Ensconced at home, every day is the same, sort of, while out in the world, the numbers of people infected by COVID-19 continues to grow exponentially. Then in California, Sunday was lower than Saturday, both in deaths and new cases, and then Monday was even lower and I thought maybe the last two weeks of the Bay Area sequestering ourselves was actually working. Then, today, infections jumped to over a thousand new infections and the total number in California now is 8,548. That’s a lot but way less than 83,712 in New York today so maybe the sequestering is working.
Last weekend, we went to our first coronavirus birthday party. We all stayed at home and wished the birthday girl a Happy Birthday over Zoom. Before the party, Craig Taylor baked 24 cupcakes and distributed them far and wide, at 7:30 we all Zoomed into..what? the matrix? let’s just say an imaginary space…on a server in the imaginary cloud. Maybe in Prineville Oregon? There we all lit our candles together and sang Happy Birthday to Carol Drummond.
I have to take a blood test and rather than just blithely going down to the lab at Sequoia Hospital and doing it, I am strategizing the safest way to get tested. My doctor’s office building has a testing facility on the lower floor and wide halls so my plan is to go there.
A couple of days ago, we went for a delightful walk in Edgewood Park but it is now closed because too many people were using it. Now we are walking around the neighborhood which is almost a park anyway but I wonder about people who are living in small apartments, where do they go? How do they get out? and I realize how lucky we really are.
We went down to Stanford the other day, nominally to see the Arizona Garden but really to get out of the house. It was a cold day and the light was flat so not really a good day to wander a garden but still good to get out. Normally we would be glad to see other people but in this new world, all we wanted to do was keep our distance. About the time we walked by the Stanford Mausoleum, a dog ran up to me and I backed up.
As an aside, I used to be a dog person but I got sort of bitten in a Bali rice paddy more than twenty years ago and I’m still a little freaked. I say sort of because, after I walked by, the dog took a lunge at my calf and drew blood but very little and I say a little freaked because it taught me how fast things can change with an animal. End aside.
In the past, when I backed up, the owner would say something like, “oh, he’s harmless, he won’t bite”, now everything has changed, now the owner laughed and said, “That’s right, don’t touch other people’s dogs.”
My world has changed the same way the contagion has changed: imperceptible, then slowly, slowly, then boom! it’s a new world. On December 31st of last year, the Chinese government announced that they were treating a new virus that they knew about for a couple of weeks but had been suppressing the information saying that there was no evidence it could spread from human to human. I must have read about it in early January but it made no impression, then, in February, a slight problem in distant Wuhan couldn’t pull our attention away from Death Valley’s weather conditions. But the slight problem only seemed that way because I wasn’t paying attention, France had already had its first death, Korea a major outbreak, and Iran, for some unknown reason, had become another center.
I went to my last Cardiac Rehab workout at Sequoia Hospital on March 9th a full nines days after the first coronavirus death in the United States. We were a nervous group but, somehow, we thought we were being responsible. Two days later when I had lunch with Barbara, an old friend and my former partner in Stern & Champion. I went home glad we had gotten together but feeling oddly guilty. Monday, it had seemed like a good idea but by Wednesday, it seemed dumb, too risky. The US had 1,260 cases with 28 then and now we have more cases than China at 85,498 (that’s reported cases, China may have more).
Three weeks ago, or thereabouts, I remember reading that the Chinese government had shut the country down – the story came with the caveat that this kind of social control was something that democracies would never be able to do – and the smog went away. Every day, I get an email from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District that gives the Air Quality Forecast for SF Bay Area for the next five days and every day, for the last couple of weeks, the forecast has been green. It is green because we are shut down in a way that didn’t seem possible only three weeks ago. It is sort of shocking.
“I don’t take responsibility at all” is such a huge in-kind donation to the Joe Biden campaign that I wonder if Trump broke campaign finance laws in making it. Tweet by Ezra Klein
Everything is changing so fast, almost everything I write, I disagree with a day later. Two days ago, I wrote: We are lucky this is happening with a Republican president. If Obama were president, or God forbid, Hillary, a Republican Senate would never be talking these kinds of regular people-centered solutions and numbers. But it turns out that the Republican Senators weren’t really talking about a people-centered solution, the Senate was just teasing. As soon as word got out that Congress was talking about spending money to mitigate the crisis, corporate lobbyists started elbowing their way up to the head of the line. Airlines, especially, are in trouble and are looking for some sort of handout. Under the Trump tax cut, they used that handout to buy back their stock which has now hurt their liquidity.
