Belgium

In Wallonia (Southern part of Belgium), universities are already back to only giving online classes, schools will be closed two additional days after the Autumn holidays (so November 2-11), and secondary schools (12-18 years-old children) will be virtual for the 3 days before the Autumn holidays (so October 28-30). The reason? The exploding number of COVID-19 cases in schools. In Wallonia, education is in the hands of the French-speaking Community (along with Brussels) but its statistics department doesn’t seem to provide public data on COVID-19. For that, we have to look at ONE (roughly: " Office for births and infancy") that communicate weekly numbers of cases and quarantines in children in schools via press releases (forcing us to parse PDFs but it’s better than no data). ...

Recently (I’m writing this on October 20), the (new) Belgian government decided to apply more stringent prophylaxis measures to contain COVID-19. One of the controversial measure is to close bars and restaurants for a month. Unfortunately, in a way, at approximately the same time, AVIQ released its latest poll on COVID-19 clusters in Wallonia ( AVIQ is the Walloon agency for well-being, health, handicap and family). I wrote it was unfortunate because I read and heard several people who criticized the closing of bars and restaurants by citing this poll. But this poll cannot answer in favor or against this closure; it doesn’t look at that … ...

We moved our family from the US (Maryland, just in case you didn’t know yet) to Belgium - no big deal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, in July-August 2020 - now we’re talking … I wrote this post to document our journey. We were (and still are) extremely privileged to have been able to do this, in the conditions we did it. The journey is not over. I’ll update and continue to document it until we fall back into something more “normal” … [long post]

While parsing the general literature, I found this paper from van der Heide et al. (2017) giving some numbers about end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands these past 25 years. I was wondering if one could see similar evolution in Belgium. And I didn’t have to look very far: van der Heide cited another NEJM paper with Belgian numbers ( Chambaere et al., 2015 ; an attentive reader will notice “Belgian” data is “only” about Flanders, not the whole Belgium). ...

Statbel, the Belgian governmental organisation for data and statistics, just released mortality data for 2014 ( press release in French, dataset). The headline of their press release was that, for the first time, tumors were the first cause of death for Belgian men. Diseases of the circulatory system remains the main cause of death in Belgium, for women and for both sex together. While the death of someone is a bad news in itself, I’m more interested here in the evolution of death causes. I’m interested in the evolution of causes of death because it might be a consequence of the evolution of the Belgian society and, as a proxy, of any (most) developed, occidental countries. ...

Many headlines stated today that UK wants to tax pharmaceutical companies again in order to contribute to a pooled fund against antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The proposed ‘pay or play’ mechanism is a bit more subtle than that. The report ( full text here) is also suggesting other financing mechanisms (including the improvement of existing ones) as well as describing potential non-financial measures to reduce these resistances in the first place. Actually, financial measures occupy only about 6% of the report. But headlines need to be catchy. Let’s see a broader picture on tackling antibiotic resistance … ...

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) released the Open Data Index, along with details on how their methodology. The index contains 70 countries, with UK having the best score and Cyprus the worst score. In fact the first places are trusted by the UK, the USA and the Northern European countries (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden). And Belgium? Well, Belgium did not score very well: 265 / 1,000. The figure below shows its aggregated score (with green: yes, red: no, blue: unsure). ...

March 7th, 2012 is Holi! It is first a Hindu spring festival celebration but it is also known as the festival of colours. The main day is celebrated by people throwing scented powder and perfume at each other. Bonfires are lit on the eve of the festival ( more info on Wikipedia). Now compare how a movie showed Holi in 1981 (" Silsila"): [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZNTbobkg-I] With a movie showing a Holi celebration in 2010 (" Action_Replayy"): ...

In three days (Jan 23rd, 2012) it will be the Vietnamese Tết. This year is the year of the Dragon. Happy New Year! For those interested there will be a celebration at Théâtre Marni in Brussels on January 28th afternoon. And BelVietnam is mentioning three celebrations in Brussels on January 21st, 29th and February 12th. Photo credit: Dragon boats resting on Sông Hương river, Huế, Vietnam (from my photos on Flickr, licence CC-by-sa)

On 14 December 1990, the United Nations General Assembly designated 1st of October the International Day of Older Persons. 1990 … it is already more than 20 years ago! People who signed the resolution at that time are now more than 20 years older. Some (most) of them probably are now considered as “old persons”. Do they still have the same view on elderly? Maybe the highlighted principles at that time (independence, participation, care, self-fulfilment, dignity, …) are too broad, too short, just enough? ...