Day 12: Tuesday
Very quiet streets this morning. I walked for close to half an hour and saw two or three people walking dogs, a car warming up in a drive, a cyclist dressed in bright yellow, and not much else. I should go for a ride myself, y'know. I don't like running, and walking isn't enough of a workout to keep me strong for the long term. Quite what the traffic lights will do is anybody's guess, with almost no cars to trip their sensors. But by that same token, with almost no cars, it won't feel bad to just press the pedestrian button and block the cross traffic for 20 or 30 seconds. I could even ride by a few stores and see what they've got on their shelves, but that adds risk for very little gain. We are well supplied.
I'm starting to relax about the risk of my sons having brought a virus home. It has been a week for number 1 and six days for his brother, with no symptoms. We shall be just as careful as before when coming home from outside, and I wiped the kitchen quite thoroughly this morning (every day I think of more things that we touch often enough to matter), but if they do have a virus, it's a latent one. Which is, come to think of it, all too possible. Production of tests is being counted in millions per month, so perhaps one or two hundred thousand per day, and is that nationwide or worldwide? We won't know whether they've got it until they cough, and the same applies to my wife and to me.
The line between truth and misinformation is blurring. Today came a message from a friend who has a brother working in a hospital, and it contained the usual sensible advice about social distance, washing hands, and slowing the spread, but also some about drinking water every fifteen minutes and spraying your nose, which is dismissed elsewhere as, at least, unlikely to work. News reports are not very detailed; I should find a site showing graphs of the growth rates. Aha! The Grey Lady comes through, and so (with no paywall) does worldometer. You see, writing blogs really is useful.
It becomes clear that, whatever New York City did, it was too late. As was predicted weeks ago, different levels of government are bickering and pointing fingers, starting, of course, at the top. The numbers from Spain and Italy are simply mind-blowing, yet they may be dwarfed by India if the lockdown is not respected ... and India has a well-earned reputation for being an unruly place and prone to superstition. Here in the USA, there seems to be an urgent need to build up capacity to care for ... at least ... hundreds of thousands of severely ill people within a very few months, but I haven't heard of anything being planned at scale. And if it were, the Environmental Impact Report would take years.
What this adds up to is, "Don't get infected - nobody will be able to take care of you." Oh, and stop electing leaders who have divorced not only a few wives, but the real world in its entirety.
I'm starting to relax about the risk of my sons having brought a virus home. It has been a week for number 1 and six days for his brother, with no symptoms. We shall be just as careful as before when coming home from outside, and I wiped the kitchen quite thoroughly this morning (every day I think of more things that we touch often enough to matter), but if they do have a virus, it's a latent one. Which is, come to think of it, all too possible. Production of tests is being counted in millions per month, so perhaps one or two hundred thousand per day, and is that nationwide or worldwide? We won't know whether they've got it until they cough, and the same applies to my wife and to me.
The line between truth and misinformation is blurring. Today came a message from a friend who has a brother working in a hospital, and it contained the usual sensible advice about social distance, washing hands, and slowing the spread, but also some about drinking water every fifteen minutes and spraying your nose, which is dismissed elsewhere as, at least, unlikely to work. News reports are not very detailed; I should find a site showing graphs of the growth rates. Aha! The Grey Lady comes through, and so (with no paywall) does worldometer. You see, writing blogs really is useful.
It becomes clear that, whatever New York City did, it was too late. As was predicted weeks ago, different levels of government are bickering and pointing fingers, starting, of course, at the top. The numbers from Spain and Italy are simply mind-blowing, yet they may be dwarfed by India if the lockdown is not respected ... and India has a well-earned reputation for being an unruly place and prone to superstition. Here in the USA, there seems to be an urgent need to build up capacity to care for ... at least ... hundreds of thousands of severely ill people within a very few months, but I haven't heard of anything being planned at scale. And if it were, the Environmental Impact Report would take years.
What this adds up to is, "Don't get infected - nobody will be able to take care of you." Oh, and stop electing leaders who have divorced not only a few wives, but the real world in its entirety.
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