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 f...

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....

Yes, I've been lazy about this blog. On Thursday I got back on my bike for a short ride; that night I slept badly (which often happens when warm weather begins) and so took only a short walk on Friday. The rates of new infections and deaths seem quite stable in the UK and USA, but in California both are climbing; reverting to towards the nationwide mean, though I'm not sure by what mechanism. The increase in deaths is odd, because the hospital statistics are not growing. Perhaps deaths in care homes are being counted better? That will be a material change in the near future: elderly people will be much more afraid of living in such crowded conditions. However, I remind you who don't have an old demented mother that if you ever do, she will also be at considerable risk in any setting where she can't be constantly watched over. My aunt was once found wandering along the street where she lived, in quite cold weather and not warmly dressed, unable to remember which front...

Let the record show that I did less exercise today than usual, but enough to feel barely respectable. California's numbers are growing two days running, with a considerable climb in new cases, and smaller increases in hospital cases. From the UK, the numbers are better, but the shortages of NHS staff seem to be severe. Keep those foreigners out, will we? I've begun thinking what my own return to work might look like. Does it, for example, make sense to go to the office one day a week? I suspect that is useful only if the team I'm on will all, or mostly, be there on that same day. Clearly a logical way to extend my contacts will be with a well defined group of people I've already been in contact with, and can trust to be truthful about whether they've got symptoms (one of the reasons I started WfH a week before the company said to was that I heard people coughing ... three of them). Someone I don't know might well be a spreader. How would I get there? I gat...

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...