on health care systems around the world.

Although we are all sick to death of this pandemic, we must continue to get vaccinated and take protective measures to avoid the virus as much as possible.

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 have hope that everything will be better and that it will be a great year!

In a couple of days the year 2021 will be over. It seems incredible to me how fast the 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 so quickly: It has been a tug-of-war of hope and despair associated with the desire we all have for this pandemic to end once and for all!

Anyway, since I don't update this blog much lately, I wanted to take this time to write a longer post and remember what are the events that marked this year through a few illustrations. In my opinion these events were the most important of this year:

James Webb Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) developed by NASA with contributions from the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) was launched on the 25th of December. This telescope will support a broad array of research across the fields of astronomy and cosmology.

Facebook Files

Beginning in September 2021, The Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files: A Wall Street Journal Investigation", a series of news reports "based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management." A couple of weeks later the face of this whistleblower materialized in Frances Haugen, a courageous former product manager for the Civic Integrity team, which was in chage to curb misinformation and other threats to election security

It's not news that Social Media has been used for years to spread misinformation. But having an "insider" to document and record the action (or inaction) coming from the senior management of the social giant, was quite a moment.

Tokyo Summer Olympics

A year later than budgeted and with a lot of restrictions associated with it, but finally the summer olympic games took place in tokyo this year. A number of athletes discussed the importance of participating in the games, but also they expressed their frustration for the lack of spectators and the confinement, not able to enjoyone of the most interesting cities in the world!

COVID-19 vaccine rollout

In January started the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, naimly in the industrialized countries, leaving the poorest nations behind). But then the scarcity of this valueable resource became clear, having many nations compiting for the same vaccines.

There was a lot of criticism in particular about the EU, since he pace of the roll-out was quite slow at the start.

Insurrection at the US Capitol

I remember I was working at home in January when those images of people attacking the US congress appeared in my news feeds, so I switched to a live a streamming to check what was going on.

My first thought was "there can't be a coup d'etat in the USA!" ... but they weren't that far off, from everything that has been discovered so far. Democracy can be quite fragile.

PS: All the source pictures used on the illustrations come from wikimedia commons.

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