Setting the Scene
My older son, a History major, has decided to keep a journal, because undoubtedly history is being made. This pandemic is much worse than SARS or MERS, both of which stayed safely confined to countries I had never visited. While I hesitate to say that it is worse than Ebola, because the latter is far more lethal, it has spread wider and touched the lives of far more people. So I'm starting to keep a journal too. I wonder what it will turn into.
You all know how we heard about a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the stringent quarantines imposed by the Chinese government, and its early spread outside China. About the only good I can see in that is that the graphs showed the true meaning of the word "exponentially", which has been widely misused over the past few years to describe anything unusually rapid. You all know how the Chinese made the virus' genetic code available and statistics about its spread; you have read the analyses about the difference between the number of confirmed cases and the true number of infections; you may, by the time you read this, understand better than I do why there was such limited capacity across most of the West to test people for infection, even with two months' notice. Perhaps you know whether the rumours from Iran of mass cover-ups and mass graves were true. I expect you're glad you were not living in Lombardy.
The rest of this blog will not be about that. It will be, in the manner of H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds, a mostly personal account of how these events looked from where I was. So you should know a little about me.
I'm male, in my early sixties, English but living in California, Silicon Valley to be more specific. Married with two children at university. I work as a software engineer for Roche Sequencing Solutions (RSS), an arm of the Diagnostics division of F. Hoffman-La Roche. I've been in either mathematics or software all my adult life, excepting some months in physics research establishments (but I wrote software for them too), and that's how my mind works. I do my un-fanatical best to stay fit and healthy with diet, exercise, and sleep, but I have slightly high blood pressure and cholesterol. So the numbers that show high risk for people over 60 leave me concerned but not frightened.
You all know how we heard about a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the stringent quarantines imposed by the Chinese government, and its early spread outside China. About the only good I can see in that is that the graphs showed the true meaning of the word "exponentially", which has been widely misused over the past few years to describe anything unusually rapid. You all know how the Chinese made the virus' genetic code available and statistics about its spread; you have read the analyses about the difference between the number of confirmed cases and the true number of infections; you may, by the time you read this, understand better than I do why there was such limited capacity across most of the West to test people for infection, even with two months' notice. Perhaps you know whether the rumours from Iran of mass cover-ups and mass graves were true. I expect you're glad you were not living in Lombardy.
The rest of this blog will not be about that. It will be, in the manner of H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds, a mostly personal account of how these events looked from where I was. So you should know a little about me.
I'm male, in my early sixties, English but living in California, Silicon Valley to be more specific. Married with two children at university. I work as a software engineer for Roche Sequencing Solutions (RSS), an arm of the Diagnostics division of F. Hoffman-La Roche. I've been in either mathematics or software all my adult life, excepting some months in physics research establishments (but I wrote software for them too), and that's how my mind works. I do my un-fanatical best to stay fit and healthy with diet, exercise, and sleep, but I have slightly high blood pressure and cholesterol. So the numbers that show high risk for people over 60 leave me concerned but not frightened.
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