CoViD-19 and I

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

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm back on the exercise routine. I didn't push quite as hard this morning as I had been doing, but felt better while walking than I had when I got up. I had also neglected my garden over the weekend, and spent half an hour out there after work, pulling weeds. I should have worn a mask, since there were pedestrians passing by. Most of them weren't wearing masks, but that does not excuse my laxity. Work was quite routine, but I've learned that Roche has publicly announced an antibody test for early May. Have I mentioned yet that I work for Roche? I'm not a scientist, though, so I can claim no credit for the tests manufactured by the group. We read now that a high proportion of the Diamond Princess  passengers were tested, and of the positives, 1.6% died. Given that cruise ship passengers tend to be even older than I am, this may mean that I have a better chance of survival than I had thought, should I become infected. It's still a ri

The exercise I skipped on Thursday and Friday probably would have helped me to a better mood on Saturday. I resolve, for some unknown length of time, to make sure I do get some. Today all I did was bike over to the Farmers' Market by way of an ATM, but I feel a bit better already. By the time I arrived at the Market, it was crowded in a Corona-esque way: difficult to stay six feet from other people, and queues at two of the three stalls I visited. Nearly everyone had masks, bandanas, or some facial covering. Oddly, at least one vendor did not. I hear rumours that another nearby market has closed. At all events, there seemed to be more vendors than last Sunday; perhaps word has got round that customers are still plentiful. In the late morning I went online to watch Sunday Assembly East Bay's first online assembly -- or was it their second? Probably first. That was fun, and I saw some faces I'm probably going to get to know better. In the afternoon, in the next room to me

Almost on cue (referring to yesterday's entry ), I see an article about protecting hospital staff with hoods rather than masks, refitting CPAP machines to filter out exhaled virus, and other useful makeshifts. On the downside, the NHS is just about out of protective gowns. Clearly, we shall need to develop reusable protectives, though I don't know how; there was also an article a few days back about trials of various techniques for decontaminating an N95, using either far UV light, hot humid air, or ... I forget whether the third was a chemical poison. The only statistical news since yesterday is that California's rise in deaths is continuing. The trends by nation and world are essentially the same as yesterday. From Stanford comes a sampling study suggesting that the county had 3% infected as of early April, rather than 0.05%. But the test they used to detect infections is itself untested. If you see what I mean. The conclusion is easy to believe, but that doesn't ma

I skipped exercising this morning, but don't worry, I'm not coughing. My belly felt a bit queasy, as it has on several previous days, and exercise would probably have made it worse. The rest of the day went much as usual. The numbers are much as they were yesterday, with the state showing about fifty more deaths than the trend -- that's a big bump! -- and some other upward blips that are hard to interpret, but small. The reading material is more pessimistic today, journalists being as they are. I've read about a company that ramped up production of protective equipment about a decade ago in response to an expected epidemic ... and nearly went broke. There's the usual stuff about price increases being both necessary to justify the financial risk, and politically untenable. There's the cautionary tale of the the UK paying 20M, in advance, for several batches of tests that turned out to not be good enough. Yes, but you have to take risks, with both money and li

I did go for a walk today (three walkers, one jogger with orange hand weights that I think I've seen before, no dogs). But that isn't what I want to write about. Not that anyone is reading this blog. The politicians, media, and experts (mostly the self-appointed ones) have swung over to talking about when to re-open. John Cochrane is grumpily pointing out that jobs which don't require close contact (less than 2 metres) can in fact be resumed without much danger. Everyone else is pointing to the need for more testing, and I don't think even Cochrane would disagree. What matters most is what the politicians are saying. Seriously; honest, guv.  Why do I think so? A politician's main talent is to understand what the people want. I could go on working from home indefinitely, but the lesson I take from what I'm reading today is that plenty of people have had enough of this and so politicians have decided to give them some hope. This lesson also echoes what one p

