Pandemic Diary – April 15 to April 21

Wednesday, April 15 

Statewide: 58 deaths, 1,663 cases out of 33,351 tested  (Deaths: +0) (Cases: +0)

FaceTime tertulia at 9:00 with J and R. They’re fine, enjoying the birds at their feeders on their deck. E took a long walk and worked many hours in the garden. M was outside a bit, but is now trying to go into more of a resting phase. He did finish rereading  Beautiful Losers, a Leonard Cohen novel. Pretty wild, exhausting really. This novel is the source of the song/poem ‘Magic is Afoot’ that is included on my old Buffy St. Marie album. That, at least, is a wonderful piece of work.

Pam Popper is on about over-reporting again. Says there’s a doctor in Michigan or somewhere who was required to list COVID19 on the death certificate of a man who tested positive and who was then struck and killed by a bus. Hmm. Don’t know if it’s really true, but it’s a good story. In general, there seems to be much more awareness now that counting COVID19 deaths and cases is complex and that the process is stubbornly imperfect. Pundits are even wondering “Is it possible that the Chinese deliberately underreported their death numbers?” Oh golly!

Thursday, April 16

Statewide: 64 deaths, 1736 cases out of 34,938 tested  (Deaths: +6) (Cases: +73)

Another quiet day. Some garden work and E had an exercise class via Zoom. Besides playing video games and watching YouTube, M attacked the Xfinity/Comcast monster and tried to get a lower rate for our internet service. He thinks he has achieved a reduction but only, of course, for the next 12 months.

Friday, April 17

Statewide: 70 deaths, 1,785 cases out of 36,321 tested  (Deaths: +6) (Cases: +122)

Grocery shopping in the morning at M of C during senior hours (7-8 a.m.) Very much the wrong time to go! Too crowded. 8:00 or 9:00 would be better. Got what we needed, though, so can’t complain too much. The shopping itself is one thing; once we arrive home the decontamination process is another major nuisance. But the meals are pretty good around here. The dinner was built around M’s chicken curry and E’s raita featuring fresh mint from the backyard. Yum.

J and R biked down to see us, delivering a book that E wants to read and staying for a while to chat in the back yard at a suitable distance. We talked about how nice it would be to have a test that confirmed that one had had the disease. One of their sons is in the medical field and he has been almost hoping to get the virus–most people’s symptoms are minor–because once he recovered he could continue his work without concern for himself or for others.

An OSU group is planning to do random testing of 1,000 Corvallis residents to try and find out how many cases there really are and especially how many individuals are infected without showing symptoms. Sounds like a plan. 

Saturday, April 18

Statewide: 72 deaths, 1,844 cases out of 37,583 tested  (Deaths: +2) (Cases: +59)

Justin Lessler, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, was interviewed by the New Yorker. In response to a question about how we might be able to determine how many asymptomatic cases there really are, Lessler replied: 

“Asymptomatic” is a squirrely concept and what we really mean here is “not detected and likely not detectable.” If you look at the shape of the epidemic curves, it is hard to explain them if children are not contributing to transmission at all, and if asymptomatic younger people are not contributing to transmission at all.

So eventually we’ll be able to infer something about what percentage of young people are/were carriers, but we will most likely never know whether any one individual young person is/was a carrier or not. Okay, fine. But also, yes, squirrely is the word. I wonder how the group planning the random testing in Corvallis sees the detectability issue. 

The news from China yesterday was that the Wuhan area death toll has been adjusted upward by about 1,300. Keeping in mind that neither the old number nor the new number is necessarily  accurate, this is still interesting. On the one hand, China is seeking here to boost its credibility, which is in tatters. On the other, it could be taken as an admission that the accurate numbers have been difficult to come by, probably partly due to inherent counting difficulties and partly due to heavy massage at various levels. Thus the announcement serves as a warning to their friends not to take any of their public statistics too seriously.

