Like, not to be too grandiose about it, but this experience is changing me.
You're going to start paying attention to events outside heebieville?
Expecting things to still be shut down in the summer? I'm not sure you're wrong, but still, that would be unimaginably huge.
Like her beloved sleepaway summer camp. Things for kids that take advance preparation.
8. What's changed for me is that I have come to believe this will go on for a long time, so Heebie is right. I will be pleasantly surprised if it turns out differently, and yes, it is unimaginably huge.
"We don't have public evidence we're in phase three in India," said Ramanan Laxminarayan, the director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Disease Dynamics, on the phone from New Delhi. "But there's anecdotal evidence. The data and modeling show we should be in phase three. And it's very hard to prevent this next phase from taking place."India has 0.5 hospital beds per 1,000 people. I make that 670,000 total.
[...]
Harvard's Jha predicts that as many as 40 percent of Indians could get infected with the coronavirus, which could mean between 300 million and 400 million infected, up to 70 million needing some hospital treatment, and as many as 8 million to 20 million needing intensive care in hospitals. "That's not fathomable in terms of what the hospital system can possibly accommodate," Jha told FP.
The scale of that tragedy is incomprehensible.
On the small, unimportant scale, I'm still not prepared to accept that the fun conference I go to in June is likely to be cancelled (3000 people getting together to celebrate and drink homemade beer, with a median age of probably 45. No problems there, right?). I am more worried in practice about whether summer camp will happen, and about all the relative timings of school-or-summer-camp reopening vs. myself or my wife no longer being able to work at home.
I could stop doing that any time I want.
Yeah, India is going to be horrific, most of Africa too. I don't know why I keep seeing these stories about how with the summer cases will go down. We're now at 526 confirmed cases* and it's in the 80s during the day here and 70s at night.
*Alarming for a country with such a small population but the curve appears to be flattening.
16: But heavy air conditioning. No idea how it balances out.
Similar story: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-news.html
17 But most people are home and have been for almost two week. OTOH I suspect most of the transmission is occurring in migrant worker camps where they are housed dormitory style.
Now that it appears my parents are staying put in FLA with my brother and his kids (in a large house) I'm pivoting to getting much more political with them. I avoided it when I was trying to persuade them to think about going back to LI.
I should maybe think about getting back in touch with my parents. But the silence really has been golden.
I recently* finished re-reading Earth Abides** and the opening is similar to the photographer's experience. Except by the time the main character gets back to the city most people have already died of a new disease. He gets sick with something else and holes up for a while.
*In January, after having started it about a year ago, pre-Covid 19.
**Which I'm still not a huge fan of, sorry Stormcrow.
The NYT interactive here is quite something. I just plugged in a 14-day Trump-shortened lockdown; a 3% mortality rate and no summer letoff. I killed 6m people.
What's your high score?
Like a lot of people, we watched Contagion, yesterday. Quite a lot of it gets a lot of things amazingly right.
24, ttaM - I googled that it's not on Netflix. Did you rent or buy it from an iTunes like service or did you go through a free download service? If the latter, can you recommend a good site?
.
Predictable, predicted. A lot of people should hang for this.
25 I watched it last week, rented it from Amazon Prime.
In some ways, I feel a lot less changed by this than I might have thought. I think the people who are really changed are the people who felt secure before. I watched Jake Tapper interview someone from Anheuser Busch about their plans to make hand sanitizer and donate it. The guy kept saying they would take care of their employees but would not answer the question about paid sick leave. At the end, Tapper said, "I hope you'll offer your employees paid sick leave." I think for a lot of people who were middle to upper middle class, who had corporate jobs with good health insurance and who went to private hospitals, they were able to believe that they would basically be ok no matter what the government policies were or especially who was elected. This crisis and the failures of Federal leadership have shattered that illusion for many. I look at the comments from hospital-based doctors who are about to go without PPE. Until now, most of them never really thought of *their own* basic survival being dependent on the government functioning. And that goes even for some of the people who treated a lot of vulnerable and low income patients.
I don't feel particularly changed and like BG didn't feel all that secure before. While I am so, so poorly adapted to forced isolation I'm pretty well adapted to big crises and I don't even feel particularly anxious. I just wish I were empowered to do more that was helpful. I might be getting my clients back after having them taken from me last week (ambiguity about whether I can do tele mental health) so that's something. This is a very challenging time for people who have the problem I was treating.
Plus, I was reflecting last week, I really freaked out after Trump got elected, and while this isn't the catastrophe I would have predicted, on some level I've just been waiting. Maybe it's not that I don't get anxious, but that I got it over with.
30.2 is me in spades, especially since reading Jeffrey Lewis's "The 2020 Commission Report" - which describes very convincingly a crisis that kicks off on 21 March 2020 thanks to poor decision-making by Trump and, well, goes much much worse than this one is going.
My changes aren't around security or insecurity. It's more about how becoming a stay-at-home homeschooling parent was probably one of my worst nightmare lifestyles, and here it was thrust upon us, and so let's make it work. Plus my own job. A lot of things I "need" - like alone time - are totally shot, so maybe I've got a more flexible sense about how urgently I need them? Or maybe I will revert when context changes and it's suppressed as a need out of necessity?
I've already billed 40 hours this week. I'm still just worried about getting my job done.
I need to have a discussion with my boss about the shutdown business plan. I like this job and want it to survive.
And I've been wearing these formprinted elastic styrofoamy masks which are super light but smell terrible. Hard to describe. Like I'm living on the inside of a squash ball?
22: Which I'm still not a huge fan of, sorry Stormcrow.
Yes. well.
And no one has to be a huge fan. It just exhibits a simplicity of storytelling that I found refreshing.
One of my reads turns out unexpectedly to be a pandemic recovery scenario.
A Beginning at the End. Just published beginning of this year.
Six years after a global pandemic wiped out most of the planet's population, the survivors are rebuilding the country, split between self-governing cities, hippie communes and wasteland gangs.In postapocalyptic San Francisco
Not that good of book so far (kind of extremely lightweight Willam Gibson-esque). I knew it was some manner of apocalyptic scenario but was not ready for the relevant specificity of scenes like this from the first few pages:
The door opened behind Moira, bringing in a gust of wind. Footsteps followed, then a woman's muffled voice. "Vi'here are your masks?"
Krista's gaze broke, focus sharpening then trailing upward. Moira looked behind her to see an older woman, face hidden behind a disposable mask
"It's hard to drink tea with a mask on. But we'll just be a few more minutes," Krista said, all proper enunciation and tone
...
The older woman reached into her backpack and pulled out two more disposable masks, then tossed them between Moira and Krista
before heading to the cafe's counter, an audible "You're putting us all at risk" under her breath.