Early this morning there were more weeds in the front than I felt like ignoring, so my walk was shortened a bit. I saw three joggers. Work was quite uneventful. The fun part was looking for security holes in our code. This is an area in which I don't shine, but we can't afford loopholes ... and I remember the scathing things I used to think (and even say) about the developers of other pieces of software that turned out to have exploits of the kind that your mother warned you against thirty years ago. Will there be weaknesses? Almost certainly, but none caused by my laziness or foolishness. The county is slightly below 200 hospital cases, the state slightly above 5k, so not much change. The UK and US both show slight, perhaps ephemeral, declines in the numbers of new cases and of deaths; the doubling times grow, slowly; Spain and Italy show sustained declines in active cases according to [site that crashed my browser]. Their R-zero is below 1.0, and Spain is trying cautiousl

At the Farmers' Market, nearly everybody wore masks, and more vendors --  though far from all -- had instituted one-way traffic, moved their cash registers six feet apart, chalked markings on the asphalt, and so on. Some of the markings on which customers were to stand while waiting were clearly closer to each other than six feet, but customers mostly took care to stand at least that far from each other. I bought a generous quantity of snap peas and made sure to thank that vendor for coming to feed us. So what did I do yesterday? Nothing; if possible, less than nothing.  Today? Not much either, but since two of us in this household celebrate Easter, we had a slightly festive meal, and I took my turn cooking it. Next Easter, I'll allow more time for the potatoes. This morning fifty non- or less-religious people attended our first online Sunday Assembly. Well, fifty of their computers (or other devices) attended. It resembled the offline one quite closely, apart from one glit

Yesterday I did a very local walk, to the primary school and back. The tally was three joggers, one walker, no dogs. Today I rode west, a block or two past the mall. Google calls it six miles. In case anyone from a hilly place is reading this, the terrain is very flat hereabouts. The weather is a good deal milder than last week. The good news from work is that everyone stays on full pay. There is also some kind of extra reimbursement for employees who find themselves in need of child care, and extra matching funds for gifts to a few very select charities that are helping people who have lost their income (or something). I hear that production of test kits has been increased yet again, though I don't have hard numbers. The county sees only a very few new cases. The state's hospitals, as of yesterday, reported a decline of about 15% in the number of suspected patients and a much smaller rise in number of confirmed cases. Total reported cases for the state are only rising at a

I was going to go for a walk but changed my mind. Bicycling definitely works my heart and lungs harder. So I rode almost as far as the next town (and yes, I do know that in some parts of the US that would take hours, not 13 minutes) and back. I'm not terribly fit! but I was able to do the usual stretches and push-ups when I got back. We're still sharing the cooking, so today my elder soon made some chicken. It was excellent. At work, I'm having to "thrive on ambiguity", which is American for "figure out what to do". We've also done laundry, washing the masks that people had worn. In case you were wondering, we continue the routines of washing, disinfecting, and so on. Now for the numbers. Yesterday the slow improvement continued, though I was too lazy to blog about it. Today, the county has about the same number of confirmed cases in hospital, and roughly 8% increase in both total cases (I'm not sure how those are counted) and deaths. Statewi

I overslept a little, so did less exercise than usual. Grrr. OTOH my wife's shopping trip was quite successful. She was able to buy flour and toilet paper, plus the usual meat and vegetables. Dried lentils remain scarce. My younger son officially started his spring term today, and asked us not to bug him until his classes were over for the day. The numbers still show progress, even if some are too optimistic for me to find credible. In this county, the number of cases has taken eight days to double. Statewide, the numbers from the hospitals seem stable, but a significant percentage have not reported in as of 21:00 PDT, so in reality there may have been something like 10% growth. Even New York is doing a little better. Nationally, the US has doubled its death toll in five days and its case load (with a grain of salt) in eight. The UK has an implausibly low death toll for today, but the total number of cases have doubled in six days. Oh, and Boris is in intensive care. There have

