Outdoor stuff in New Jersey is starting to open.
My wife is down at the community garden today, handing out keys and helping people to reestablish control over their wild-grown plots.
I played tennis with a buddy at the park by my house yesterday.
The dog park is open!
This is great for me. I've gone from interacting with hundreds of people a week to the usual quarantine family-time and Zoom happy hours. The lack of stimulus is making me a little crazy (although I've been passing the time with low-stakes online poker. I'm reading some books and learning some math . . . but I don't think I'm headed to the WSOP any time soon).
The dog park at least restores some random social interactions, for both me and Lola.
This morning, I got to talk to a smart guy from down the street. He's in finance and owns a HUGE house. He's a conservative but thinks Trump is a lunatic. He would have voted for Bloomberg. He thinks the free market economy is rigged against the environment but doesn't like liberal foreign policy. He's the kind of conservative that that-- if you're in a left-wing echo chamber-- you might not think exists (now, of course, he lives in Highland Park . . . which is the most liberal town in a liberal county, so that skews things).
He's a hedge-fund data scientist and he's sanguine about the numbers-- which is a nice change. He says if you look at the data, you really need three things for the pandemic to continue.
1) an elderly population
2) densely populated areas
3) cold weather
You can read all day about #3, but it seems that warmer weather will at least slow the spread of the virus (but this won't prevent it from returning in the winter). And it's getting warm and yucky in New Jersey (in fact, I've got the AC on right now . . . when my wife gets home she's going to yell at me, but it's 73 in the house and humid. That's gross).
I presented the conservative-data-guy the statistics rattling around in my mind:
For every 800 people in New Jersey, one of them has died from Covid-19.
Two percent of the state has tested positive for the virus.
We're still generating over 100 deaths and over 1500 cases a day.
He told me something I know: the vast majority of the people that died were in nursing homes. That doesn't make it right, but it could have been prevented. Old people really can't handle this thing. There does seem to be some long-lasting effects in younger people, but we're probably going to build herd immunity in New Jersey and New York (at a great cost, but the genie is out of the bottle).
He's rooting for herd immunity. It's going to be a long road. I got my antibody test this week-- I'm still waiting for results. The doctor said about 20 percent of people being tested came up positive for antibodies. I think I had it February, but my wife was negative for antibodies. And the doctor said the two things she's hearing most from people testing positive for antibodies are:
1) two weeks
2) it felt like the worst X ever . . . the variable being flu, bronchitis, cold, strep, cough, etc.
My thing in February wasn't the worst thing ever (although giving blood for the test WAS the worst thing ever . . . I was really nervous -- my blood pressure was higher than normal-- and maybe a little dehydrated because I went running. The lady had to do both arms-- she didn't get enough blood out of the first arm. I wanted to give up and leave . . . I didn't like being in a room with multiple people giving blood . . . wounds don't bother me but when blood is circulating through tubes and needles, I get light-headed).
We agreed on a few things. Other countries did a better job.
Taiwan, for instance, had 440 cases and 7 deaths. Part of this might have been the heat, but it's mainly through comprehensive testing and contact tracing.
Our President has failed us on the testing, the tracing, and the plan. This conservative totally agreed with that. Trump, like Putin and Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, is too macho to deal with something as small and statistical as a virus.
And Americans aren't big on mandatory tracking, testing, and tracing. Our freedoms don't mesh with fighting a virus. So we aren't out of the woods yet.
The attitude of the day is guarded optimism-- for now-- but unfortunately, winter is coming.
3 comments:
As I said at GTB, "The testing failure was completely unforeseen. It never occurred to anyone who drew up the CDC playbooks that we couldn't make a rapid accurate test in the first instance. That isn't Trump's fault directly (no one expects him to develop analytical methods) but he did appoint Redfield who is not covered in glory. This is a multifactorial failure but ultimately some blame must rest with the person in charge of the Executive branch. I think that's Jared Kushner nowadays."
It is stunning that the US government could put a man on the moon in 1969 but they couldn't develop a viral diagnostic test in 2020.
It's also amazing, but not commented upon, that seeing people in masks is completely normal now. You see photos of people testifying before Congress and everyone is wearing a mask. And they are all different--some are disposable exam masks, some are N95, some are store-bought cloth, some are homemade cloth. This boggles my mind. We are what, 3-4 months into this thing and we still haven't figure out a standardized mask? But no one bats an eyelash when they see Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell in blue disposable masks? And Lindsey and Mitch aren't up in arms that they have to wear masks now? Why aren't they like "Holy horseshit, how did we get to this point?"
i'll be excited to read a book detailing culpability on this five years from now, once we have a vaccine and things are back to normal. but we've certainly learned that Americans don't like anything standardized, masks included. i assume you've seen the video of the kentucky woman and her special mask?
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-20200504-qjpnujrrpzdtzlxlsavkfanjie-story.html
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