arduous trifles

Even before Russia's aggression on Ukraine which created a refugee crisis in Poland, the number of foreign K-12 students in Poland has been rising exponentially. There were less than 30,000 such students starting the 2017/18 school year, while four years later, nearly 136,000 foreigners started the 2021/22 school year. You can see this dramatic increase when you compare the two maps above.

There is a certain lie the COVID-skeptics in Poland tell. Last year, due to the pandemic medical system overload, the ministry of health ordered medical providers to suspend in-person consultations and to prioritize treating COVID patients over non-threatening medical conditions. This was done in part to protect doctors, who were direly needed everywhere, and in part to make more room for people with COVID.

When the statistical office later announced over 120,000 more people died in Poland than in a typical year, the COVID-skeptics used that medical system ordinance as a convenient excuse: "it was not COVID which is that deadly, it's the fact that people with other conditions could not see their doctor!". To be fair, there is some truth to it - surely there are people who are now in later stages of cancer, for example, because their doctor could not have caught it on a routine in-person visit. But the COVID skeptics just do not accept that this is exactly one of the challenges with COVID - even if there was no ordinance like that, these doctors would still have to fight COVID - or they would have to let COVID patients die while tending to other patients.

This year, however, we can expose their lies. Once vaccines became widely available, the west of the country, especially big cities, quickly embraced them and people there got vaccinated. This was not true in the east, where even among the elderly, less than 60% are vaccinated. This provided a real-life A/B test opportunity.

Poland registers now just as many COVID cases as the same time last year (actually, it's on the way to exceed that number this week). But the number of deaths in the west increased only slightly compared to a multi-year average, while the number of excess deaths in the east continues to climb. The east has been in a COVID wave since October, and many COVID-skeptics and anti-vaxxers predicted that it's a seasonal wave that will soon move westward in the country, while the east will experience less new cases and deaths. And while it is true that the number of cases rises very fast all across the country, the number of deaths does not rise that much in the west of Poland.

Since moving to San Francisco, two things hit me. First, how low-rise and outdated the housing stock is. Second, rent and sales prices of that housing stock.

Turns out these things are connected. In 1978, San Francisco downzoned all residential neighborhoods, making it almost impossible to build new housing in most of the city. Add NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard - an idea that neighbors can oppose any changes to their neighborhoods), which also originates in San Francisco, to the mix and you end up with a city like in amber - beautiful but unchanging.

San Francisco prides itself on its progressiveness and openness. There is some truth to that. But for a newcomer, the city also feels very nativist - and bear in mind that I come from a conservative country, so if I feel it, it must be pervasive.

This map is sort of a provocation towards that self-perception of San Francisco. In a city where no Republican can even dream of being elected, nearly half the residents still live in buildings constructed under Republican mayors' administrations - even though the last one ended nearly 60 years ago.

It might not seem that far back, but consider this: when George Christopher vacated the mayor's office as the last Republican to hold it (probably ever) in 1964:

Interracial marriage and gay sex were still illegal in California. Today, San Francisco prides itself as a global symbol of LGBTQ+ acceptance, has a Black woman as a mayor, and even the traditional Republican party openly embraces minorities of all kind (at least in California!)

The United States had only 151 million people, of which 88.9% were white. A year later, Congress passed the immigration act that completely transformed America. Today, the U.S has over 331 million people, of which 38.2% are people of color, and 28% are immigrants (myself included).

People were mesmerized seeing a man in space for the first time in history, after massive, military-inspired government programs by both the US and USSR. Today, we just saw first space tourists - private citizens. And these men went to space with computers a thousand times less powerful than what we hold in our pocket or on our wrist every day.

New Eurostat's data reveals that mortality increased dramatically in Poland compared to last year. After successfully curbing coronavirus in the spring and summer, Poland was rapidly overwhelmed by it in late September and struggles to curb it to this day. 

Up until November 1, 363,327 people died in Poland, an increase of 18,028 over the same period in 2019. But this statistic is way more dire in the past few weeks. In October, 53,759 people died - 15,183 (or 39.4%) more than at the same time last year. Preliminary data suggests November will be even worse - in the first week of it, 16.1k people died, more than twice last year's figure. 

Polish Statistical Office released (finally!) population figures for 2019 and I have traditionally created a few maps out of it. 

Overall, Poland had 38.383 million people as of December 31, 2019 - 28.6k less than a year before. The decline was solely to natural change - 34.8k more people died than were born in Poland in 2019. International migration resulted in an increase of 6.2k people, though it should be noted that this number does not include hundreds of thousands of people on working and student visas (last year, there was around 600k of them on average, with 1.2 million in summer months). 

Population change was not evenly distributed around the country, though. Major metropolitan areas noted significant increases: +27.5k people in Warsaw, +12.6k in Kraków, +11k in Tricity (Gdansk-Sopot-Gdynia), +9.1k in Wroclaw, and +7.7k in Poznan. Of large urban areas, only Łódź and Katowice decreased, by 4.6k and 10.9k, respectively. Rural areas, especially in Eastern Poland, are also depopulating extremely fast due to rapidly falling birth rates and migration to big cities. 

Flight home

I live in Dublin for almost 2 years now and I felt it would be a good time to do some maps about this city. So I discovered an absolutely amazing dataset of 2016 Census by Small Areas (and by small they really mean small, it can be just one street). 

Saxony, 2018 

Straight-line distances between European cities of 50k people and more

This map is inspired by this map of the French geographer Denise Pumain. I saw that map a long time ago and only now had enough time to gather all data to recreate and tweak a little bit my own map. Main differences: I took 50k+ cities (instead of 100k+ urban areas) and limited distance to 100 km (which I feel is the maximal distance between two medium-size cities that people can commute daily etc.).

Now, few surprising findings:

Central France is pretty empty. There is a bit of 50k+ cities there but they're all far from each other.

Same with interior of Spain, though this is more understandable (climate)

Post-communist states are very evenly laid-out with 50k+ cities, though there is very few agglomerations of such cities (literally three: Moscow, Donbas and Katowice).

When we think of the “ill countries of Europe”, we usually think about Italy, Spain and Greece - unemployment-ridden, stagnant southern nations where a significant youth population is described by the term NEET (not in education, employment or training). 

And while that might be true, there is one more - and unsuspected - country in Europe where a similar process takes place. In Denmark, that praised Nordic nation, employment among young people dropped even below late-crisis levels, and where labor force participation rate among young people is lower than all-age average by as much as 2-6%. 

It’s almost a year since I moved to Dublin. 

An interesting job brought me here. If it weren’t for it, I would have probably never even visited Ireland in my life. But here I am, drinking Guinness on an average Friday night. 

There is many things wrong with this city. It’s crowded, and the housing crisis is extremely severe. It’s always cold. Sure, there is no real winter (although this year it has come for a few days - see the photo above) but there’s also no real summer. Public transportation doesn’t work. Living is extremely expensive - from groceries to pricey and private healthcare. The city itself is unappealing.