CoViD-19 and I

As you will have guessed from the lower frequency of entries in this blog, the pandemic has become less exciting. It is certainly less novel. Not only that, I've stopped worrying about toilet paper and soap. California's death rate is not declining, but was never very high, and certainly this county's was not; the state's hospital cases are getting slightly fewer . The nursing home where my mother lives has had a few cases, but is now clean again. But ... few countries have eradicated the disease, so we have to decide what to do about it and when. Aside: should more countries have tried? A few, such as New Zealand , were able to clean it out without an authoritarian government. The country that failed the worst, namely the USA, suffered from a mentally defective president and an excessive reliance on the letter of the law. Even China, which locked down earliest, took some serious damage to its economy; to be sure, this might not have happened if the epidemic had been re

In case you missed it, the four of us still seem to be quite healthy. The political balance is clearly tilting in favour of giving people some hope, though the (detected) infection rates in both US and UK are roughly flat and the death rate, while declining quite convincingly in the UK, is going down slowly and somewhat ambiguously over here. About those death tolls, there is reason for doubt. Comparing mortality figures in March and April against previous years, the NYT finds  that New York (the state) has some 23k deaths unaccounted for, versus an official body count of 26k due to CoViD-19, and California slightly more than 1k.  China has also revised its numbers upward. The silver lining of this analysis, if one dare call it that, is that the real death rate probably peaked sooner than we realised. The lead lining is that the infection spread further, faster, and probably started even earlier than any of us knew. I'm now re-reading  The Mercy Men , a childhood favourite o

Daily life is much as it was last week, so I haven't been blogging about it. I sometimes forget to wipe the doorknobs and such in the morning. We do still have plenty of disinfectant (we don't drink the stuff), but some of our bottles of liquid soap are running out. A friend of my wife's has given us some colourful masks. The numbers are not as good as I'd like to see, given that restrictions on movement and activity are starting to ease in some places. Neither the US nor UK is reducing its infection rate or death rate; they are staying roughly stable, which presumably means that medical staff are still over-stressed ... except for (in the US) those who have been sent home because their specialties are not in demand at present. Seriously? I also read  that it is politically difficult to make sensible decisions about who has priority for the use of scarce equipment etc., and no, I do not think such difficulty is unique to the nation from which the article is written.