Why this blog?

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

In case I ever write enough posts that the first one becomes invisible, here's an explanation.

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.

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Setting the Scene

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
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