Cur...phew?

At least someone has woken up this morning with a sense of clarity on this matter...

There does seem to be a suggestion that the Guatemalan Congress needs to come back and formally vote to disapprove of the State of Calamity, which is likely to go as well as their attempts to approve it. 

Anyway, I cannot see how a blanket curfew was going to be of much use in the current situation. 

And we kind of resented the restrictions on our freedom of movement when very clearly many organisations around town, largely in the spirituality and hospitality trades, seemed unwilling to even toe the line when it comes to the 'traffic light' system of controls, which have been in place since last year. 

The church in our village has been openly cheating with respect to 'virtuality' since the weekend. The Power And The Glory sprung to mind. 

We shall probably have to wait and see now what the executive can manage in terms of measures with real ameliorative impacts. Parts of the Estado de Calamidad involve edicts which could be imposed by local mayors anyway without constitutional consequences.

In yesterday's address Dr G said encouraging things about the vaccination programme. This on a day it was revealed that approximately 4/5 of the newly-infected hail from the un-vaccinated parts of the population. 

This is all too easily mapped on to the stat that 4/5 of Guatemalans remain un-vaccinated. 

The President spoke as if real progress is being made, of the kind that will soon make it possible to ignore those new infection figures. Yet, after 18 months of this, people surely do not need to be reminded that they can pick up the coronavirus handling tomatoes in the market and pass it on to others regardless of their own infection or vaccination status. 

This risk will only diminish when the virus starts to run out of vectors and Guatemala is a long, long way still from that scenario.