24 January 2021: Recent events put a damper on the positive news we’ve been enjoying over the last couple of weeks

Yesterday, AstraZeneca announced that due to a production problem the initial doses available for our country would be lower than expected. They will only be able to deliver 650,000 dosages in the first quarter instead of the initially forecasted 1,5 million. This blow came after the inoculation programme in hospitals was slowed due to a cut in deliveries of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The news is putting a bit of a dampener on the wave of good publicity that pharma companies have been enjoying since developing a highly effective vaccine at record speed. Meanwhile, the number of infections is plateauing at an average of 2,000 new cases a day. In the week leading up to 20 January on average 2,008 new cases were diagnosed. Also, 178 cases of the more infectious British variant have already been confirmed in Belgiumand the number is rising every day. To make things worse 15 cases of the South African variant have been confirmed in Ostend. All of this is extremely worrying. Today I’m posting some more street art from my daily corona walks – Ghent, Belgium.