All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.
Source: Analysis of Johns Hopkins coronavirus database.
My original posting on this was wrong, and I, in effect, posted the effects of change in data reporting. The correct answer here is, we have not yet reached the inflection point here in Virginia.
If social distancing is working, that really ought to occur sometime before the end of month. Or so.
Source: Let’s Make A Deal.com
Continuing the thread from Post #570, I’d like to say that I’m doing this immediate follow-up because I need to set the stage for the analysis yet to come. But that would be a lie. I just need to get this off my chest.
But this post does serve to introduce one of the key concepts needed: The value of a human life. Of course human lives have value, you may respond. Really? Aside from practical and moral issues, this is exactly the point that the “Just let them die” strategy typically brushes off.
But when I ask you, OK, what is a human life worth, in dollars and cents? That’s when this discussion starts to get tough. And our inability to deal with that is precisely what allows the “let them die” crowd to brush that off.
So let me start with the basics: It’s more than zero. And zero is what those focused solely on GDP effectively assume as the value of a human life. Continue reading Post #571: Course correction, Part 2
Source: Psyllium husk Metamucil.
I wanted to get up this AM and write something light. We’ve been digging through our pantry, and I thought of holding a contest for who had the worst, long-forgotten-but-still-edible item in their household. The item that, even though you own it, you can’t fathom why you bought it, much less kept it.
My personal winner so far is a king-size container of generic unflavored unsweetened coarse-ground psyllium husk. (Psyllium husk is what Metamucil is made of.) Ran out of MetaMucil yesterday, so I tried it. I literally had to spit it out. And the container was open, too, so I must have already tasted it before and still kept it. It’s the sort of item that I describe as a more-than-lifetime supply. And, … yeah, of course I still haven’t thrown it out.
But after reading the headlines this AM, there was a slight course correction. This is a tough topic, so this initial post is just the intro.
Source: Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Map, update through 9 PM EDT, 3/24/2020. Historical data file for all days prior to that.
I have now figured out, I think, what Hopkins changed about the data files, and they have released new ones. At present, there is only an “official” time-series data set for the US as a whole, plus one-day cross-sectional counts for US states and counties. This means that the final data on any of these graphs may be subject to some (hopefully small) revision when the next set of numbers comes out tomorrow. This change in the data resulted in modest change in the historical day-by-day counts for the US, but nothing that mattered materially.
Hopkins has stopped tracking the number of people who have recovered, because they do not have (and never really did have) any hard data on that. In addition, they plan to start listing the number of people tested, which will be a big help in analyzing differences in apparent mortality rates across countries. (All other things equal, countries that test more and identify a larger number of mild cases should show lower overall mortality rate as a fraction of all identified cases.)
From the currently-released files, we can tell that Fairfax County has the most coronavirus cases in Virginia (46). Here’s a text list of the current (9 PM 3/24/2020) counts for DC area.
| Area | Cases | Deaths |
| Fairfax, Virginia, US | 46 | 1 |
| Arlington, Virginia, US | 36 | 0 |
| Prince William, Virginia, US | 23 | 0 |
| Loudoun, Virginia, US | 18 | 0 |
| Alexandria, Virginia, US | 8 | 0 |
| Stafford, Virginia, US | 6 | 0 |
| Fairfax City, Virginia, US | 0 | 0 |
| Falls Church, Virginia, US | 0 | 0 |
| District of Columbia,US | 141 | 2 |
| Montgomery, Maryland, US | 107 | 1 |
| Prince George’s, Maryland, US | 63 | 2 |
| Howard, Maryland, US | 30 | 0 |
| Anne Arundel, Maryland, US | 24 | 0 |
Original writeup follows but is no longer relevant.
Caveat: Hopkins changed the underlying data structure of its coronavirus database today. It looks like they are transitioning the US data to a county-level basis, from states. When something like that happens, you can’t quite be sure if today’s count is completely comparable to the historical data.
Further, the Hopkins data files available to the public, as of today, no longer contain any US state data. The accompanying discussion suggests that they plan to provide an additional file of detailed US data, but so far, that file is not available.
That said, up to this point, for Virginia, the 5 PM update of the map has almost always turned out to be, after the fact, the official count for the day. (Presumably, any cases diagnosed after that point are counted in the next day’s total).
