The U.S. is now down to 37 36 34 33 new cases per 100K population per day, down from 38 at the end of last week 37 when I checked it a couple of days ago 36 four days ago 34 two days ago. Daily new hospitalizations have fallen below risen to just over fallen below risen to just over 6000 per day. Deaths remain around 350 375 400 per day.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 8/11/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Single-ply toilet paper and other permanent pandemic-induced lifestyle changes.
It sure looks like this pandemic is going to linger.
For most of us, it’s no longer particularly dangerous. Hospitalizations and particularly deaths are concentrated among the oldest old — historically, a medically frail population — and among the unvaccinated — historically, a terminally stupid population. If you’re neither frail nor stupid, COVID-19 now boils down to having a flu-like illness of brief duration. Plus a slight risk of something more serious. Plus the hassle of having to isolate yourself should you get infected, something that could (e.g.) ruin a vacation or interrupt your work or school schedule.
But there are still a lot of cases in circulation. Today’s numbers (33 new cases per 100K, more than 6000 new hospitalizations) are well above the median for the entire pandemic. In fact, if you date the start of the pandemic to April 1, 2022, you find that today’s counts for official new cases and new hospitalizations are worse than most of the days of the pandemic so far.
Source: Data from CDC COVID data tracker, calculation and annotation are mine.
The upshot of that is that just taking the official daily new case count at face value, and applying a few rules of thumb, any sort of regular group social situation (e.g., school, church services, public transport) is bound to put you in the same room as somebody who’s actively infectious with COVID-19.
And if, as we all suspect, the actual new case count is now substantially higher than the official count (by a larger margin than was true in the past), the simple table above understates the odds. Plausibly, there’s now a large segment of new cases that go unreported due to the widespread use of cheap home test kits.
How you react to that depends on your preferences. I’ll go to the movies, but I’m not comfortable going back to the cardio/weight room at the gym. I’ll drive to get to a vacation destination, but it seems like almost everyone I know who’s flown anywhere has come back with a COVID infection. I’ll eat on restaurants while on vacation, but I’m not doing that when at home. And I’m still not thrilled about the idea of taking the Metro into the city and back.
As a result, there are still a lot of temporary changes in my lifestyle. But those are a result of the current high incidence of disease, coupled with my strong desire not to be one of the 6000 people a day currently being hospitalized for COVID. But if the new case rate ever goes down to a negligible level, I’ll pick up those old behaviors in a heartbeat. And if it looks like it’s never going down, I’ll probably just suck it up, go back to my pre-COVID habits, and deal with the inevitable COVID-19 infection when it happens.
But there are a handful of other changes that I think are more or less permanent, that I owe to the pandemic. Things that I would never have considered, in the normal course of business. Some I’ve kept because they are changes for the better. Others, not so much. Nothing drastic. Just a collection of changes that I’m probably going to maintain regardless of the level of COVID-19 in circulation. In no particular order:
Vegetable gardening
I started a fairly big vegetable garden early in the pandemic. I needed to get some exercise, and shoveling a few tons of dirt and mulch around seemed like a productive way to get it. But, as you can tell from this blog, that’s stuck with me. I expect I’ll be gardening at my current scale — or maybe even enlarge the garden — for as long as I am able.
Single-ply toilet paper
I started using this as a matter of desperation. During the dark days of the pandemic, on those occasions when my local stores weren’t out of toilet paper entirely, often the only stuff left on the shelf was the cheap single-ply stuff. Normally, I wouldn’t touch that. It’s the kind of TP where you expect the package to boast “Fewer Splinters”. But my local Home Depot started stocking it. And it sure beat the alternatives. So I bought some.
Turns out that a) it works just like two-ply, you simply use twice the length of it, b) it’s vastly cheaper per use than two-ply, and c) it’s packed far more densely than two-ply, so there’s much less packaging waste and rolls have to be changed less often.
How much cheaper? Restricting to name brands, and doubling the price per square foot of single-ply to get at a cost-per-use instead of cost-per-square-foot, the price of Scott single-ply is less than half the price of (say) Charmin double-ply. As illustrated above.
The bottom line is that’s its a superior product. It’s functionally identical to two-ply, but vastly superior from the standpoint of economics and labor input, and perhaps slightly superior from the standpoint of the environment. I have since come to learn that most serious, controlled studies of this issue come to those same conclusions. The main advantage is much lower cost.
My family remains unconvinced. So at this point, only one bathroom has made the conversion to single-ply. But that’s a keeper.
Cutting my own hair.
Source: Amazon.com
This is another solution that came out of desperation. For one brief interval during the pandemic, barber shops were closed. Then, for a much longer interval, it was probably inadvisable to visit a barber shop, even though they were open. And, in theory you were probably supposed to keep your mask on as you got your hair cut.
