Fall is coming
I woke up in the middle of the night last night and had to grab an extra blanket for the bed because my toes were cold. This morning it is gray and windy in Berlin - a far cry from last week’s 80 degree weather. On Sunday, when it was in the high 70’s, E and I took a bike ride to Britzer Garten , and it was hot in the sunshine, but chilly in the shade. The breeze was cool and smelled a bit like Fall.
It’s only mid-August and my summer-loving mother would tell me to bite my tongue if she heard me talking about how it’s basically Fall. But that shifting seasons feeling is already in the air here in Berlin.
I really don’t want to write about the pandemic, but I think this issue of the newsletter has to be about the pandemic. Because Fall is historically my favorite season, but what it mostly represents for me this year is rising COVID case numbers. After a lull in June and early July, numbers have been climbing rapidly in Berlin for the last month. We have the highest incidence rate in Germany.
E and I will be fully vaccinated next week. We got our first dose back in May, but it was AstraZeneca, which studies show is most effective with a 12-week window between the first and second dose. So, we twiddled our thumbs for three months and then got our second shot last week. (Pfizer-BioNTech this time because the German Vaccine Commission recommends that people who got a first dose of AstraZeneca get a second dose of an mRNA vaccine.)
But it doesn’t feel very exciting to be fully vaccinated when numbers are trending up instead of down and studies are showing that although vaccinated folks transmit the virus less often, we’re still able to spread the delta variant around. Obviously, I’m glad to be vaccinated and I recognize that there are lots of places in the world where vaccination still isn’t an option for people.
But this pandemic isn’t over and I’m continually disappointed by our collective response to it.