The post-Labor Day decline in newly diagnosed cases continues. The U.S. new COVID case count is now at 20 / 100K / day, down two from just a couple of days ago. Deaths are approaching 300/day, hospitalizations are below 4500/day. Continue reading Post #1585, COVID-19, finishing the data week at 20/100K/day.
At this point, it looks like the daily new COVID-19 case count has declined relative to the pre-Labor Day period. The U.S. stands at 22 new cases per 100K population per day. Continue reading Post #1584, COVID-19, post-Labor Day decline (!)
This is more of a note-to-self than a posting for the public. But come along for the ride if you care to.
This is about getting fed up with short-lived rechargeable battery packs for a home device. And deciding to Do Something About It!
I don’t actually make the repair in this post — I need to get my hands on some parts. But I outline my proposed solution. Continue reading Post #1853, autopsy of a Mint 5200 battery pack failure.
If you’ve been following along, you know the drill at that point. Holidays disrupt the COVID-19 numbers. Mostly, that’s just a disruption of data reporting. But to some smaller degree, there will typically be a drop in formally-diagnosed new cases, once all the dust has settled. Plausibly, people who are only mildly ill will be more likely to forego a formal test if their symptoms appear on a holiday.
As a result, you have to wait a couple of days past the holiday, in the hopes that the numbers will bounce back to their true trend.
FWIW, on paper, the U.S. stands at 23 new cases per 100K per day, down three from the Friday before Labor Day. I expect that will bounce up a bit yet, based on what appears to be under-reporting in California.
That said, reported hospitalizations are down to 4400 per day, deaths are down to 350. Both of those are improvements over the pre-Labor-Day period. Continue reading Post #1582, COVID-19, post-Labor Day decline (?)
That’s the hardware version of Segal’s Law.
Take two garages, a basement, and a son who borrows tools at will. Add in decades of hardware accumulation from D-I-Y home projects. Season with a habit of leaving tools wherever I last used them. Top off with limited storage space and an increasingly faulty memory.
The result is chaos.
These days, every significant D-I-Y project starts off with a 15 minute stream of questions. Don’t I already own a blank? Where the hell did I leave that blank? Is that the blank that broke five years ago, or did I buy another blank to replace that? Didn’t I lend that blank to somebody? Which toolbox would I have put that blank in?
Honey, do you have any idea where I would have left my blank?
And, for those of us in the Washington DC area, the inevitable “I know I bought that blank at Hechinger’s. It hasn’t been that long since they closed. Has it?” (Answer: 23 years.)
Increasingly, I’ve come up with one-size-fits-all answer to all of those pesky questions:
Just buy another one.
Even though I’m pretty sure I already own one, even though it’s inherently wasteful to run to the hardware store at the drop of a hat, arguably the biggest time-saver for the aging and disorganized D-I-Y enthusiast is just to shell out for another one of whatever you’re looking for. Search for five minutes, and if it ain’t where you think it should be, just buy another one. It’s quicker.
I turn 64 this month. I’ve been on a rampage to reduce the amount of stuff that I own. Call it my home-grown version of Swedish death cleaning.
It’s no great secret that once you qualify for Social Security, much of what you own can be expected to outlast you.
Some of that will be great, quality, usable, heirloom goods. True assets. Something that a relative or a stranger will enjoy after you’re gone.
But much of it is just crap. If not crap to you, then crap to anyone but you. E.g., a toilet plunger is a useful, perhaps even necessary, device. A good one is practically indestructible. But is somebody going to want mine after I’m gone?
Crap is not one large, amorphous category. Household crap comes in hundreds of distinct varieties. Absolutely the best categorization I ever saw was in the book “Clutter’s Last Stand“. The author (Don Aslett) was the Marie Kondo of his day, and the book is well worth the read for the listing of different types of clutter alone.
Your own personal pile of crap is going to be most evident in whatever area of life you tend to go most overboard. For some people, maybe it’s clothing. Perhaps books, or art, or glassware. Stamps, coins, guns, cars. You name it.
My personal crap avatar (crapvatar?) is the coffee can of mixed fasteners. Bolts, screws, nuts, and God only knows what else. All the leftovers from all my D-I-Y projects, conglomerated into one great cloacal mass of hardware. Too good to toss out. Not worth enough to sort through. Occasionally useful.
Unambiguously crap once I’m gone.
As part of this round of cleaning, I am consolidating all my hardware and tools, with the idea of getting rid of as much as possible. Following the process outlined by KonMarie, I have started by gathering all I own, from all its various hiding places. The first step to recovery is to face the full extent of your excesses, hiding nothing.
This is the point at which “just buy another one” comes back to bite me, as I discover duplicates, triplicates, and more, of pretty much any type of home hardware you can imagine. Some of it seeing the light of day for the first time in decades.
It is appalling, but not unexpected. Like cirrhosis for the alcoholic, or a heart attack for the obese, a lifetime of bad hardware habits is catching up with me.