Sunday, April 19

Statewide: 74 deaths, 1,910 cases out of 39,038 tested  (Deaths: +2) (Cases: +66

We’ve just heard from a friend in Spain who gave us some insight about what conditions are like in the Madrid area. L and her husband have food delivered to their garage by their son. They are allowed to leave their house only twice a day and only for the purpose of walking their dog. These walks must be limited in duration and not take them more than 200 yards from their home. The fine for violating the restrictions is 600 euros. The government has just recently relaxed the general lockdown orders so as to allow parents to take young children outside for a short period each day, provided that they wear masks and gloves and respect social distances. This relaxation, however, is controversial with many believing that it is premature. L’s son is a Madrid firefighter and first responder. Needless to say, he would much rather be fighting fires than performing some of the tasks that he has faced during this crisis. L also reports that the world of politics is very much business as usual. Many politicians seem much more concerned with scoring points as opposed to actually working to solve common problems. That sounds familiar.

E and M no longer have a dog, but they still leave the house almost every day for short periods. Some public walking trails are open, but we avoid these as we hear that they are very crowded. Often we just walk around our neighborhood, but sometimes we drive to some other neighborhood and walk around there for a while before driving back home. The spring blossoms are in their glory and on many residential streets we can find lovely front gardens to admire. We don’t wear our masks on these walks. We see a few other walkers and those few are easy to avoid. Of those other walkers that we do see, perhaps a third are wearing masks; the majority are not. 

At other times we go out into situations that require interaction with other people. Our big four in this category have been plant nurseries, Home Depot, grocery stores and take-out restaurants. We tend to wear masks in these cases. The nurseries are the least stressful, as they are spacious and uncrowded, with traffic flow systems that have been adapted for the crisis. We get a sterilized cart as we enter and then wander about picking out what we need. We deliver the cart to a check-out station and then retreat behind a roped barrier. The checker comes out and scans our items without touching either cart or plants. The checker then retreats and we re-enter the checkout area to put our credit card into the reader. The reader is set to require no signature and no tapping on any screen–just insert and retrieve. The checker asks if we want a receipt, which we do not. We then take the cart to our car, unload it, and return it to the unsafe cart area where it is re-sterilized before being moved to the safe cart area. Some employees wear masks and some to do not. About 80% of the customers wear masks. The 20% who do not are almost always younger people. There is never any need to come closer than six feet to anyone.

Home Depot is similar in that there is lots of room, but often there are also a lot more people. But HD managers have closed down all but one entrance and staff close that off as well whenever the number of customers inside reaches a certain limit. It stays closed until the store begins to clear. Most people use self-checkout and one downside is that the process requires several taps on a touchscreen, but sterilizing wipes are available at each station. M wears a mask to go to HD, but he is definitely in the minority. Because HD sells bulky items, their self-checkout stations are already widely separated. This contrasts with some grocery stores where the stations are very close together. Pam Popper mentions this as one of the insanities of grocery shopping in Ohio. Maybe just turn off every other station? 

Grocery stores are the most difficult for us also. In some stores most people are wearing masks; in others most people are not. Some stores have very narrow aisles and, as far as we know, none are controlled for numbers of customers allowed in at one time. We always wear masks and have noticed that at least in our favorite store most other customers also wear them. Some staff are masked; some are not. In many stores, a large plastic window now separates the checker from the customer. Credit card readers do not require signatures or screen taps. M is chagrined because he wants to use ApplePay, but face recognition fails if he is wearing a mask! How is that fair? In general, M finds that wearing a mask creates more personal stress than it removes.

Maintaining distance from other shoppers is usually possible but requires effort and attention. Our friend Mrs H reports that her favorite grocery now has one-way aisles. Sounds sensible. The pace of things is inevitably slow however. You know how irritating it is when you want to get a cucumber and you can’t because the person standing in front of the cucumbers is taking a ridiculous amount of time trying to pick one? It’s much worse now because not only can you not access the cucumbers, you can’t access anything anywhere within 6 feet of the cucumbers! Also, grocery shopping is now more expensive. In normal life, we shop at several different stores, mainly because we know which items are cheaper at which places. Lately, though, we have been paying full price at the expensive store for the sake of convenience and safety. 

