Juan Convers

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 doest 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.

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.

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