The upshot is that it appears that we had another day of (roughly) non-increasing additional case counts, per a hope expressed in Post #567. But there’s some chance that’s an artifact of the change in the structure of the Hopkins database.
Upshot is, it remains too soon to tell whether Virginia has hit the inflection point.
Source: Clipart-library.com
Post #565 was a long-winded explanation of how I try to minimize health risks when grocery shopping. (And the things I flubbed the first couple of times.) Post #566 was about a rumored increase in wages at Wegman’s.
Courtesy of Shelley Ebert, today I have three more interesting things to report on the shopping front. As well as a couple of items from my wife. So I thought I’d do a wrap-up of this topic and move on.
My wife tracked down this: There is zero evidence so far of any COVID-19 transmission through food or food packaging. (Via Serious Eats, showing citation as to source.) None. That’s per CDC, USDA, and the European Food Safety Authority. So maybe quarantining your food for a day (below) is a bit over the top. But if it makes you more comfortable, do it.
And then:
First, it looks like bonus pay for grocery store workers is a real thing, per this article about Cleveland. So not just Wegmans (by rumor), but Giant Eagle by report.
Second, yes indeed, taking your re-usable shopping bags to the store is now officially a dumb thing to do. Per this other article about Cleveland. I felt like an ass about two seconds after I thoughtlessly handed mine to a clerk at Fresh Market (Post #565). Avoid the embarrassment. Do everybody a favor and if you shop, leave your bags at home.
Third, I’ve been seeing reports of sporadic availability of toilet paper. It comes into the store (Costco gets several mentions, as do drug stores in preference to grocery stores), people line up, and the store rations it out. Reports so far suggest orderly behavior. Good to have tangible evidence that the supply chain remains intact.
Here’s picture from a friend of my wife’s, this AM, senior hour at the local Costco. It’s the very definition of orderly social distancing.
Source: Priscilla Marsh
Fourth, it looks like we may have a deliberate effort in place to speed up the transportation portion of the supply chain. At least here in the Commonwealth. Shelley drove to Richmond last night and reported that I-95 was a) wall-to-wall trucks, b) 90 MPH and up, c) trucks crammed like sardines into the truck stops, and d) zero police enforcement of speed limits.
Qualitatively different from her normal trip. Tough to say whether that’s just business-as-usual, and she’d never noticed it before. (She was traveling in the dead of night). But by report, it was unusual.
I may be making this up, but to me that reads like a deliberate effort to speed up the supply chain. Which makes perfect sense.
Finally, I’m planning a Safeway excursion for this Friday, and I thought I would summarize how I’m going to do it. So this is the condensed version of my post on grocery shopping etiquette.
Wash my hands, and take a) one sheet from the Sun Gazette, b) a couple of paper towels, ripped in half, c) a touch-screen stylus, and d) a piece of Saran wrap. Use the newspaper as a disposable shopping cart handle cover. Use the paper towels as disposable dairy case/frozen food case handle covers. Use once, crumple, put in your pocket. Use the stylus to avoid touching the touch screen (we’ll see if that works). Use the Saran wrap to cover the scale when weighing produce. Keep my distance from other shoppers and grocery store workers. Only touch items that I am buying. Pack the groceries in disposable plastic bags. Wash hands immediately upon getting home. Put the groceries away (or, optionally, let them sit for a day). Wash hands again. Wash the touch screen stylus.
Why don’t I just wear disposable gloves, in order to avoid touching certain surfaces in the store? Well, gloves protect you if used properly, sure. But they don’t stop you from spreading anything that ends up on your gloves. And because I don’t see many people wearing disposable gloves at the grocery store, I thought it was a little more neighborly to use disposable paper products as indicated, rather than rely on gloves. There’s certainly no barrier to using both.
Face mask optional. That’s what the CDC says, and if there has been any source of good sense in the US, I’d say it has been the CDC. You have to trust somebody.
Masked or unmasked, you’ll fit in either way. I don’t even give a second look when I see somebody with a surgical mask on.
I’ve decided to take a day of fast and abstinence today. If you step back from it, that’s a religious tradition that reminds you to behave yourself as you look forward to more joyous times ahead.
So, in that spirit, why not? Couldn’t hurt, might help.
Why today? By my calculation, today is the first day we could possibly see any hint of an inflection point in coronavirus cases in Virginia. Up to this point, any hope for things to stabilize in the Commonwealth was 100% wishful thinking. Bad news was baked in (Post #561).