For take-out food, we either call or order online, pre-paying by card in each case and including a large tip. We usually pick-up rather than having the order delivered. The best restaurants tell you to call when you arrive in the parking lot so that one of them can bring your order out to your car. But some still expect you to come inside and wait there along with some number of other customers. We will be avoiding this latter type. The hassle with take-out is that we have to assume that the outside of the container may be contaminated. That can be dealt with, but it’s work.

We filled the car with gas today. M did not wear a mask while pumping but noticed that the two other people getting gas were wearing them. And they were both younger than he! Will wonders never cease. M did wash his hands after, or so he claims.

Monday, April 20

Statewide: 75 deaths, 1,956 cases out of 40,045 tested  (Deaths: +1) (Cases: +46)

Thankfully, the number of COVID deaths in Oregon remains fairly low. We feel fortunate–at least so far. To see how fortunate we are, we could try to figure out how Oregon is doing compared to other regions. We see a lot of “death rate” numbers in the media. But these numbers are peculiar. Most of the time, it appears that these numbers are derived by dividing the number of deaths in an area by the number of confirmed cases in an area. If we did this for Oregon, using the numbers above, we would divide 75 by 1,956, giving a result of 3.83%. Also by this method the ‘death rate’ for Italy now approaches 10%. But if we want to know how severe this pandemic is, the confirmed case number is not what we want. That number depends on how many tests have been done and is influenced by the fact that most of those tested are from the most high risk groups: older people and health care workers. This is as it should be, but it means that the numbers cannot be used even to estimate the total number of actual infections, which is really what we need to know. 

Two basic question that we might ask are these: How widespread is this disease? If I get the virus, how likely am I to die? If we knew the answers, we could make a decision about how much we should be worried and what level of emergency restrictions seem justified. Unfortunately these questions are not answerable at this point and possibly never will be answered with certainty. (Researchers will be able to estimate the total number of infections and lots of smart people are attempting to do that even now. But at least for the moment, the various estimates are wildly inconsistent.) What it comes down to is that if anyone tries to tell you exactly how dangerous this virus is by comparing confirmed cases to deaths, that person is confused. 

So if we can’t know what percentage of infections are fatal because we don’t know how many infections there are, is there anything we can know for sure? Well, one thing we can do is compare the cumulative number of deaths in an area with the total population of that area. That, after all, is the bottom line. For Oregon, as of April 20, that would be 75 deaths divided by 4,301,000 total population. For New York City it would be 10,367 deaths divided by 8,398,000 total population. For Italy it would be 24,648 deaths divided by 60,462,000 total population. Here are those results, expressed as percentages:

Oregon .00174%         

NYC .12344%

Italy .04076%

These numbers are a little easier to understand if they are restated in terms of deaths per one thousand inhabitants:

Oregon   .0174

NYC 1.2344

Italy   .4076

These numbers are accurate as of April 20. As the cumulative death toll rises, the numbers above will also rise. Daring to peer into the future, it seems possible that all these numbers will double or triple before we’re finally done. If all the numbers above were to simply triple, the virus would end up killing roughly 4 out of every 1,000 people in New York, roughly 1.2 out of every 1,000 people in Italy and roughly 1 out of every 2,000 people in Oregon.

Tuesday, April 21

Statewide: 78 deaths, 2,002 cases out of 41,128 tested  (Deaths: +3) (Cases: +46) With three new deaths reported, the Oregon death rate as calculated by the total population method rises from .0174 per thousand to .0181 per thousand. 

The media today are reporting a study that indicates that 95% of COVID deaths are associated with underlying (pre-existing) medical conditions. Of course this fans the flames of those who believe that general lock-downs do more harm than good and that we should instead be focusing all our efforts on those we know are most vulnerable–whatever that might mean. 

Meanwhile, Michael has managed to make four jars of pickled vegetables: his favorite mix of cucumbers, bell peppers, hot peppers, green beans, and carrots. A crisis arose when in the midst of the process he discovered that the beautiful organic carrots that he had plucked from the bin in the grocery store had somehow never made it into the vegetable bin of our refrigerator. Nor could he find them anywhere in the house, garage or car. He had to run back to the store and try again, not something you want to be doing in times like these! Another unsolved mystery from the year of the virus…