#winteriscoming

seebrueckeffm@venera.social

https://twitter.com/wirpackensan/status/1564160926407806977

#Sammelaktion #Spendenaufruf #WinterIsComing

jakob@pod.orkz.net

Our small Wyzard Tower garden has been producing enormous amounts of tomatoes. The principle I have enforced has been to let the plants grow wild with no pruning down to increase harvest. I like things to just go wild. It has sometimes gone a bit too wild, so some of those new gentrification pest neighbours are worried that their children would die due to falling tomatoes. Killer tomatoes.

My wife have this year tried beef tomatoes that in this cold climate, where all fruits and vegetables get intense aromas in a trade off with less crop, have tasted almost melon like. Our youngest daughter didn't fancy them, probably because they were to large, luscious, colourful and alien shaped. So we have had tomato salads every evening, and I have been eating rye bread with mayonnaise and tomatoes for lunch for quite some time. Now the chillies are soon ready for harvest and the tomatoes are over. As you can see on the last picture, we are ready for winter now, with the thyme, rosemary and the survivor pine tree as the only residents on the balcony. The rest of the spices have moved inside - (actually they are right now on display in some plastic recycling design project my wife has on exhibition right now - they will return shortly she has promised).

Next year we will return to the less frivolous sort of tomatoes and have many, many more chillies!

#gardening #urbangardening #winteriscoming #tomato #chilli #balcony #Copenhagen #Denmark

dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com

#CovidWinter may be extraordinarily bad

I linked The National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System (NREVSS) National Trends a few days back. This shows the past two years' history of four non-COVID-19 coronaviruses in the United States. These start to appear in testing around mid-October, peak from late December to April, and fade by late-May to June. Again, though these are NOT Covid, the common trend and other data for COVID-19 strongly suggest winter as the disease's most prolific season.

This also suggests that the January-April emergence of COVID-19 actually occurred about halfway through the peak season, attenuating spread compared to a full-length outbreak.

More evidence comes when looking at South American and African data. For much of the period June through September, South America performed conspicuously poorly for COVID spread. This increasingly looks like a wintertime peak.

Africa as a whole has been relatively spared Covid, and hasn't shown a strong seasonal trend. Data are also more questionable thad for most other regions. But Africa slso spans both Northern and Southern hemispheres, and the region that has seen the largest outbreak, Southern Africa geneerally, and South Africa specifically, also seems to show a winter peak. Cases are now trending high in Morocco, in Northern Africa.

The other southern region, Oceania, has fared well, though again Australia's peak spans winter.

European cases began rising notably in September. @Joerg Fliege, teaching at university in the UK has been posting regular updates and as of mid-September was showing cases doubling every few days --- relatively low numbers at firsst, but it's the growth rate that matters. More broadly, cases didn't start rising noticeably until September--Occtober. This was about 4--8 weeks ahead of the US rise, and in both cases more northerly regions seem first affected.

If this is accurate, then we may well be on the cusp of an extraordinarily bad Covid Winter, with infection peaks occurring in February--March.

Interventions, including lockdowns, masks, and vaccines (available likely March--June) should help, but this looks like it's going to be quite bad, with peak infection and death rates 4-8 times levels being seen possible.

The good news is that European case growth has slowed, flattened, or declined innmany countries, for now. Quarantine does in fact wwork. But there's six months between now and June.

#covid19 #CovidWinter #WinterIsComing