When will we be able to travel again?

Last trip on an A 380 on the long flight from Dubai to Sao Paulo
When will we be able to travel again? That is the all important question. The world is in lockdown and many flights have been grounded. For the next hundred year or so, people will be talking about the 2020 global pandemic that crippled the world. We are living through it! This will be studied by microbiologists, sociologists and economists for generations to come. That is, assuming that we survive this!

The beautiful Pangolin - believed to have been the host of the virus which spread to man
 

Yes - of course -  man-kind will survive! After all, the virus which has grounded most of the planes currently has a mortality rate of around 4%. That means that out of every 100 people who get the virus, about 96 of them will survive. Based on the normal processes in the human body, those who survive should have antibodies and these antibodies should be able to prevent people from getting the virus a second time. Mankind is also working very rapidly to develop a vaccine. If I need to get vaccinated against Covid-19 to be able to start traveling again - I will be first in line! After all the concept of needing a vaccine before you can travel is not new and anyone who has traveled to South America (my favorite destination) or many parts of Africa, need a Yellow fever vaccination. This has never been a big deal - so why should getting vaccinated for Covid-19 in order to travel be a big deal!

Pao de Queijo (Cheese bread). A good reason to visit Brazil!
 

Slowly but surely, my favorite airline -  Emirates - have started flying again. The number of cities they are now flying to are increasing almost on a daily basis. They are still not flying to South Africa, but I guess that this will come quite soon.

Over the last few months, I, like pretty much everyone else in the world, have been stuck at home and trying to work from home. As a lecturer at a university, all of my course material has to change and we have to move to an on-line model of doing things. This is taking time to sort out. Hence my silence on the blog (over and above the fact that I have not been able to travel!)

The Covid-19 pandemic has cost me 4 international trips which would have made interesting blogs. However, quite a bit of my time at home has also been spent on doing zoom webinars for the various international clients on the disinfectant (Virukill) which I am a technical consultant on. A very good name for a disinfectant at this stage - Virukill - The disinfectant that kills viruses! This is now also one of the very few disinfectants which has been tested against Covid-19 and kills within 5 mins on contact. When testing the efficacy of a disinfectant against viruses, a 5 min contact time is pretty much as short as it can be, based on the techniques needed in the test.  

The new normal
 

It has become pretty easy to do zoom webinars for people all over the world. I will be doing an online training session for our new distributor of Virukill in Morocco next week. I have said to them that this training webinar does not mean that we should not do face to face presentations once we can all travel again. Looks like I am fated not to visit Morocco. It looks like a really interesting place and I am very keen to visit there. I would have gone in June this year, but then there was the virus. This is the third time that I have planned a trip to Morocco which has not happened! 

As a microbiologist, quite a bit of my "Home time" has been on writing popular articles on covid-19 and doing various radio and TV interview. As a lot of these have been written and as I cannot travel at the moment, I have decided to use this platform to share some of the stuff that I have written. articles. This is, afterall my blog and I can use it as I like!

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