8th
Stuck in the Northern Islands by the ReDs-Free-Area regulations
Damn and blast. I took the UN assessment gig to come up and take a look over the infrastructure implementation plans for the Northern Islands - that’s the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland / Greenland. Obviously the big worries up here are food security, and for the non-geothermal countries, energy security. Also took the opportunity to teach a couple of classes on SERAA mapping to good effect. A video clip from those classes is here.
Yeah - totally watch that.
Anyway, the new ReDsWatch stuff is now in force in Iceland. Two to four week quarantine, plus genetic testing to look for contamination etc. That, in and of itself, isn’t a problem - two weeks is a long time, but they’ve got full network connectivity and I can work from anywhere. The goal is to completely isolate Iceland, which is currently ReDs-free, and concentrate a lot of the vaccine development and viral analysis work here so that if ReDs does go pandemic in some really huge way, there’s a stable base of operations to continue the science from.
All that makes perfect sense and I approve of it. But here’s the problem.
A lot of other people who don’t feel that way about living in a plastic-wrapped hotel for a fortnight are canceling their trips to Iceland, and flights are now once a week only, and those are utterly oversubscribed by people leaving. I’ve been trying to pull some local strings here to get a seat but people are so afraid of being unable to leave because all flights would be cancelled (because the flight crews and plane could not return to Iceland in the event of a crisis) that… well…
It’s a mad scramble. I, personally, would not mind being stuck in one of the ReDs-free areas of the world in the event of a major meltdown, but like I said, I can work from anywhere. I dropped off the DCAR samples in Paris, and now… it’s just me and you and the internet, baby.
See you online!
