CoViD-19 and I

In the beginning, the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and been widely regarded as a Bad Move. - Douglas Adams The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly. - Madeleine L'Engle (or earlier The first kick I was given towards treating CoViD-19 as deadly serious came from  Liz Specht , to whom I was referred by  Marginal Revolution . (If you're at all like me, you will love MR.) People who work with me at RSS also posted links to some articles, including epidemiology and information about how long the virus survives on various surfaces. A key fact caught my eye: one of the most effective means China found to slow the epidemic was to shut public transport down. (They can do that in China, just by saying so.) Since I was commuting by train and bicycle, this made it clear that simply getting to work was putting me at risk. Being at work wasn't great, but it seemed bearable. There are surfaces everyone...

My older son, a History major, has decided to keep a journal, because undoubtedly history is being made. This pandemic is much worse than SARS or MERS, both of which stayed safely confined to countries I had never visited. While I hesitate to say that it is worse than Ebola, because the latter is far more lethal, it has spread wider and touched the lives of far more people. So I'm starting to keep a journal too. I wonder what it will turn into. You all know how we heard about a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, the stringent quarantines imposed by the Chinese government, and its early spread outside China.  About the only good I can see in that is that the graphs showed the true meaning of the word "exponentially", which has been widely misused over the past few years to describe anything unusually rapid. You all know how the Chinese made the virus' genetic code available and statistics about its spread; you have read the analyses about the difference between the number o...