One of the things about being restricted to home is that supposedly you can eat better than if you’re eating out. But that hasn’t been the case for me. I’ve been eating hot dogs, ham and cheese sandwiches, pizza, and other things not particularly good for me instead of health things. Oh well.
This was the first official day of quarantine. Here is what traffic looked like on one of our major thoroughfares at rush hour:
Usually it’s bumper to bumper at rush hour there. Now it’s less traffic than a typical weekend.
The neighbor took advantage of his enforced vacation to finish building a deck. He hadn’t been able to work on it on the weekend because of rain. So hammering and drilling was what I most heard today.
Hard to get motivated to do work when the world seems to be ending… sigh. But have to do something in order to be paid, or else I’m fired. Rather than work, I’ve been watching the feral cats on the security monitors. One particular bonded pair, Snowy and Patches, have been of especial interest because they appear to have decided that my patio is their home. They sleep in a cat pile on a cat bed at the far back corner of my covered patio, and go out catting in the morning and evening before returning there during the day and at night. It is oddly touching, seeing these two very different cats (one neutered male, one spayed female) who quite obviously are quite fond of each other. And people say that cats are solitary creatures….
Alameda County Superior Court has cancelled all civil proceedings for the next two months. No evictions. So at least people who have lost their jobs due to quarantine are going to have a home for the next two months because the courts won’t be operating to process them. This will be interesting.
The crazy Democratic idea of sending every household a $1K check has now been embraced by…. President Trump? Not that it matters. Moscow Mitch is still holding up any COVID-19 relief in the Senate.
Kaiser-Permanente has rented large party tents from most of the vendors in the Bay Area and is setting them up in front of their emergency rooms to operate as triage centers. This is the closest I’ve seen to panic on the faces of medical personnel in my lifetime. Kaiser is probably best situated of all local healthcare providers in that they have extensive facilitiies that can be repurposed, large numbers of personnel who can be repurposed, and people on staff who have first hand experience with epidemics, and even they are looking really, really grim right now. Maybe because of a paper that said that 2.2 million Americans could die in this epidemic if the health care system collapses — and the health care system in the United States is already close to collapse on a normal day.
The CDC has been utterly useless. Their web site for healthcare professionals has all sorts of advice for preventing transmission of COVID-19, but nothing on how physicians should actually treat patients sick with COVID-19. The CDC is also responsible for the testing fiasco in the United States, refusing to allow anybody to do testing unless they were using the same obsolete machine and obsolete firmware version that the CDC uses in its own labs. The Federal response to COVID-19 has been so horrifyingly bad that the AMA refers its member physicians to the World Health Organization, which has tons of practical advice and research on its web site.
The National Institutes of Health, on the other hand, seems to be pretty on top of things. They have both an experimental vaccine and an experimental antiviral treatment already in trials. If the vaccine works, though, large quantities of it won’t be available until the fall. This tends to indicate that the current state of emergency is going to continue for longer than anybody has ever envisioned. I don’t know what the nation is going to look like at the end of this. I suppose we will find out, though.
Badtux the Snarky Penguin 
Once the hot dogs and pizza have been eaten, you’ll have to eat some healthy stuff… or more starchy, less salty. I’m hunkered for the next two weeks, and have been making soups and pasta sauces with lots of vegetables the last two weeks or so.
How long will this go on, how deep will it go… no one can know, the epidemiological numbers from all countries are garbage because there is so little rigour – it’s all based on what tests were able to be done, there are so many variables, and governments are inclined to play with them anyway.
But we do know that social distancing and reducing the number of new vectors (shutting down travel) will work to contain the initial outbreaks, but it’s just prolonging an epidemic that will see at least half of the population affected by the disease… just not all at once, which is the important and obvious strategy to follow.
I’d like to think that all Western countries, especially the USA could learn something from this, from spending money to fix health care instead of fighting another war to the idea of an Emergency Basic Income. It’s been obvious for a very long time that the general health of a society is tied to its least healthy members a lot more than its most healthy ones.
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Ive kept Stouffers in business for years and Iām still alive.š
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The whole world is strapped into a roller-coaster ride that it can’t get off of, and nobody knows whether the tracks were built correctly, or if there are low-hanging bars that will smash riders’ heads off, or if there’s even a proper ending built on the tracks… Not EVERYBODY’s going to die, but shit’s gonna get fucked up in so many ways that we can’t even guess at. The ramifications to Business As Usual are going to do more damage than the literal dying part.
I still haven’t seen much talk about “deflation” in regards to the economic consequences of this. The word is not even in the understanding of people who don’t geek out on econoblogs. The rest of the world will learn it soon.
Spare a thought for the 2 million+ people locked up in AmeriKKKan prisons. I reckon the disease will be allowed to run rampant through them, by design, and at least a million will be consigned to die gasping for air in locked, poorly ventilated cells. Even after they start burning the prisons down. Sovokamerika is dotted with Dachaus that haven’t ovened up yet. TPTB will be happy, and I estimate that a lot of the bloodthirsty USAnian citizenry will be too.
The medical system here is alarmed but still with an air of “we can handle this.” More hand sanitiser in the hospital where I’ve been working the most for the past couple of months, but no massive masking in most areas. The virus hasn’t hit Oz in a big way yet. It will. I’m hoping that a sense of social solidarity will cause Aussies, so many of whom weren’t even born here, to stick together. I will not be surprised if Amerikans tear each other apart, but I have a cynegative view of the place, eh? Will hospitals become war zones, as people whose relatives are triaged away to turn blue and croak because they’re over 60, or poor, or whatever, decide to shoot at the staffers who turn them back, and torch the hospitals in ragevenge? I expect so, but I’m just apocalyptic that way.
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The medical system here is not only alarmed, but its air is more “we will handle this, even though it’s going to crush us”, not “we can handle this”. They’re not under any delusions about their ability to handle 350,000 patients who need a ventilator. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. My local K-P is pulling old ventilators out of storage and setting up makeshift ICU rooms in their hospitals, which are emptying out because all elective procedures have been cancelled, and also digging out lots and lots of stretchers and such for setting up makeshift hospital rooms in their large network of clinics and medical office buildings, but the expressions I see on people’s faces is grim. Really grim. Nobody’s really confident that we’re going to get through this without a shit-ton of dead bodies. Everybody’s going to do their best, but we just aren’t set up for this kind of thing. Every local hospital has a disaster preparedness plan, but the disaster we were setting up for is an earthquake where simple trauma treatment is the most common issue, not for an epidemic. Epidemics were supposedly left behind with the 20th century, they just aren’t a *thing* anymore.
Except apparently now they are.
So it goes.
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