And, to be clear, it’s still 99% wishful thinking. But the remaining 1% is just facts and math, starting from the assumption that we got serious about social distancing somewhere around the time the Fairfax schools closed. (That’s a little arbitrary, but this is a rough calculation.) That date, plus a median six-day incubation period, plus a median four-day testing lag, would bring is to just about today.
If social distancing and other measures work, if the density of cases remains low enough to slow transmission among the stupid non-compliant, if the timing of disease and testing match that observed in China, and if Fortune smiles on us, then sometime between today and … ah … maybe the end of March … we ought to see the daily count of new cases decline here in the Commonwealth. (Plus-or-minus a small secondary peak due to within-family-unit transmission of the disease, once transmission within public spaces has been brought under control.)
I’m not religious and I don’t pray. But if you’re the praying type, right about now might be a good time.
Source: Analysis of data from Johns Hopkins, to the 5 PM update of their interactive coronoavirus map. Continue reading Post #566: The Wegman’s wage in the time of COVID-19
Source: Amazon.
These are my rules for grocery shopping, for the time being. I may update this as I fine-tune my technique.
FWIW, Item 6 is something that I originally entitled: Coughing at the grocery store is the new farting in an elevator. If you can’t keep that particular orifice shut, then just don’t go there. That’s based on an anecdote given below. Trust me on this, if you cough, you’re going to get some hard looks, no matter how politely you do it.
These items, and why I continue to shop in person, are explained below.
If you think I’m being overly fastidious, just repeat the phrase “Boomer remover” a few times.
Continue reading Post #565: Shopping etiquette in the time of COVID-19
Source: Flickr.
In the US, we’ve reached the (completely predictable, Post #550) part of the pandemic where the case counts are rising rapidly. And so, all you are going to see in the news is … well … that. Every possible variation of … that.
Despite the fact that it’s not really news. Despite the fact that almost every Western nation has experienced/is experiencing some variation of that exact same curve. Yes, we’re still on the uphill slope of the curve (below). And by any reasonable estimate, it’s still too early for us to hit the “inflection point” — the top of the hill, in the curve below. So we’re going to be going up that curve for a while yet.
And, as of this morning, the US case count is far higher than my naïve prediction of 10,000 from Post #550. But there’s no way to tell whether that’s due to the lack of testing early on in the US, or to truly more rapid spread of cases here than in other countries. Or a generally crappy prediction methodology. Or some combination of those.
But I ran across three things yesterday that lifted my spirits a bit. I thought I’d share.
I have been food shopping at the Pan Am Safeway, out of long habit. Keeping it to once a week. (And I respect those who are opting for grocery delivery for the time being, despite that service being in exceptionally high demand at present.)
But even before the coronavirus, the workers there had a hard time keeping the Safeway stocked. By the end of a typical Saturday, the shelves usually looked pretty moth-eaten.
It’s stressful enough to go food shopping. Make your list, wash your hands, maintain appropriate social distance, don’t touch your face, stifle any urge to cough/sneeze/clear your throat, don’t handle things except to put them in your cart, get home, wash your hands, put away the groceries, wash your hands.
And then wash your hands again, because, eh, it can’t hurt.
I haven’t reached the point of washing canned goods and such, but that’s because most of mine will sit on the shelf for quite a while before being used. And I don’t wear a mask — yet — because my guess at odds says I ought to keep whatever stock I have of those, for the time being. But I respect those who do.
So it’s not exactly an ordeal, but it’s hardly anyone’s idea of a good time.
The sight of empty shelves, and inability to get everything on the list, just adds to the stress. This, despite the fact that intellectually, I am absolutely sure there has been no material interruption in the grocery store supply chain thus far. But some things are just not rational. Maybe it’s the primordial fear of starvation.
Which is kind of hilarious, given that I could probably live off my body fat alone for the better part of a year. The rule of thumb is that a pound of body fat provides about 3500 calories. Or about two day’s worth of energy once your metabolism shuts down and goes into starvation mode. Have you thanked your love handles lately?
Another weird plus of grocery shopping in the coronavirus era is that I have learned to stifle a sneeze — without touching my face — merely by thinking about it, really hard. As in OMG, I’m in a grocery store, I can’t sneeze here. Old dog, new trick.
