CoViD-19 and I

 That's right: a few nanograms of RNA near the left shoulder, wait three weeks, a few more, and I'll be 95% virus-proof.  I'm keeping my mask, both because I'm only slightly protected in the first 10-15 days and to set an example to the unvaxed majority.  For posterity, I should tell the whole unlikely tale.  My wife, eager to fly to where her sons and her father live (three separate places, BTW), had been poking various Web sites for a week or two  looking for vaccine appointments.  She finally found one about two and a half hours away.  Then a day or two later she was able to trade it for one in a town where a friend of hers lives, just one and a half hours away and within reach of our car's battery (OK, it helped to get a little recharge en route ).  Her appointment was on Tuesday.  So the Sunday before it, I looked at my medical provider's app and saw nearly a full page of appointments, only one hour away!  Of course, it seemed much too good to be true.  But

As you will have guessed from the lower frequency of entries in this blog, the pandemic has become less exciting. It is certainly less novel. Not only that, I've stopped worrying about toilet paper and soap. California's death rate is not declining, but was never very high, and certainly this county's was not; the state's hospital cases are getting slightly fewer . The nursing home where my mother lives has had a few cases, but is now clean again. But ... few countries have eradicated the disease, so we have to decide what to do about it and when. Aside: should more countries have tried? A few, such as New Zealand , were able to clean it out without an authoritarian government. The country that failed the worst, namely the USA, suffered from a mentally defective president and an excessive reliance on the letter of the law. Even China, which locked down earliest, took some serious damage to its economy; to be sure, this might not have happened if the epidemic had been re

In case you missed it, the four of us still seem to be quite healthy. The political balance is clearly tilting in favour of giving people some hope, though the (detected) infection rates in both US and UK are roughly flat and the death rate, while declining quite convincingly in the UK, is going down slowly and somewhat ambiguously over here. About those death tolls, there is reason for doubt. Comparing mortality figures in March and April against previous years, the NYT finds  that New York (the state) has some 23k deaths unaccounted for, versus an official body count of 26k due to CoViD-19, and California slightly more than 1k.  China has also revised its numbers upward. The silver lining of this analysis, if one dare call it that, is that the real death rate probably peaked sooner than we realised. The lead lining is that the infection spread further, faster, and probably started even earlier than any of us knew. I'm now re-reading  The Mercy Men , a childhood favourite o

Daily life is much as it was last week, so I haven't been blogging about it. I sometimes forget to wipe the doorknobs and such in the morning. We do still have plenty of disinfectant (we don't drink the stuff), but some of our bottles of liquid soap are running out. A friend of my wife's has given us some colourful masks. The numbers are not as good as I'd like to see, given that restrictions on movement and activity are starting to ease in some places. Neither the US nor UK is reducing its infection rate or death rate; they are staying roughly stable, which presumably means that medical staff are still over-stressed ... except for (in the US) those who have been sent home because their specialties are not in demand at present. Seriously? I also read  that it is politically difficult to make sensible decisions about who has priority for the use of scarce equipment etc., and no, I do not think such difficulty is unique to the nation from which the article is written.

Yes, I've been lazy about this blog. On Thursday I got back on my bike for a short ride; that night I slept badly (which often happens when warm weather begins) and so took only a short walk on Friday. The rates of new infections and deaths seem quite stable in the UK and USA, but in California both are climbing; reverting to towards the nationwide mean, though I'm not sure by what mechanism. The increase in deaths is odd, because the hospital statistics are not growing. Perhaps deaths in care homes are being counted better? That will be a material change in the near future: elderly people will be much more afraid of living in such crowded conditions. However, I remind you who don't have an old demented mother that if you ever do, she will also be at considerable risk in any setting where she can't be constantly watched over. My aunt was once found wandering along the street where she lived, in quite cold weather and not warmly dressed, unable to remember which front

Let the record show that I did less exercise today than usual, but enough to feel barely respectable. California's numbers are growing two days running, with a considerable climb in new cases, and smaller increases in hospital cases. From the UK, the numbers are better, but the shortages of NHS staff seem to be severe. Keep those foreigners out, will we? I've begun thinking what my own return to work might look like. Does it, for example, make sense to go to the office one day a week? I suspect that is useful only if the team I'm on will all, or mostly, be there on that same day. Clearly a logical way to extend my contacts will be with a well defined group of people I've already been in contact with, and can trust to be truthful about whether they've got symptoms (one of the reasons I started WfH a week before the company said to was that I heard people coughing ... three of them). Someone I don't know might well be a spreader. How would I get there? I gat