I now need some strategy for disposing of this ridiculous lifelong accumulation of tools and hardware. Everything from perfectly usable power tools down to the inevitable coffee can(s) of mixed fasteners.
Obviously, I could dumpster the lot and be done with it. Keep back the minimal set of items I think I might need over the next few years. Toss the rest in the garbage. Dust my hands, and I’m done.
That’s wasteful. Not merely from an environmental standpoint, but even more from a value standpoint. At least some of my hardware hoard could be of utility to someone, if I could only get it into the right hands.
The goal, then is to generate as much value out of this hardware excess as I can. Find the people who could use it, and get it into their hands.
And conversely, I need to acknowledge that large parts of it are virtually worthless, or not worth the cost of processing it. In particular, if you look on Ebay, you do in fact see people selling what amounts to the contents of their coffee cans. Everything from dealers in new fasteners combining odds lots from open boxes, to what appears to be literally a coffee can full of mixed steel fasteners. And people will buy that, in large lots, for about $1 a pound. So I guess there’s that, as a last resort. I don’t think that’s worth the cost of shipping, really.
I’ve already had my son sell some high-quality but no-longer-needed tools on Ebay. I don’t think I have much of anything left that is of enough value that it would pay the shipping costs to try to sell it. Although, per the above, it’s surprising what some will pay good money for on Ebay.
As a result, I’m now in the business of trying to find ways to give this away locally, to produce the highest value for the ultimate end users. Without paying shipping costs. And that means I’ll be giving it away through my local Buy Nothing and Freecycle groups, and similar.
I haven’t evolved a complete strategy yet, but it’s clear that there is some low-hanging fruit. For example, I have an open box of deck screws. It doesn’t look like much, but at today’s prices this scruffy box with four pounds of screws is about $40 worth of fasteners. Surely I can find a taker for that. The same for (e.g.) functioning power tools that I no longer need.
The real trick is going to be getting any value at all out of the lower-end merchandise. With the coffee can of mixed fasteners being the apex of that problem. The question being whether there is some way I can easily repackage that so that someone in my immediate area would be pleased to take that off my hands.
One can find examples of D-I-Y devices to sort out the contents of the typical suburban coffee can of mixed fasteners. Upon investigation, these seem to be either aids to manual sorting or Rube Goldberg contraptions that are unlikely to work well. The upshot is that technology is unlikely to come to my rescue. And in any case, do I really want to buy or make yet one more hardware-related device?
So, the question is, how can I pack up this excess in way that provides some value. Otherwise, there’s always the option of turning it in as scrap metal. But only as a last resort.
I’ll let you know how it goes. But I’m keeping the stuff from Hechinger’s.
The COVID-19 new case count continues to drift downwards, now 26 new cases per 100K population per day, down one from yesterday.
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 9/3/2022, 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
As has been the case throughout the pandemic, back-to-school for elementary and high school students seems to be having no noticeable impact on the spread of COVID-19. Early in the pandemic, most people (including me) expected to see some increased spread of disease as students returned to school. But, as far as I can recall, that never materialized in any uniform fashion. Michigan schools had some problems, particularly among “high contact” populations such as football teams (Post #1077). But for U.S. students, in general, return to class (typically masked, sometimes distanced, frequently tested) didn’t increase the spread of disease significantly above the existing background rate in the community.
For example, last year I did a pretty good “natural experiment” analysis of Virginia schools, comparing the school districts based on the staggered school year start dates. I found exactly nothing.
Note: This is the 2021 school year opening.
This year, our local school district (Fairfax County Public Schools) continues to track the number of reported new COVID-19 cases among elementary and high school students. That seems like a not-unreasonable precaution.
Source: Fairfax County Public Schools.
By contrast, there were definitely well-documented COVID-19 outbreaks at many U.S. universities. For example, at William and Mary, which my daughter attended at the time, widespread partying last St. Patrick’s day led to a significant upturn in new cases (Post #1099).
This year, William and Mary isn’t even bothering to keep track of new cases. Checking a few other Virginia universities, this appears to be the norm. That seems a bit odd, as there’s still plenty of COVID-19 in circulation, and students are still apt to party. That makes further COVID-19 outbreaks on college campuses almost a certainty. But this year, those outbreaks will be treated no differently from flu outbreaks, annoying but not life-threatening.
And so, things return to (the new) normal. It resembles the old normal, except that we all have to contend with permanent widespread circulation of this disease. But now, by and large, it’s like flu, just vastly more contagious. It continues to add to our health care costs and to the U.S. mortality rate. (As noted in a recent post, U.S. lifespan isn’t going to return to the pre-pandemic level any time soon.) It’s now just the way the world is. Today’s children will eventually view COVID as part of the landscape.
I tried a number of new plants and techniques in this year’s vegetable garden. As we move into September, it’s time to start sorting out what worked and what didn’t.
Drip irrigation (Post G22-026, Post G22-027, Post G22-037). A huge success. For a bit over $100 in parts, and maybe two hours of labor, I can now water my entire garden either by hooking up to my rain barrels, or by using water from the spigot. I can reconfigure it and add to it at will. Key takeaway: Use 1/2″ drip line.
