Children of the account – NRC

The funniest moment of the week was the way President Biden changed his mind after being asked by journalists at some reception whether he thought Putin was a war criminal.

“No,” he said at first and continued on. A moment later he came back: “You asked if I…” “Whether he is a war criminal”, the journalists eagerly added. “Oh…he’s a war criminal,” Biden said as if he’d always taken it for granted, and quickly turned away.

A very human moment too, because who doesn’t recognize that in themselves? You shut up at first because an honest answer doesn’t seem appropriate to you, and a moment later you think: who cares, or in Biden’s case: what the heck? Putin could burst.

Other than that, there was little to laugh about this week. A terrible war that only festers and that Ajax perishes – I can’t really mention it in the same breath, but what the heck†

Admittedly, this was offset by the triumph of the PvdA in Amsterdam, but that is more my wife’s department. I was only able to enjoy it a little when I met Wouter de Winther, political commentator of The Telegraph, heard people smirking that Marjolein Moorman’s victory was partly due to “the perhaps disproportionate attention she received from NPO1”. You never hear them say that at De Telegraaf when Wilders or Baudet have been put in the spotlight by certain media.

Wouldn’t the developments around corona have made me happy? Again I have to be honest: not really. I have too mixed feelings about it. On the day that Minister Kuipers canceled almost all corona measures, it was also announced that the number of infections was still quite high: around 50,000 per day. In addition, the number of positive tests among the elderly rose sharply: by 66 percent among people in their sixties, and even by more than 100 percent among people in their seventies and eighties.

In short, the elderly become the children of the bill, if they are not very careful. I mean the account of the understandable euphoria among the young about the return of freedom. The elderly should be more careful than the young. Corona has not gone away and will not go away, new variants can always emerge, warned virologist Ab Osterhaus recently. In addition, he pointed out the social disruption that is now taking place because many younger people also call in sick.

For those who do not want to believe him, and there are quite a few, I refer to two articles from an unsuspected source. Volkskranteditor Maarten Keulemans pointed out this week that the time between infections seems to be getting shorter: of all people who tested positive, one in seven had had corona before. They got the Omikron variant after the Delta variant and it is now also possible that one is infected with another Omikron variant (BA.2) after the Omikron variant BA.1.

The New York Times warned on Thursday that this BA.2 variant could quickly blow over from Europe to the US. The paper quotes Dr Maria Van Kerkhove of the World Health Organization as blaming BA.2’s advances on relaxations, vaccine refusals and misinformation “that Omikron is mild, the pandemic is over and it’s the last variant.” […]†

BAH!