hot weather

"time inured then to it all and they ventured everywhere after without hesitation." journal of the plague year

a dearth of posts has not meant a dearth of new cases of the plague...the seem on the rise in fact...per the state health department there have been 367 new cases in this county in the past five days... and 4413 in the state...johns hopkins has a five day total of 351041 new cases nationally and yesterday's numbers put the ratio of new cases to reported recoveries at 3.83:1...hot weather would seem to have little effect on this virus and we already know it can spread in cold...so? the governor of the state has issued a five page executive order mandating face masks and threatening to close the state again...as if big greed wouldn't howl at that thought...oh it has the requisite exception that open loopholes and enforcement is in the hands of local health departments so there won't be any...we don't want to step on the voters' toes...or those of the corporate donors either...so? best bet this continues to spread because humans are pretty much informed by their habits and change is not easy...i have to wear a mask at work...wearing it in public is no big step...but i will be counting the maskless just to see what sort of compliance there is...some businesses are hard assed about it and have been all along ( menard's for instance )...others are not so much so...certainly the retail giant i work for has mandated that we prole not confront the maskless ( a corporate directive )...that is management's problem...i foresee laxity all round.

i don't always disagree with the times

the call has come...i am recalled to work next monday...that this may be a pointless exercise is unseen by an elite that needs a greed fix and doesn't care if i die giving it to them...and the times pretty much agrees...

my state is in every one of these graphics of failure...and yet the state is "open" as of monday...the governor says ( and he is a politician so we should expect some divergence between "saying" and "doing" ) he will close the state again if there is a spike in new cases...i am skeptical of that...nationally the figures have seen a daily increase ranging from a low of 22593 to a high of 34129 ( per johns hopkins whose numbers and available data have increased dramatically as time goes on and are far fresher than cdc's...and, frankly, i am not certain whether the figures are emanating from the univeristy or the hospital..i am inclined to think university ) and are on the rise over the past three days, 22593, 23481, and 24134 respectively...

1228609 confirmed cases in the united states and 189910 "recovered" is revealing...people are falling ill 6.46 time faster than they are recovering by this measure...

of the 7759771 people tested in the united states to date 1228609 are confirmed positive...15.45% of those tested are positive...extrapolate that percentage out to the entire population ad you get around ( populations figures are "estimates" ) and you get around 49903500 cases nationwide...is that reflective of reality? i don't know...and with only 7759771 tests out of a population ( estimated ) of 323000000+ neither does anyone else...

here in the state the numbers are, as the times reported, not declining...in the last seven days new cases in the state have ranged between 837 and 514...with 526, 837, and 633 over the last three days respectively...in the county the seven day range has been between 42 and 83 with 63, 72, and 55 for the last three days' totals...so...i am thinking it is too early and that there will be a spike in new cases...this i think the governor will totally ignore...or, at least, diminish in his announcement to keep the state working...no doubt the pressure from the actual power brokers is acute...they need cash...one has to wonder whether the consumers are going to respond...my surmise is this is not nearly over...that it will be seasonal...viruses don't do well in warm and humid weather...that's why flu season starts in october...the efforts to synthesize a vaccine supports the seasonal premise...why pursue one if this is going away? sure there will be a lot of money in it...only if there is a need however...one wonders what the true motivation is.

political will, uncertainty, and you

what political will there is involved in this seems to be earnestly wishing it would just all go away ( and, as a side note, i wish linsey graham would go away...he won't...but he should keep his mouth shut...or, at least, mind his phraseology...he might give someone ideas when he overdoes the south carolina good ole boy verbiage...another whore politician we all could do without...it does, however, provide insight into the drive by the elite to reduce us all to debt penury...keep in mind, debt is what creates new money and the elite are convinced they are entitled to anything they can extort )...and the numbers are clearly whacked...but they are "official" so we will run with them until something less distorted turns up...

johns hopkins' seem the freshest numbers i cam find out there and they have changed the format they present them in which eases some of my undue reliance on the number of deaths in the country which the cdc provides but which complicates things somewhat in other areas...they are still giving us the total number of "confirmed" cases in the u s...which today is up by 22593...the increase has been holding in the twenty-thousands for the last nine days...fluctuating from 22 to 29 thousand... they've added the total deaths in the u s ...which is up by 1472 today...for the same nine days it has varied from 1300 and change to 2300 +...there are variations in both but they are consistent...

