CoViD-19 and I

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm back on the exercise routine. I didn't push quite as hard this morning as I had been doing, but felt better while walking than I had when I got up. I had also neglected my garden over the weekend, and spent half an hour out there after work, pulling weeds. I should have worn a mask, since there were pedestrians passing by. Most of them weren't wearing masks, but that does not excuse my laxity. Work was quite routine, but I've learned that Roche has publicly announced an antibody test for early May. Have I mentioned yet that I work for Roche? I'm not a scientist, though, so I can claim no credit for the tests manufactured by the group. We read now that a high proportion of the Diamond Princess  passengers were tested, and of the positives, 1.6% died. Given that cruise ship passengers tend to be even older than I am, this may mean that I have a better chance of survival than I had thought, should I become infected. It's still a ri...

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...

Almost on cue (referring to yesterday's entry ), I see an article about protecting hospital staff with hoods rather than masks, refitting CPAP machines to filter out exhaled virus, and other useful makeshifts. On the downside, the NHS is just about out of protective gowns. Clearly, we shall need to develop reusable protectives, though I don't know how; there was also an article a few days back about trials of various techniques for decontaminating an N95, using either far UV light, hot humid air, or ... I forget whether the third was a chemical poison. The only statistical news since yesterday is that California's rise in deaths is continuing. The trends by nation and world are essentially the same as yesterday. From Stanford comes a sampling study suggesting that the county had 3% infected as of early April, rather than 0.05%. But the test they used to detect infections is itself untested. If you see what I mean. The conclusion is easy to believe, but that doesn't ma...

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 li...

I did go for a walk today (three walkers, one jogger with orange hand weights that I think I've seen before, no dogs). But that isn't what I want to write about. Not that anyone is reading this blog. The politicians, media, and experts (mostly the self-appointed ones) have swung over to talking about when to re-open. John Cochrane is grumpily pointing out that jobs which don't require close contact (less than 2 metres) can in fact be resumed without much danger. Everyone else is pointing to the need for more testing, and I don't think even Cochrane would disagree. What matters most is what the politicians are saying. Seriously; honest, guv.  Why do I think so? A politician's main talent is to understand what the people want. I could go on working from home indefinitely, but the lesson I take from what I'm reading today is that plenty of people have had enough of this and so politicians have decided to give them some hope. This lesson also echoes what one p...

Early this morning there were more weeds in the front than I felt like ignoring, so my walk was shortened a bit. I saw three joggers. Work was quite uneventful. The fun part was looking for security holes in our code. This is an area in which I don't shine, but we can't afford loopholes ... and I remember the scathing things I used to think (and even say) about the developers of other pieces of software that turned out to have exploits of the kind that your mother warned you against thirty years ago. Will there be weaknesses? Almost certainly, but none caused by my laziness or foolishness. The county is slightly below 200 hospital cases, the state slightly above 5k, so not much change. The UK and US both show slight, perhaps ephemeral, declines in the numbers of new cases and of deaths; the doubling times grow, slowly; Spain and Italy show sustained declines in active cases according to [site that crashed my browser]. Their R-zero is below 1.0, and Spain is trying cautiousl...

At the Farmers' Market, nearly everybody wore masks, and more vendors --  though far from all -- had instituted one-way traffic, moved their cash registers six feet apart, chalked markings on the asphalt, and so on. Some of the markings on which customers were to stand while waiting were clearly closer to each other than six feet, but customers mostly took care to stand at least that far from each other. I bought a generous quantity of snap peas and made sure to thank that vendor for coming to feed us. So what did I do yesterday? Nothing; if possible, less than nothing.  Today? Not much either, but since two of us in this household celebrate Easter, we had a slightly festive meal, and I took my turn cooking it. Next Easter, I'll allow more time for the potatoes. This morning fifty non- or less-religious people attended our first online Sunday Assembly. Well, fifty of their computers (or other devices) attended. It resembled the offline one quite closely, apart from one gli...