While it is true that Greece has handled the Covid-19 crisis better than most other EU member-states, the vaccination rate has been lagging. Unlike Hungary, Greece hasn’t gone rogue and started importing the Chinese or Russian vaccines. I did a little online research to estimate where I stand in the queue.
The population of Greece is about 10,371,000, of which 22% (2.3 million) are aged 65 or over. To date 886,000 vaccines have been administered so just under 40% of seniors have received one or both jabs. This means that 1.4 million are still waiting and, at a rate of 26,277 vaccinations a day, it will take another 52 working days to vaccinate the over 65s – so well into April. I’m basing these figures on this webpage from Reuters:
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/greece/
Ironically, though I’ve considered myself fortunate to have missed the chaos of the UK, I have received two vaccination invitations from my Medical Centre in Birmingham!
Turning to musical matters, our Sunday morning practices are going from strength to strength. A limited list of around eight items seems to allow ample time for practice and banter. One of our members has been smitten by sea shanties and I think the next set we create will contain shanties and more songs related to fishing and seafaring. In fact, he’s started putting a new set together.
We are also going to try out the free version of JamKazam, a program that supposedly cures latency problems thereby allowing musicians to sing and play together live online. Unfortunately, I don’t think our relatively sluggish Greek internet speeds will make for successful “jamkazamming”, but we will give it a try.