Day 27. Wednesday. Bike again.
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. Statewide, there is an increase in hospital cases, perhaps 6%, which may signal the start of something, or it may not. The US continues to grow its numbers at a rate only slightly less alarming than last week, and has 4x as many dead as China, with 1/4 the population. The UK is doing slightly worse; neither country has yet brought its death toll to even a 5-day doubling time. California is at 6 days.
On the bright side, most countries (even the US) report more recovered patients than dead ones. The UK not only reverses this tilt has the melancholy honour of reporting the highest ratio of deaths to recoveries: roughly 40 deaths for each recovery. But it also has an apparent fatality rate of 10%, which almost certainly means that most infections are being missed; it may be that mild cases have been recovering without being counted.
I'd been saving as a special treat the NYT's report on how NYC got into this mess, but to read it this late at night would make me too angry to sleep. Instead, I've read this paper, explaining (in formulae, more than in words) that it matters whether people are of the same opinion on how dangerous CoViD-19 is, and that, in the US, these opinions vary along the left-right spectrum. Yes, when influential people lie and delude themselves, their followers will suffer, and not just in monetary terms. We aren't quite living through one of those catastrophe epics where a lone genius sees the trouble coming and (almost) nobody believes him, but we also aren't living through an epic where the genius will succeed in saving (nearly) everybody.
One more article about how the recovery goes. After a bad case, the weakness in lungs and muscles may, it is said, take months to mend (and need skilled help). Keep washing, then.
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. Statewide, there is an increase in hospital cases, perhaps 6%, which may signal the start of something, or it may not. The US continues to grow its numbers at a rate only slightly less alarming than last week, and has 4x as many dead as China, with 1/4 the population. The UK is doing slightly worse; neither country has yet brought its death toll to even a 5-day doubling time. California is at 6 days.
On the bright side, most countries (even the US) report more recovered patients than dead ones. The UK not only reverses this tilt has the melancholy honour of reporting the highest ratio of deaths to recoveries: roughly 40 deaths for each recovery. But it also has an apparent fatality rate of 10%, which almost certainly means that most infections are being missed; it may be that mild cases have been recovering without being counted.
I'd been saving as a special treat the NYT's report on how NYC got into this mess, but to read it this late at night would make me too angry to sleep. Instead, I've read this paper, explaining (in formulae, more than in words) that it matters whether people are of the same opinion on how dangerous CoViD-19 is, and that, in the US, these opinions vary along the left-right spectrum. Yes, when influential people lie and delude themselves, their followers will suffer, and not just in monetary terms. We aren't quite living through one of those catastrophe epics where a lone genius sees the trouble coming and (almost) nobody believes him, but we also aren't living through an epic where the genius will succeed in saving (nearly) everybody.
One more article about how the recovery goes. After a bad case, the weakness in lungs and muscles may, it is said, take months to mend (and need skilled help). Keep washing, then.
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