Portable electric fence as a deer deterrent (Post G22-018). A winner. This is another project that took almost no time and a bit over $100 to set up. Push in some cheap plastic posts, run the “wire” (more like metallized twine) through them, pound in a grounding rod, and hook up a small fence charger. With deer deterrents, it’s hard to tell whether they worked or you just got lucky. But I’ve had essentially zero deer damage since this went up. I suspect the deer really don’t much like it. (And, having tested it on myself, I concur.) Key takeaway: The technology has changed to make these easy, cheap, and flexible. If you only need a small fence, you only need a small, cheap fence charger.
Sprawl technique for tomatoes (Post G22-035). Thumbs down. This year, I tried letting one bed of tomatoes grow un-staked and un-caged. Just let them sprawl. It’s by far the easiest way to grow them, but I’m not going to do that again. They grow just fine. I didn’t see (e.g.) any higher levels of leaf diseases and such. This bed is now a mat of interwoven vines. It’s hard to see the ripe tomatoes, and I’m losing more tomatoes to garden pests than I would if I had staked them. Key takeaway: The problem isn’t growing them, it’s getting a good harvest after allowing the vines to sprawl in the garden bed.
Cold-tolerant (early season) tomatoes (Post G22-025, Ripe Tomatoes in June). A big winner. This worked out quite well. Not only did I have tomatoes by the end of June, those plants are still producing a decent yield of salad-sized tomatoes. They slowed down in the heat of the summer, but it looks like they’re picking up steam as the cooler weather sets in. I also learned a lot about what “days to maturity” really means. Key takeaway: Pick the right varieties, and you can have tomatoes in June without having a hothouse.
Growing large seedlings in paper lunch bags (Post G22-012, Post G22-017). Works well. This year, my butternut squash and pumpkin seedlings outgrew the paper cups I started them in before I was ready to transplant them to the garden. I moved them to doubled-up paper lunch bags filled with potting mix. The idea was to give them room to grow and to avoid transplant shock by planting them bag and all. Coincidence or not, I’m having my best butternut squash year ever. Key takeway: Double up the bags, and handle them gently when it’s time to plant.
More to come.
U.S. new case counts continue a slow decline. We’re now at 27 new cases per 100K per day. You can either view that as down one from a few days ago, or essentially unchanged since mid-May.
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 9/2/2022, 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
Still just over 5000 hospitalizations a day. Still around 400 deaths a day.
Both deaths and hospitalizations remain concentrated among the oldest old.
And within the elderly, lack of vaccination remains a significant risk factor. These are observational data, so you should take them with a grain of salt. But the gist is pretty clear:
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
An interesting piece of research on COVID vaccines was in the news today. It’s this piece, in Nature:
It’s a bit of a slog cutting through all the science-speak, but the gist of it seems to be that if you’ve already recovered from COVID-19, if you then get vaccinated afterwards, you appear to develop really good resistance to further infection.
Being scientists, they can’t actually come out and say that, because that’s not exactly what they tested. But it’s pretty clear that’s what they think, due to this little bit of rumor-mongering tucked neatly into the conclusions section of the paper, emphasis mine:
Of note, among participants in the longitudinal observational Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (PARIS) study, breakthrough infection cases after vaccination have - in the pre-Omicron era - only been identified in individuals without SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to vaccination, and not in individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to vaccination (personal communication, data not yet published).
As I read it, if you’ve had COVID, and you’re wondering whether its worth getting a vaccine or booster after you’ve already had it, this study seems to be pushing pretty strongly in the direction of “yes”.
Separately, this piece, also in the news today, looks at the same issue, but the other way around. There, in a population that was almost fully vaccinated to some degree, the folks with a prior COVID-19 infection had stronger immunity against the new BA.5 variant.
Again, the conclusion is that the combination of prior infection and vaccine provides greater immunity than vaccination alone. Which seems pretty reasonable to me. And points to the same answer to the question of whether or not it’s worth getting vaccinated or boostered if you’ve already had COVID. As I read the current research, the answer is yes.
Source: NY Times, today.
You read it here first, in Post #1575, a few days ago.
I have nothing new to add to my prior analysis. Based on the 2022 data to date, things aren’t going to improve much this year either. That’s all in my prior post.
I guess the only thing I have to add is this: If you’ve never used U.S. mortality data, you probably don’t grasp how incredibly unusual this is. I had to study those numbers, from time to time, over the course of a 30-year career as a health economist. If, at any time, you’d put this graph in front of me, I would have sworn that somebody screwed up the numbers. I wouldn’t have believed it was possible. But it’s real, and it’s not over yet.
The daily new case count is 28 new cases per 100K population per day, up one from the end of last week.
Hospitalizations are at just below 5000 per day, down a bit from last week. Deaths are just below 400 per day, unchanged from last week. Continue reading Post #1577: COVID-19, stalled at 28 new cases per 100K per day
