Hungarian News

Indeed since Eva’s passing I have thought of her a great deal, especially since my immediate family are essentially quarantined in our home until this Sunday due to a daughter contracting Covid. My wife and I have tested negative for Covid, but effectively both had to put ourselves at some risk of infection to get tested. The lines for testing are simply mind blogging in most major urban areas of the USA. At home test kits are sold out in the Chicago area and even Amazon will take weeks to get one to you. Amazingly there were people in my line that were unmasked, and there were some who were visibly sick, but they did not know if they had influenza or Covid.

There are also some people being found dead in their homes and apartments here in Chicago, generally older people like myself and my wife. One was a friend from the military, who I and his family tried to call repeatedly, he lived in a building I own. So I called our maintenance staff who in turn let in the Chicago Police, for a well being check, who found him dead from a possible heart attack. There was no detailed examination ordered by public heath officials because of a past history of heart problems, and a death certificate was issued listed heart failure based on his history. We know that abnormal cardiac biomarker are common in Covid-19 that can cause direct cardiac injury in some cases. Formally here in Chicago deaths directly attributable to Covid are currently very small, only 0.3 per 100,000 residents in the City, yet the formal positivity rate on testing this week has increased to 9.2% from 4.5% last week based on an average daily test rate of over 35,000 tests a day in just the city.  

Eva was indeed a deeply secular person, but did seem to appreciate Hungarian traditions surrounding Christmas. Due to the wonders of the internet driven economy we have all the Christmas elements for the holiday isolated here in our big home in the city of Chicago. I will watch eventually a video of Christmas mass from Esztergom which I have attended myself in the past. I am unclear if this is virtual reality or unreality to be honest sometimes. I am thankful that Istvan has taken up the burden of bogging about contemporary Hungary in Eva’s tradition.