As a consequence, during that period you saw an awful lot of guys looking pretty shaggy. Myself included.
I wasn’t really convinced that I could, in fact, cut my own hair. ( …. and not look completely ridiculous afterward). But I looked it up on the internet, and it seemed fairly idiot proof. At least, for a standard old-guy businessman-style haircut. The various plastic guards keep the clipper away from your scalp, and you change them to determine the determine the length of your haircut. Shorter on the sides, longer on top.
So I bought a Wahl hair-cutting kit and gave it a try.
And the whole package pushes all the right buttons for me.
First, it’s made in the U.S.A., if you buy anything but their cheapest model. Second, it’s totally old-tech. It’s corded (no batteries). It uses an AC motor with replaceable carbon brushes. The blades require period lubrication with mineral oil.
And it makes the exact same noise that hair clippers made when I was a kid.
The clipper is basically something straight out of the 1950s. I don’t think I’ve seen a home appliance with a brushed motor in at least three decades. (I think maybe I owned a drill with a brushed motor at some point in my life.) Let alone one with user-replaceable carbon brushes.
It’s almost as if they meant to make these last a lifetime.
And it works perfectly. It takes me less than 10 minutes to cut my hair, start to finish, including cleanup. And while it’s not the best haircut I’ve every had, it’s a completely normal haircut. If you passed me on the street, you wouldn’t know that I cut my own hair.
In any case, now that I own it, I’m going to continue to use it. It’s not just a question of “paying for itself”. The first couple of haircuts more than paid for the kit. It’s more a question of convenience. If I wake up of a morning and say, my hair’s getting a little long, I just take care of it, right then and there. And get on with my day.
Cashless existence
My children used to mock me for my habit of paying cash whenever possible.
I had my reasons.
Among other things, it’s dysfunctional to give the credit card company ~3% of the purchase price, off the top, just because you’re too lazy to reach into your wallet for some cash. That hurts the retailer’s margins. It’s a completely unnecessary expense that burdens the seller, yet remains hidden from the buyer who is causing that expense. It not only complicates each transaction, it leaves a record of what you purchased, where, and when.
In short, cash has a lot of appeal if you’re cheap, paranoid, or both.
And, of course, “cash back” cards are simply a vicious circle. The credit card company takes more money from the merchant than it actually needs to make a normal rate of profit on its business. It then gives you your cut of it as “cash back”, to bribe you into making more purchases on credit. Meanwhile, the merchant had to charge you more, in the first place, to make up for the excessive charges from the credit card company. The upshot is that the credit card company is bribing you with your own money.
But you have no choice to play along with it. Because if your card doesn’t give you cash back, all that means is that the credit card company is bribing somebody else with your money. So you might as well take your cut, because you’re paying for it one way or the other.
I won’t even get into the oligopolistic nature of credit card processing in the U.S.
But the pandemic certainly cured me of my habit of paying cash. Back when the CDC (incorrectly) said that the disease could be easily transmitted by contaminated surfaces, it became exceptionally un-cool to pay with cash. To the point where most places weren’t accepting it, and to the point where there was a national shortage of coins because the normal flow of cash through the retail sector had been interrupted. (See Post #724, June 20, 2020).
And, despite my best efforts, I can’t quite seem to get my cash groove back. It’s not just the presence of card-only self-check-out at (e.g.) my local big box hardware store. It’s just that it now feels a bit strange to hand somebody little bits of paper, and get some paper and little metal disks back. Why that’s stranger than sticking a card in a slot, I can’t tell you. But I think the pandemic has left me permanently — and completely irrationally — unwilling to pay cash any more.
What is the sound of one hand shaking?
The last permanent change that I’ve noticed is the handshake. Or, rather, the lack thereof.
I am, in fact, somewhat reluctant to shake hands any more. This is, once again, totally irrational, as COVID never was transmitted to any measurable extent via surfaces. Including your hands.
It’s not just me. In my observation, there’s no longer any expectation of a handshake upon greeting somebody. Or perhaps I’m just a relatively unfriendly guy.
But in situations where, in the past, the first thing you’d do is stick out your hand and say “how are you doing”, that doesn’t happen these days. Or, for sure, it’s not the automatic and effortless gesture that it was.
I guess this is part-and-parcel of not handling cash. We’ve been trained to beware the invisible (and imaginary) COVID cooties that lurk on surfaces. Including, I guess, the surface of a friend’s hand.
I’m not even sure that this is something that I, as an individual, can change. Even if I realize it’s irrational. A handshake upon greeting is a social convention. Once that convention gets stopped, it may be kind of hard to get it re-started. That said, at the very least, I can make the effort not to hesitate when somebody offers me a handshake from now on.
