Day 24. Sunday. Other perspectives.
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 soup.
The articles I looked at were about the 1957 'flu epidemic -- I wasn't around then, but apparently there was one, in the US at least -- and the expected effects of CoViD-19 on Native American reservations. The latter are expected to be bad, given the combination of poverty, multi-generational households, and pre-existing health conditions. The former was bad, but no special precautions were taken against it, because (so the article claims) infectious diseases were rampant anyway. This last is true: my early childhood in the 1960s included several diseases that my children have been vaccinated against, and one (polio) that has effectively disappeared from developed countries. Oh, and I've read that there is no shortage of flour as such. Rather, the small paper bags in which it is packed for retail are in short supply, now that restaurants and suchlike are not buying the big bags: since consumption of flour doesn't change very much, more small bags are needed, and the production lines that make them are running flat out. This is probably not the whole story, but does make sense, and shows an aspect of fragility that I hadn't considered.
In our county, the infections do seem to be tapering off. Growth in total cases is perhaps 5% per day. The statewide data broadly confirm this, though LA County is still not doing well. The state's numbers of hospital cases are effectively unchanged, with some few percent of patients shifting from "suspected" to "confirmed" category, thanks to the well-documented lag in testing. The state's total of cases has grown by 10-11%, which may be an artifact of testing, and of deaths by some 14%; both of these are noticeably better than they were earlier this week. The lockdown took too long to work, but it is working. Soon we shall find out whether it is working well enough. At the national level, both UK and US are bending their curves, slowly and gracefully to be sure, but the trend is clear on the log-scale charts.
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 soup.
The articles I looked at were about the 1957 'flu epidemic -- I wasn't around then, but apparently there was one, in the US at least -- and the expected effects of CoViD-19 on Native American reservations. The latter are expected to be bad, given the combination of poverty, multi-generational households, and pre-existing health conditions. The former was bad, but no special precautions were taken against it, because (so the article claims) infectious diseases were rampant anyway. This last is true: my early childhood in the 1960s included several diseases that my children have been vaccinated against, and one (polio) that has effectively disappeared from developed countries. Oh, and I've read that there is no shortage of flour as such. Rather, the small paper bags in which it is packed for retail are in short supply, now that restaurants and suchlike are not buying the big bags: since consumption of flour doesn't change very much, more small bags are needed, and the production lines that make them are running flat out. This is probably not the whole story, but does make sense, and shows an aspect of fragility that I hadn't considered.
In our county, the infections do seem to be tapering off. Growth in total cases is perhaps 5% per day. The statewide data broadly confirm this, though LA County is still not doing well. The state's numbers of hospital cases are effectively unchanged, with some few percent of patients shifting from "suspected" to "confirmed" category, thanks to the well-documented lag in testing. The state's total of cases has grown by 10-11%, which may be an artifact of testing, and of deaths by some 14%; both of these are noticeably better than they were earlier this week. The lockdown took too long to work, but it is working. Soon we shall find out whether it is working well enough. At the national level, both UK and US are bending their curves, slowly and gracefully to be sure, but the trend is clear on the log-scale charts.
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