Day 37. Sunday. Assemblies.
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, my wife orchestrated her church's online worship service, while SA Silicon Valley held a meeting of which much was about preparations for a proposed all-California assembly next month. On Saturday we had discussed among leaders of LA, SV, and EB how this might be done. The emergency is clearly promoting some community spirit. It may go away again in time, but I hope to keep some of the connections we'll have made.
Doubling times are extending further; the UK now has 11 days, on the NYT chart, and the US, 9. The rate of new cases, and of deaths, seems effectively flat. In California, the number of hospital cases is trending slowly but clearly downward. (I made that chart myself from the State's data. The lines to look at are the greenish one at the top and the red one at the bottom.) So we can look forward to the number of active cases declining, with just a little more effort. The question is, who is going to make that effort? or will the decline happen automatically? The factors that control this, such as differences on R between super spreaders and the majority, and rate of undetected asymptomatic cases, are unknown and very hard to find out. I hope, at least, that the panic over ventilators will recede once the burden on hospitals levels out. The shortages of gowns and masks are another matter. Having ample supplies of those, and doctrines for how to economise on their use in a pandemic, was a need very easy to foresee, and Jeremy Hunt failed to do so.
There are some well-reasoned analyses of the problems of measurement, but the boil down to one thing: not enough data, stemming from not enough test kits. It is hard to see what to do about this; the amount of surge capacity in manufacturing that would be needed is huge, and besides the kits themselves, we would probably need much more equipment to process them. That equipment is not simple to make. The breakthrough to hope for is a far simpler test, but I have no idea how one might be made. Something containing ACE2 receptors?
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, my wife orchestrated her church's online worship service, while SA Silicon Valley held a meeting of which much was about preparations for a proposed all-California assembly next month. On Saturday we had discussed among leaders of LA, SV, and EB how this might be done. The emergency is clearly promoting some community spirit. It may go away again in time, but I hope to keep some of the connections we'll have made.
Doubling times are extending further; the UK now has 11 days, on the NYT chart, and the US, 9. The rate of new cases, and of deaths, seems effectively flat. In California, the number of hospital cases is trending slowly but clearly downward. (I made that chart myself from the State's data. The lines to look at are the greenish one at the top and the red one at the bottom.) So we can look forward to the number of active cases declining, with just a little more effort. The question is, who is going to make that effort? or will the decline happen automatically? The factors that control this, such as differences on R between super spreaders and the majority, and rate of undetected asymptomatic cases, are unknown and very hard to find out. I hope, at least, that the panic over ventilators will recede once the burden on hospitals levels out. The shortages of gowns and masks are another matter. Having ample supplies of those, and doctrines for how to economise on their use in a pandemic, was a need very easy to foresee, and Jeremy Hunt failed to do so.
There are some well-reasoned analyses of the problems of measurement, but the boil down to one thing: not enough data, stemming from not enough test kits. It is hard to see what to do about this; the amount of surge capacity in manufacturing that would be needed is huge, and besides the kits themselves, we would probably need much more equipment to process them. That equipment is not simple to make. The breakthrough to hope for is a far simpler test, but I have no idea how one might be made. Something containing ACE2 receptors?
Comments
Post a Comment