Yesterday I decided to try Fresh Market, just to see what the littlest and least-used grocery store around looked like. It was a pleasant surprise. It was not exactly fully-stocked, but … pretty close. It was almost like a regular, normal trip to the grocery store. They had some of everything that was on my list, and the bare shelves were few and far between.
It’s not a cheap place to shop, by any means. But as a form of therapy, yesterday, it was well worth the expense. I talked to the clerk as I was checking out, and their produce, milk, eggs, etc. were wiped out by the the 3/14/2020 weekend panic shopping. Just like everybody else’s. But for whatever reason, they have their store largely back in good order. I didn’t see any TP, but I honestly don’t even know if they carry it.
Anyway, it was a much-needed bit of near normalcy.
As an afterthought, I’ve been trying to figure out why this is so. Why Fresh Market looks so much better than Safeway at this point. One possibility is purely physical: It’s a small, well-staffed store, with limited stock of each item, and so fewer total boxes are required to restock it. (As opposed to Safeway, which is gargantuan and was thinly-staffed at the best of times.) So their net-time-to-restock is lower. Maybe it’s just lightly used, and people are such creatures of habit that nobody would try shopping in anything but their “regular” store? But it also occurs to me that stores might be giving home-delivery orders first pick for scarce items. If I were in their shoes, that’s exactly what I’d do. Safeway has its own dedicated home-delivery service, while Fresh Market only has Instacart. So maybe, in part, I’m seeing the fact that Fresh Market doesn’t really have home delivery as a major portion of its business? No way to tell at this point.
Count of daily increase in COVID-19 cases in China. Source: World Health Organization report on coronavirus in China, see Post #551.
Recall that they only hit their inflection point (the peak of the hill depicted above) at the end of January. Less than two months later, and the reports are trickling out that areas that were not badly hit by this are returning to near-normalcy. E.g., schools have reopened.
No way to tell yet whether we’ll follow that curve or not. Authoritarian regimes can do a lot more to keep people isolated when necessary. On the other hand, they spent a couple of months just figuring out what this was. Plausibly, they may have actually fumbled around for longer than we did. (Which doesn’t excuse us, since they didn’t know what it was and we did, but facts are facts.)
And the understanding of this continues to improve. For example, the WHO report on China (Post #551) said that there was no approved treatment, in China, at that time. That report is less than a month old. But as of a few days ago, China had approved one cheap, easily-manufactured, currently available, largely obsolete, but apparently effective drug for this (Post #562). One that physicians can use right now.
An extended rant on chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine. Sure, some dumbass who knows nothing about viral infections or arithmetic was touting this as some sort of miracle that would stop the epidemic. But, as Einstein is reported to have said, “There are only two things that are infinite — the universe and human stupidity — and I’m not so sure about the first one.” So don’t let the presence of basic ignorance at the highest level of government allow you to dismiss this. To be clear, at present, hydroxychloroquine is a treatment for those who are already sick. Which, pretty much by definition, ain’t going to stop the spread of the disease. It has not been subject (yet) to a large-scale randomized controlled trial of effectiveness. Further, it doesn’t cure anyone. All it can do, at best, is reduce the severity of the illness somewhat, presumably by blocking some step in the replication of the virus. Again, somewhat. But that, by itself, will be extremely helpful in avoiding exceeding the capacity of the US hospital system, because reducing severity and duration of illness probably a) helps avoid some hospitalizations all together, b) helps avoid ICU use within hospitalizations, and c) reduces length-of-stay and so frees up hospital beds sooner. Finally, it is being tried on an experimental basis to see if it can reduce the likelihood of infection within a family, of which at least one member is known to have the virus. So if that latter use actually pans out, it might — emphasis might — play a minor role in preventing some of that second phase of disease spread, the one the WHO report characterizes as being within family units. That said, despite all limitation and caveats, assuming it works as it currently appears to, it beats the hell out of having nothing but folk medicine (Post #552) on hand to treat this. And that’s something to be thankful for.
I’m not going to give citations to particular reports. I’m just saying that amid the relentless pounding of bad news about coronavirus, you might want to Google “china return to normal”. Clearly there’s some propaganda mixed in with the truth. And “normal” is not “the same as it was before coronavirus”.
But if we can just keep our act together, we might be able to do as well as the Chinese. Maybe even better. That’s an OK thought.
