Feb. 2, 2021

The U.S. economy will return to its pre-pandemic size around the middle of this year, according to a new forecast from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office — even if Congress does not approve any more pandemic aid. But it will be years before everyone thrown out of work by the pandemic can return to employment.

The brightening outlook is a result of large sectors of the economy adapting better and more rapidly to the pandemic than expected, as well as increased growth from a $900 billion economic aid package that Congress passed in December.

 

The budget office expects the unemployment rate to fall to 5.3 percent at the end of the year, down from an 8.4 percent projection in July. The economy is expected to grow by 3.7 percent this year.

Stimulus response: President Biden met with Republican senators who are pushing for a much smaller alternative to his $1.9 trillion stimulus bill to address the toll of the pandemic. Administration officials warned that he wouldn’t accept their scaled-down proposal.   This seems very optimistic to me but I hope it is true. But aside from that, today, I was sleeping soundly, under two light blankets (it has been hot here lately so I have been sleeping without any covering except, perhaps, in the early morning, a sheet covering, but yesterday it got very cool and it was a great night for sleeping) and when the alarm went off, I really didn’t want to get out of bed, and changed to alarm to get another 15 minutes in  even though I had to cancel part of my usual pre-mass routine. Ha. It was soooo nice.   A few other things have been happening since my last posting on Jan. 13. One of the old timers, here, (92 yrs old) asked me to take him to the bank to do some work on merging his German accounts and his SA accounts. Believe it or not, I took my portable urinal along because I know that where the banking complex is in this shopping mall, it is faaaaar from the nearest toilet and I need a tree about every hour. Sure enough, it took him and hour and a half to get through his stuff. Can you, in the States or Europe, imagine taking an hour and a half at the bank? Anyway, the urinal saved me as I ducked out knowing that it was going to be a disaster if I didn’t. The joys of old age. Luckily, there was no one around when I had to do my thing, nature doesn’t wait. All’s well that ends well. We lost two priests (one a bishop) to the diocese of Durban (Bishop Gabuza and Msgr. Paul Nadal) two really great people. Gabuza was young, less than  65 and Nadal was a year older than me, and fit fit. But that didn’t stop the virus. We also lost a young seminarian, just about to be ordained a deacon, 31 yrs. old, to the virus. Thandoyenkosi Ngwenya, a Zimbabwean. Thandoyenkosi is a pagan name meaning, The will of the Lord. I am being sarcastic. In the old days the priest might not have allowed him to be baptized If he only had a pagan name (meaning a Zulu name) but must take a Christian name like Ferdinand (which would probably never be remembered by his family as he would still be called by his so-called pagan name, meaning, he was born because of the will of the Lord. How pagan can you get. The virus is going wild here. Our hospital, St. Mary’s , recently having lost its Catholic identity and become a government hospital, has turned its Marian wing (maybe about 45 beds, mostly 2 bed wards and one bigger 8 9r 10 bed ward) into a covid wing. The Marian wing, in the apartheid days was the white wing where everyone had insurance coverage, and those patients helped to pay for the rest of the hospital with its African patients who had no coverage, and little money to pay for medical help. But now it is all government and struggling (we are still trying to find donors to make up for what the govnt doesn’t pay).  The husband of one of my favorite nurses phoned me to ask me to come to give him wife, suffering from covid, the sacrament of the sick. It was 11 am. I said I would come at 2pm, but would first ask Maureen to organize things for me (Maureen is the head nurse at the hospital). When I phoned her and explained my plan, she said she refuses to let me go to the Marian wing because it is full of covid and the risk is too great, almost a certainty. I phoned her husband to explain and he said that he understood. (What was I ordained for, I was asking myself).  As it turned out, her husband also got the virus and both of them wound up on one of those 2 bed wards. He died of covid and she just barely pulled through. The only good thing about this is that she was able to be with him, pray with him, support him, encourage him, etc. right up to his last breath (so she said). That is a blessing that is denied of most dying covid patients. I visit the hospital at least twice a week just to pray for the staff and patients, trying to make myself visible as I go to the chapel to pray, hoping that my presence reminds them that we are in Gods hands and that I am on duty when I come to pray. The chapel is straight in from the main door so there is no danger of meeting corona, I hope. But I had better put this in the blog for now or I will forget again till the end of Feb. I have some other things on my mind as well. See you next time.