Day 35. Thursday. Annoyances great and small.
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 lives -- ideally not my life, yet I am taking a risk whenever I step outside, and perhaps even when I stay inside. One article points out that these transactions are usually paid for on delivery, but the makers need money now in order to ramp up production, and may find it difficult to borrow (see above).
Worse yet, the conspiracy theorists are coming out to play. There are legends about the origin of the virus, because Wuhan did (presumably still does) host a virology lab that was studying viruses from bats. There are legends about the WHO, prompted (I dare say) by You Know Who. There has been at least one protest against a state governor's shelter-in-place order. The legends will evolve towards faster spread, like the viruses they are. The protests are harder to predict.
Some people are going to have to rethink medical protective equipment. The old practice of throwing away one suit per patient seems, mirabile dictu, to have been abandoned almost instantly; it made sense when the patients had different diseases and cross-infection was dangerous, but now they've all got the same virus with minor mutations. Suits that are to be worn for hours on end can't be sealed up like the rig I've seen demonstrated, but will have to give the wearer a way to drink some water, and to eject it at the other end. It seems ridiculous that such suits don't already exist; not so ridiculous that the US FDA / CDC may have not yet licenced them for clinical use, and possible that they are very expensive (or slow to make). In the UK, one would hope that the NICE could simply authorise the use of makeshift suits and ask to be judged by results rather than procedure, but I'm not sure if that is true or to what extent. The legal landscape will certainly differ between the two countries: a lawsuit against an NHS is not like one against a private-sector company.
Much as I don't identify with conspiracy theorists, I am sure that some material facts are being overlooked -- journalists see the world through their own preconceptions, as do we all -- and nearly sure that some are not being made known to (or believed by) people making policy decisions. The fog of pandemic can be just as thick as the fog of war. (And if you think that at least this time we don't have an enemy trying actively to deceive us, look no further than Moscow, and perhaps Beijing too.) At least, since this isn't a war, there is room to ask questions.
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 lives -- ideally not my life, yet I am taking a risk whenever I step outside, and perhaps even when I stay inside. One article points out that these transactions are usually paid for on delivery, but the makers need money now in order to ramp up production, and may find it difficult to borrow (see above).
Worse yet, the conspiracy theorists are coming out to play. There are legends about the origin of the virus, because Wuhan did (presumably still does) host a virology lab that was studying viruses from bats. There are legends about the WHO, prompted (I dare say) by You Know Who. There has been at least one protest against a state governor's shelter-in-place order. The legends will evolve towards faster spread, like the viruses they are. The protests are harder to predict.
Some people are going to have to rethink medical protective equipment. The old practice of throwing away one suit per patient seems, mirabile dictu, to have been abandoned almost instantly; it made sense when the patients had different diseases and cross-infection was dangerous, but now they've all got the same virus with minor mutations. Suits that are to be worn for hours on end can't be sealed up like the rig I've seen demonstrated, but will have to give the wearer a way to drink some water, and to eject it at the other end. It seems ridiculous that such suits don't already exist; not so ridiculous that the US FDA / CDC may have not yet licenced them for clinical use, and possible that they are very expensive (or slow to make). In the UK, one would hope that the NICE could simply authorise the use of makeshift suits and ask to be judged by results rather than procedure, but I'm not sure if that is true or to what extent. The legal landscape will certainly differ between the two countries: a lawsuit against an NHS is not like one against a private-sector company.
Much as I don't identify with conspiracy theorists, I am sure that some material facts are being overlooked -- journalists see the world through their own preconceptions, as do we all -- and nearly sure that some are not being made known to (or believed by) people making policy decisions. The fog of pandemic can be just as thick as the fog of war. (And if you think that at least this time we don't have an enemy trying actively to deceive us, look no further than Moscow, and perhaps Beijing too.) At least, since this isn't a war, there is room to ask questions.
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