they are still providing figures on the officially "recovered"...and new confirmed illnesses are outrunning recoveries at a rate of three to one...recovery would seem to be a lengthier process than two weeks...

they stopped giving figured for cities and went instead to states...so no more direct figures on new york city...and no one has "recovered" in illiois or california? one wonders why not...this state mostly began "re-opening" yesterday...except for three counties, one of which i live in..which are "closed" until next monday...what purpose a week serves is unclear to me since new cases continue to be reported..between five and seven hundred a day state-wide and my county is averaging sixty new cases a day... in the county 18% of those tested are positive and 21% of those tested state-wide have the disease...extrapolate that out and there are possibly a lot more folks ill who have not been tested for one reason or another and you have to wonder if "re-opening" is a good idea...the political will to do so is there and that is what will be done...a spike in new cases and we all go home again...we'll see what happens...with the state, the country, the economy...and if this becomes a seasonal visitor like influenza or vanishes...with all the talk about vaccines one supposes the clerisy is expecting the former...the variables seem manifold and no one can see them all...empirical territory is where we are at...time to be inductive.

open for business...sorta

all but three counties in my state ( and the one i live in is one of the three ) have come off the "stay at home order" as of 11:59 p.m. last friday and the first tentative steps towards "normal" are due tomorrow because this whole covid thing is winding down, right?

admittedly this is not new york...however the death toll there has incresed from yesterday to today...and if is is "flattening out" i am reasonably sure the bereaved find that heartening...

same holds true for los angeles even if to a lesser degree...

and in a metropolis closer to home...

while across the country as a whole people are falling ill at a rate 2.54 times faster than they are "recovered"...in my state in the last week the death toll has ranged from 28 to 63 daily and in my "hot spot" county from 1 to 9 while new cases statewide average around 50 a day...

per the governor's executive order 20-26 retailer "re-opening" is a limited affair...

and they have to "protect" their employees...

and an understaffed and overworked "enforcement response team" is going to ensure that the rules are adhered to by corporate governance when they get around to it...not that corporate governance isn't going to do what it pleases as soon as any inspectors leave the premises...this is play acting and making a pretense of controlling sociopathic corporate structures...corporate governance is firmly in control here...civil government except as a control mechanism to keep the rabble in line is a fiction...

and in all this us old folk are supposed to still say at home at least until mid month and if there is a spike in new cases and icu admissions we all get to go home again until further notice..okay...this is the new "normal" and no one knows what will happen...too many variables for feeble human cognition...and i suppose you have to start somewhere...however starting when people are still sickening more quickly than the are recovering seems counter-intuitive if you are trying to control the spread and i am inclined to think we will all be going home again...except for those of us who do not leave...i have not come to a decision about that as yet...again the variables need consideration...certainly we are all on our own in this...distance comes in many forms.

the wheels of commerce

"...the town begins to be lively again, though the strees very empty, and most shops shut." the diary of samuel pepys. 26 september 1665

this state is set to re-open at 11:59 p.m. tomorrow and there are plans ( one presumes it is planned ) in the works...

that yesterday confirmed cases rose over confirmed recoveries ( per johns hopkins ) in a 3.37 : 1 ratio and that confirmed new cases are holding fairly steady over the past week in the mid twenty thousands while the greatest number of confirmed recoveries in a day 8087 and that deaths were adding up between 1373 and 2437 as a high and a low for the same period is not going to slow "re-opening" one whit...chaos may however...i got an email from my employer today with a provisional "re-opening" date for the store of may eleventh...with the requisite number of provisos, quid pro quos, and ifs...