Today I biked to the Farmers' Market, wearing my new mask, plus a cotton puff each side of my nose where the fabric leaves a gap.  I went by way of an ATM: the emergency has lasted long enough that I've used up most of the cash I had. There are slightly fewer stalls again, perhaps 70% of normal. The number of customers seemed further reduced; while a lot of people were still bare-faced, distancing was fairly carefully observed, making it hard to fit the usual number of customers into the space available. I saw one vendor chalking the word "ENTER" in front of her stall, and reminding the guy at the cash register to direct people the other way for exit. I think I spent a bit more than usual. We had a video get-together with about a dozen Assemblers, purely social, except we discussed the mechanics of our new Google Group a bit. It is already seeing traffic, which heartens me. In the afternoon I used up some of our dwindling stock of groceries to make half a pot of sou

Saturday is my rest day, but I felt energetic enough to walk downtown and back, once I had actually got up (not a quick process). Since it was later in the morning, I saw far more people than usual. I carried a disinfectant wipe with me, and used it on the exit door at the Post Office after checking the contents of a PO box. Returning home, I did perhaps the riskiest thing I have yet done during this epidemic: I invited my son to cut my hair. Yes, I needed it. No, he wasn't enthusiastic, but given my simple needs (short sides, short back, and there isn't enough on top to matter), he did well enough. I wonder when I'll see  a real hairdresser again. We' are close to running out of fresh vegetables, but I'm fairly sure we have some frozen ones, and the Farmers' Market is tomorrow morning. I'll play it safe and use the plastic bags the vendors provide -- normally I bring my own, but that is deemed risky. Given the improvement in growth rates (see below), and

Yes, today I put my wool socks on (it's chilly for April), got the old Specialized down off the wall, and pedal out, for the first time in almost four weeks. It felt a bit unfamiliar. I don't think I've been entirely off a bike that long in decades. The roads were indeed quiet, and I covered five miles. I used two main roads, which were not so quiet, but had plenty of gaps between the traffic. At work, there was a newsletter with photos of interesting work-at-home rigs, one using an ironing board! Yes, we have one of those too, but I'm not planning to use it; all of these photos showed a laptop only, with no large monitor. These days, I find the latter indispensable. We are now being advised to wear cloth masks outside (but not the medical-grade equipment). I have an old ear warmer that will be better than nothing. Better news is that the country reports only 90% week-on-week growth in both cases and deaths; I've not yet found a graph of hospital cases, but numb

The streets were quiet this morning, as before. I forget the exact count, but something like two cyclists, one dog, and two or three walkers. I saw many cars, but only because I crossed a main road. Somebody actually honked at me for jaywalking. I should seriously consider getting the bicycle out this weekend, or perhaps tomorrow. Lack of car traffic should make an early ride much more pleasant. The charts make dispiriting reading. Both the US and UK are doubling their caseloads every three days, even now. Spain is doing better than this and Italy much better. In this county, after two and half weeks locked down, cases continue to rise at the rate of perhaps 10% each day, though the counts are certainly inaccurate. Locally, I see more complaints about shortages of basic supplies, violations of social distancing, and so on. On the Web, cudgels and daggers are being raised against politicians who refused to see this coming. I too am past being kind, past mincing words about such a pr

Today on my walk I met one of the people who used to be at the Caltrain station every morning when I caught my train. She is still commuting that way. I hope she is a medic or otherwise doing truly essential work. I also saw two dogs being walked -- one by a couple, who very kindly stepped into an entryway so I could pass them at a social distance -- and perhaps two other walkers; I remember only one vehicle. At work, the higher-ups are continuing their efforts to provide us some degree of contact and information, by scheduling small group chats. There is also some thought of reallocating under-utilised people -- do we really have any of those? The numbers mostly show more small steps in the right direction. I am alarmed that I now regard a one-week doubling time as a good  thing. But if we can reduce R-zero by that much again (from one third, to one seventh, to, <thinks> minus one twenty-first), the pandemic will disappear eventually. Except that restrictions on movement wil