Camping

After a full week of rebound in local coronavirus infections, I haven’t had time for running. All hours seemed to be taken up by the one objective of clearing the cases.

It’s not just a matter of keeping my head above water; I have to keep my head behind surgical respirator and, yes, face shield.

If I had a dollar for every time I don personal protective equipment, I could be dining at Four Seasons Hotel.

At long last, I have taken two days off for a family camping vacation. The air is colder here, but being in the outdoors lifts my spirits. It’s a pretty landscape, but not in an extravagant way. There is no Michelin star, but we were happy to be the chef ourselves. It's not about the five-star dining, it's not about the wine. It's not about the world-class gastronomic experience. It's about the raw experience of making and cracking open our own beggar's chicken in the wild.

Change

All of the ways we've been talking about the coronavirus involve changes: changing strain with new variants, changing reproduction number R-naught, changing rules of the game.

We'd all been shellshocked. We worry. We panic.

But then, I try to remind myself to get prepared for changes. Today, one has fun at school or on school bus. The next day, there is in-person school suspension. Pretty soon many parents - including me - hear about the news of a teacher being quarantined and their children thus declared as close contact.

How should we make sure nothing bad happens? Try this. Open our eyes to the new opportunities. That's what my daughter showed me when school closure was announced without warning. She had come up with many pen-and-paper games when she spent time with classmates on school bus. She then switched to teach me her self-made game. First, write a list of categories: name of celebrity, villain character of any book, city, song, body parts, elements in periodic table. Next, think of an alphabet. We then have to race to complete the list by giving one example for each category, using that alphabet as the first letter of the example.

As it happened, we ended up having a non-stop-laughing night when we kept competing, and changing the categories for fun.

Monk

Omicron is anything but blameworthy. I suppose that's what most of us think.

Little did I expect silver lining on such cloudy days, when things turn dark earlier than usual. Actually, everything, cafeteria and restaurants included.

Besides the curfew on dine-in services, many venues are closed. No bars. No karaoke roooms. No gyms. No swimming pools. No cinemas. No libraries. 

In my case, there was something quite magical about my clairvoyance to time my public library visit. I was able to check out more than ten library books one week before our government ordered all those premises to shut. I then took a deep breath, sipped my coffee and nodded, feeling accomplished like Chip 'n' Dale after stocking enough for the winter. It's simply more than awesome. Quite a number of the books have been reserved by others, and I could have had only two weeks to finish them if not because the library is closed.

Good, simple, hassle-free. I'd figure I should have more than enough time to go through all those highly popular books before the library re-opens: Jay Shetty's Think Like a Monk, Michael Lewis' The Premonition, Oprah Winfrey's What Happened to You?, Liane Moriarty's Apples Never Fall.

Hero

BioNTech is a wonderful vaccine developed from a brand-new technique. So much so that some of us remain skeptical of the new technology of messenger RNA platform. Consider how we compare with any earlier vaccine - the fastest one was mumps vaccine which took four years to develop - and we are amazed by the way Pfizer-BioNTech was developed within 12 months.

The fact is, we all forget how much longer the scientists have been solving the puzzle of mRNA vaccine. The answer, as it turns out, is more than 15 years. That's what l learned after reading the story of a Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó, who is named one of 2021 "Heroes of the Year" by Time Magazine.

During these years, Karikó has been fascinated by RNA. If DNA makes up the letters of life, RNA creates the words, and ultimately the sentences, as explained by Time. In her pursuit of turning our body into its own drug-making factory, Karikó has been figuring out ways to use messenger RNA to instruct the body to make proteins, enzymes and different molecules. Think about her working late nights and early morning, writing at least one new grant application every morning, being turned down and rejected again and again - at least 24 times. But the key is that she kept pushing, even after being fired by her supervisors at the University of Pennsylvania.

The breakthrough came after her collaboration with an immunologist years later, when they found out the trick of encasing the mRNA inside a fat bubble, thus protecting the precious genetic code without triggering a cascade of inflammatory storm. The next thing they knew, in a lightbulb moment, is the flexibility of creating any vaccine once they get the readout of a virus's genetic sequence. Get the code, build the correspoding mRNA with chemical compoundes, pop it into the fat bubble and that's the birth of a new vaccine. Simple and smart. When this smart solution was first published in the journal Immunity in 2005, the beauty of their findings was clearly not appreciated by the scholars around the world. The night before the paper was published, Karikó was expecting a flood of phones calling to congratulate next morning. No one called. Nothing.

Not until 15 years after the original work of Karikó, when we are now blessed with the protection by BioNTech.