I realize that, as a retiree, I don’t really have to face the worst of this. Other than having my brother joke in an email about this virus being renamed “boomer remover”.
That said, while case counts continue to rise, in absolute numbers, things still look fairly manageable. The graph above looks awful until you focus in on the scale at the left. Yesterday, there were 34 new cases reported in Virginia. In the entire commonwealth. You have to keep the current scale of this in perspective.
Anyway, as my wife and I were out walking yesterday, we happened to meet a couple of folks. (We chatted a while, carefully maintaining the required 6′ distance.) One of whom works with the local ambulance providers. I have a handful of those N95 masks (mine are P95 for lead paint, but same difference). I asked if I ought to donate those to the Vienna VFD. And the answer was, no, there’s no supply problem here, right now. Just hang onto them.
So even as I am not facing a lot of the problems that working people now face, we in this community are not even close to hitting the real horror show that is now going on in parts of Italy. And if we can just keep our act together, there’s no reason we should have to.
I’ve been reading up on toilet paper. Many, many pundits seem to be straining to find some logical reason why the TP shelves are bare.
As a person with a lifetime fascination with panics and manias, let me save everybody some time on that one: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. There doesn’t need to be any reason whatsoever.
You can go back to the Johnny Carson affair (reference Snopes) to realize that you don’t need even the tiniest bit of fundamental problem or rational thinking whatsoever to have a shortage like this.
All it takes is the perception that other people are hoarding, and that there might be a shortage, and … bam … that causes a shortage at the grocery store. Take a nervous public, add a rumor, stir gently, and stand back.
And it’s totally self-reinforcing, because, regardless of your beliefs about whether or not a toilet paper shortage is rational, if you don’t go out and get some toilet paper, well, you can’t. You, as a member of the public, must either participate in the panic buying or do without.
And so, a full and complete explanation consists of this:
Toilet paper is being hoarded because toilet paper is being hoarded.
Really, seriously, it doesn’t need to go an inch deeper than that.
And so it is with bank runs. Or, rather, was. Just the rumor that a bank (or equivalent) was insolvent would cause clients to withdraw so much money that … the bank became insolvent. Absolutely didn’t matter if the rumor was well-founded or not.
Bank runs were a fairly routine occurrence prior to the Great Depression. Banking panics significantly deepened many recessions in that period. Surely you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life.
For the technically-minded, common usage is that a “run” is on an individual institution, whereas a “panic” occurs when that same phenomenon happens to the entire banking system.
That more-or-less completely ended with the creation of the FDIC (and its extinct cousin, the FSLIC). As with any type of insurance, there was significant risk of “moral hazard”, which is the best way to describe the Savings and Loan crisis (and death of the FSLIC).
But, love it or hate it, the FDIC put an end to bank runs. An agency of the Federal government guaranteed that you’d get your money back. And people lost their fear. US Bank runs stopped (virtually completely). And, more recently, that became a “full faith and credit” entity of the US government.
Toilet paper shortage. Bank run. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Why do we have one, right now, and not the other? FDIC.
There is a serious point here, somewhere, that has me thinking about this. The serious point is that I can’t quite figure out how long the shelves are going to remain bare of TP.
I’m in a hurry this AM so I’m going to say a few things next that are true, but without citation as to source.
First, at present, there is absolutely no interruption of the supply chain for TP. For a host of good economic reasons (high bulk, low value) almost all American TP is made in the USA.
Second, because toilet paper demand is (normally) so stable, there’s almost no slack in the toilet paper supply chain. It has what economics call inelastic short-run supply. By and large, factories routinely run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can tweak that a bit, but that’s all.
Third, I am afraid that whether or not the TP shelves refill will depend on whether or not the TP shelves refill. That if people continue to see bare shelves, they’ll snatch up TP whenever they see it available. That “shortage mentality” will become the rule here.
So I come down to my final question: Who (or what) will be the equivalent of the TP FDIC. What entity can step up and guarantee you a roll or two, if you run out? That might break the back of the current panic-buying mentality in this area.
Let me emphasize that I’m totally serious about this. I don’t want the potentially humorous nature of the product in question to obscure the fundamental economics of the situation. Fear itself is adequate to prolong this situation for months. And right now, we really don’t need to be worrying about whether we’ll be able to wipe our butts, three months from now.
For myself, I’m just trying to take life one roll at a time.
