Day 14: Thursday
Light frost this morning; if it had been warmer, I might have got the bike out. As things were, I walked across El Camino -- jaywalking in perfect safety at about 07:10! -- and failed to talk myself out of a quick swing through the supermarket. Eggs: none. Flour: none made from wheat, though there was almond flour. Cooking oil: hardly any. Cans of soup: some, but huge gaps on the shelves. Come on, people.
Someone I know took her three small children out for a walk and was stopped by a cop who told her they formed too large a group. Gaaah. I'm told the National Guard has been mobilised, including some to our area, but have seen no sign of them at all. More constructively, the supermarket had marked spots six feet apart so people who queue up can keep their distance. I still see very few masks. Good. Keep those for the medics.
At work, they're starting to think about making our lives easier, such as by shipping us the monitors we left at the office, where nearly nobody needs them. I don't that much mind making do with one, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I want to work standing. A fellow engineer sent me a description of one you can build cheaply starting from a desk of some kind -- search for "Standesk 2200" -- and I realised I could improvise. Ten minutes and four cardboard boxes later, it is done. Tomorrow I'll try it out.
Studying the graphs carefully, I see that California, the US as a whole, and the UK now have a doubling time (counting total cases, not new ones) of four days instead of the three days that obtained last week. If they keep this up, the increase over ten days will be more like 6x than 10x. But after more than a week of sheltering in place, I'd hope to see much slower growth. Is some of the growth due to wider testing rather than more infections? Probably, but I can't tell with the information I've got, and it's unlikely that anyone can. The situation moves too fast.
Marginal Revolution points out that
Someone I know took her three small children out for a walk and was stopped by a cop who told her they formed too large a group. Gaaah. I'm told the National Guard has been mobilised, including some to our area, but have seen no sign of them at all. More constructively, the supermarket had marked spots six feet apart so people who queue up can keep their distance. I still see very few masks. Good. Keep those for the medics.
At work, they're starting to think about making our lives easier, such as by shipping us the monitors we left at the office, where nearly nobody needs them. I don't that much mind making do with one, but as I mentioned a few days ago, I want to work standing. A fellow engineer sent me a description of one you can build cheaply starting from a desk of some kind -- search for "Standesk 2200" -- and I realised I could improvise. Ten minutes and four cardboard boxes later, it is done. Tomorrow I'll try it out.
Studying the graphs carefully, I see that California, the US as a whole, and the UK now have a doubling time (counting total cases, not new ones) of four days instead of the three days that obtained last week. If they keep this up, the increase over ten days will be more like 6x than 10x. But after more than a week of sheltering in place, I'd hope to see much slower growth. Is some of the growth due to wider testing rather than more infections? Probably, but I can't tell with the information I've got, and it's unlikely that anyone can. The situation moves too fast.
Marginal Revolution points out that
We like to say “speed is of the essence,” but a less frequent spoken corollary of that is “at some point it is too late to stage the defense we had been hoping for.”and offers some sensible ideas about what that might look like. The decision will be political, and that scares me less than it would in most matters. Politicians often make poor decisions when that they want to treat one group better than another. But CoViD-19 hasn't heard of race, ethnicity, and so on, nor does it know the 99% from the 1%. If a government policy can slow the spread, everyone will benefit.
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