Every day, when I get up and look at the news, it feels worse. Yesterday’s counter on the right front page of the LA Times said 1,802 confirmed COVID-19 cases with 35 deaths and 33,276 confirmed cases in the US with 417 deaths and today it reads 2,065 and 40. The governor is no longer talking about people sheltering in place to not catch the virus but sheltering in place to spread out the contagion period so hospitals are not as overwhelmed. The president is now talking about ending sheltering in place because it is bad for business saying “We’re going to be opening our country up for business, because our country was meant to be open.”
And every day, even though it is cold and crummy outside, more flowers bloom.
The greatest contribution you can make is: don’t gather together, don’t cause chaos, the Guangming Daily a Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda rag.
“The way we get ahead of it is, I want people to assume that we’re overreacting because if it looks like you’re overreacting you’re probably doing the right thing,” Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.
When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why. Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer upon the disbandment of the Pandemic Response Team by John Bolton in 2018.
Are there any nurses or doctors who are able to put in an IV in next half hour? Thank you. A message on the local neighborhood social networking service.
This post is sort of a coronavirus potpourri, starting with the good news. At last, a cold front is moving through California and it is cold and raining outside. I probably wouldn’t want to go out anyway, but, somehow, having to be inside is making this whole thing seem surreal and giving me cabin fever.
There is a voice in me that says: “What if this whole thing is really fake, well, not fake but blown up way out of proportion and I am sheltering in place for no real reason.” The problem is that, if staying away from people is not an overreaction, if there really is a pandemic, if staying at home really will help, then staying away from people will seem like it wasn’t really necessary because the pandemic will not be as powerful. This is called the paradox of preparation according to a Tweet by Chris Hayes.
This is obviously not something that the Trump administration expected, How could they, nobody expected it. They knew it was possible, just not likely, like “This has never happened before.” not likely. So the Trump Administration thought: Let’s save some money, which we can use elsewhere, by getting rid of the U.S. Pandemic Response Team. Which is exactly what they did, in 2018. One thing that I read, probably, twenty years ago is that successful people are gamblers and so are people who are now homeless, the difference in the result is often just a matter of luck. However, people who are responsible for the well being of others are usually not gamblers. Formula One is a large group of gamblers but the people on the F1 Emergency Medical Team are not and they will not let a race start in the fog because the medical helicopters can not fly in the fog. Trump may be gambling that a Global Pandemic won’t happen, just like they are gambling that Global Climate is not real, even Mark Esper, the Secretary of Defence, might not think either is real, but the people in the Pentagon who are responsible for long term planning, especially logistical planning, are basing their planning around Global Climate Change just like the engineers at Ensco or Transocean, who build and maintain oil drilling platforms, are building them high enough to accommodate sea rise.
For me, the biggest anxiety producer is the lack of facts, the uncertainty of the whole thing. We live in San Mateo County near the border to Santa Clara County, that’s close to being at the US epicenter of the pandemic. San Mateo has 64 cases and two deaths while Santa Clara has 138 cases with four deaths but I have no idea how many people have been tested. If one thousand people have been tested because they were out of the country or possibly exposed and only 202 have tested positive that is completely different than 205 people have been tested and 202 are positive. Because we’re still not testing – OK, we are testing on a very limited and selective basis – nobody has any idea of the percentage of positive readings compared to tests taken or percentage of the general population that have the virus.
I’m going to the drugstore today and I wonder how do I treat my prescriptions. I get a bottle of pills in a bag, the person that handed me the bag has handled it – and I get the bag should be disposed of once I get home – but they probably haven’t handled the bottles inside. Still, the pharmacist probably has. However, the pharmacist probably hasn’t touched the pills inside because a machine did the counting. Do I clean the pill jar? What are the chances it is contaminated? And what about a bag of frozen peas? Will the freezer kill the virus? And what about our mail? Will ripping the covers off of the magazines make them safe to read or should I just put them in the recycling?
In the meanwhile, try to stay safe. If you can, go outside alone and listen to the spring birds sing. The world is alive and it is inspiring.