"we will be planning" "once a decision is made" "we will keep you posted as plans evolve"... okay...any event horizon has its share of variables and the process is probably a complex one and human cognition isn't really all that great when things get complicated...i keep coming back to tainter's "diminishing returns on increased complexity" as a prelude to collapse...given that many will be making more on unemployment than at work i am wondering how many will return to begin with...another layer of complexity...

my health is my responsibility and i cannot argue with that...i am also on the honor system as i am responsible for taking and reporting my temperature as well as "flu-like" symptoms...i wonder what happened to confessing someone in the immediate family has this virus...well...embryonic plans and all...one supposes that someone who actually needs the hours might dissemble a bit on some of these questions...and have you tried to purchase a thermometer recently? it isn't what i would call fail safe...but then, nothing anthropogenic ( spell check says that is not a word...oh yes it is ) is...

finally, just when hand sanitizer had begun to reappear in shelves is seems fated to disappear again...ostensibly to protect the consumer from carcinogens...okay..the fda is on the job...soap and water it is...as "re-opening" lurches forward it will be of interest to see who goes back first and how many decline the offer..this whole process could bog down for months...collapse may not be probable...to rule it out as a possibility is hubris...and managers are chock full of that.

grind

"the bills increased mightily..."samuel pepys august 1665

while the increase could be described as growing "mightily" i would call it more arithmetic...

in the last two days the number of confirmed cases in the u s has grown by 60,600...

and the officially "recovered" by 7,966...so people are falling ill as opposed to recovering at a ratio of 7.6 : 1...not of necessity good news...

death rates in new york, chicago, and los angeles continue to rise...flattening perhaps, but not declining...

and in his narcissistic frenzy the president provides nothing in terms of leadership...and a clinic in self-absorption...

there was never a moment when listening to this would have been helpful..the time to "tune out" has come...and in the midst of this we are preordained to "re-open" by singularly economic pressures...freedom of movement has nothing to do with it...greed needs a fix and that is the driver here...protesters are usually tools of an ideology and ideology is the work of idealists..and idealists are crack-brained meddlers who have a vision of human perfection which could be attained if only we would all do things their way...belief in the possibility of perfection leads people to do some awful things to no real result...the upshot? do not drink bleach...it will kill you...i have no word from my alleged employer on when i might be asked to use ppe and practice "social distancing" in a confined space...the directives on how to achieve this should prove interesting, if not entertaining...we will look into those as they arrive...if they arrive..they may just call it a day...meanwhile the government, the media, and life all grind on...and the surreal quality has not diminished...

quackery

"One mischief was, that if the poor people asked these mock astrologers whether there would be a plague or no, they all agreed in general to answer 'Yes', for that kept up their trade. And had the people not been kept in a fright about that, the wizards would presently have been rendered useless, and their craft had been at an end." daniel defoe. a journal of the plague year.

no hogs, dogs, or cats

"that no hogs, dogs, or cats, or tame pigeons, or ponies be suffered to be kept within any part of the city, or any swine to be or stray into the streets or lanes, but that such swine be impounded by the beadle or any other officer and the owner punished according to the act of common council, and that the dogs to be killed by the dog-killers appointed for that purpose." edict by lord mayor sir john lawrence 1665.

well intended i suppose...unpopular with some as well...

and that sort of bureaucratic thinking has not evaporated in three hundred and fifty five years...leave it to government institutions to exacerbate a crisis by fomenting another one...how many cat owners misread this and how many shelters are being overrun as i type? who knows...no cats or dogs here..there is a bird...are we going to be warned about avian influenza any time soon?

the number of new cases in the country has some variation from day to day...37346 wednesday...17318 yesterday...and 36586 today ...growing daily but with some variation...

there is no stability in the "recovered" reports either...2146 reported nationally wednesday...914 yesterday...4320 today...no one will argue with a recovery spike...some consistently growing numbers would be better...here in the state 641 new cases in the past day and 99 in the county and the death rate is holding steady as well...while 21% of those tested in the county are positive and 18% across the state...level it may be...diminishing it is not and the state is due to "re-open" actually on may second which seems imprudent to me but is probably what will happen...how quickly it happens and if anything resembling the old "normal" re4constructs itself is still an unknown...too many unknown variables and...

i personally still am astounded at the death rate in new york city...especially compared to los anglese which has a marginally greater population density...density seems to not be much of a factor...cook county in illinois has half ( or a bit less ) of the populaton density of the other two but still has more deaths than los angeles...i keep coming back to my correspondent's theory of no mass transit in l a...anyone with a better one? let me know...so? will there be a spike in new cases in may...will the virus die down in hot humid weather...will it turn up again in the autumn and will we all find ourselves at home again? thinking no one knows...i certainly do not...i have questions, not answers...and. being who i am, i doubt anyone else has the answers either...waiting for events to unfold..until then there will be no new cat or dog here...the bird stays...she is innocent.