Day 29. Friday. I biked.
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 about 5% a day, nor is the death toll growing much faster than that. The US as a whole has leveled off the number of new cases, thanks mostly to New York posting only a 6% growth. Doubling times for the US are just under a week, but it is still poised to vertake Italy's shocking body count in about two days. The UK is making really slow progress, with cases doubled in about 6 days and deaths in 5. Oh, and Boris is out of intensive care.
Looking at the NYT's charts of California by county, I notice that San Francisco, which has after all had some experience with a nasty epidemic in living memory, spent only three days in its rapid growth phase before people started being safe. Some counties took over a week, or sped their growth rate up after it had slowed down. Stay the fuck at home!
Apparently some thoughtful and knowledgeable people have not only thought about, but published, plans for the longer terms (months). They are more realistic than reassuring. This article in Vox says concisely, "There is no plan to return to normal." Or as one of my favourite authors says in an early book of his, "We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed."
We shall have to be changed if we are going to live with this disease in our midst, and any eradication that we may succeed in doing by a combination of vaccine and quarantine will be temporary, given that it has non-human hosts of unknown number and species. (Think about malaria.) Possibly it will spur the invention of much better anti-viral medicines, but I imagine scientists were already working on those, and clearly with scanty success. I don't even know whether the viruses that infect us have enough in common to make a general anti-viral drug possible; if even a general anti-coronavirus drug existed, we'd be using it against 'flu, so there must have already been plenty of incentive to invent one.
The SF reader in me says we may have to evolve our way out of this one: there should be strong selective pressure in favour of people who can survive CoViD-19 without intensive care, so that our grandchildren will be changed. However, I'm assuming that there is a genetic difference between the survivors and the dead, while it may simply be that the former got a small dose or the latter were all already ill (diagnosed or not) with something that hampered their immune systems. Or there may be a genetic difference with a hefty drawback: look again at malaria ... and sickle-cell anaemia.
My son was right: we are making history. Or it is remaking us.
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 about 5% a day, nor is the death toll growing much faster than that. The US as a whole has leveled off the number of new cases, thanks mostly to New York posting only a 6% growth. Doubling times for the US are just under a week, but it is still poised to vertake Italy's shocking body count in about two days. The UK is making really slow progress, with cases doubled in about 6 days and deaths in 5. Oh, and Boris is out of intensive care.
Looking at the NYT's charts of California by county, I notice that San Francisco, which has after all had some experience with a nasty epidemic in living memory, spent only three days in its rapid growth phase before people started being safe. Some counties took over a week, or sped their growth rate up after it had slowed down. Stay the fuck at home!
Apparently some thoughtful and knowledgeable people have not only thought about, but published, plans for the longer terms (months). They are more realistic than reassuring. This article in Vox says concisely, "There is no plan to return to normal." Or as one of my favourite authors says in an early book of his, "We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed."
We shall have to be changed if we are going to live with this disease in our midst, and any eradication that we may succeed in doing by a combination of vaccine and quarantine will be temporary, given that it has non-human hosts of unknown number and species. (Think about malaria.) Possibly it will spur the invention of much better anti-viral medicines, but I imagine scientists were already working on those, and clearly with scanty success. I don't even know whether the viruses that infect us have enough in common to make a general anti-viral drug possible; if even a general anti-coronavirus drug existed, we'd be using it against 'flu, so there must have already been plenty of incentive to invent one.
The SF reader in me says we may have to evolve our way out of this one: there should be strong selective pressure in favour of people who can survive CoViD-19 without intensive care, so that our grandchildren will be changed. However, I'm assuming that there is a genetic difference between the survivors and the dead, while it may simply be that the former got a small dose or the latter were all already ill (diagnosed or not) with something that hampered their immune systems. Or there may be a genetic difference with a hefty drawback: look again at malaria ... and sickle-cell anaemia.
My son was right: we are making history. Or it is remaking us.
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