Monday, September 21 Deaths 529 (+3) Cases 30,995 (+194)
The little car is got cleaned and waxed today, looking good. We watched a couple of episodes of Derry Girls on Netflix. Hm.
Tuesday, September 22 Deaths 532 (+3) Cases 31,313 (+318)
We got a take-out sandwiches from Ba’s in Albany. We finally discovered their online ordering system, which takes Apple Pay. Nice. In the early afternoon E went to a meeting of her HEPAJ group. They all took lawn chairs and treats and met outside at a park. This was a first for the group and E says it was fun. M was also outside for a while, mowing lawn and washing the remaining ash from the patio. M is on Ibuprofen today. Apparently he strained his shoulder working at the carwash.
It’s the 180th day of the Pandemic Diary database. Average daily deaths fell from 3.7 to 2.8. Here’s the chart.
Wednesday, September 23 Deaths 538 (+6) Cases 31,503 (+190)
After tertulia this morning we went back to the forest near where we used to live. What a difference two weeks makes! It was summer the last time we were there and now it’s fall, with maple leaves falling everywhere. The native maples don’t do much in the way of color; they’re mostly just brown. But we found a bit of red on this big fir, courtesy of a thriving poison oak vine.
We also passed an old maple that the forest managers decided to cut down about five years ago. It seems to be rebounding nicely from the experience.
And of course we stopped to see one of E’s favorite trees. She didn’t try to climb up onto that big limb today, but she’s been known to.
And e is not the only one…
Thursday, September 24 Deaths 539 (+1) Cases 31,865 (+362)
The Chambers siblings did a Zoom meeting today, James from Clifton Park, John from his mostly finished house at Lake George, and Eve from our new Zoom studio in Corvallis. The meeting began on time with no technical difficulties. It seems that we are all getting better at Zooming. Jim and John are both well. We got to see a bit of the interior of John’s new place, including a very old wooden icebox that John and his father rescued from a yard sale many years ago when John was just a child. He remembers the two of them working to remove many layers of white paint to reveal the wood underneath. The top was rotting, so Hoy replaced it using pine boards that he had in his shop. They then sought out and applied the period correct type of varnish. John didn’t say if it had been refinished since then, but it certainly looks lovely now. Besides talking with Jim we got to interact a little with Joanne, who is as kind and lovely as always. We debuted our new green screen, which allows any photo to be used as a background, even on devices that do not have super processors. Also a couple of umbrella lights to smooth away some of the shadows. Our background, chosen in haste but still nice, was from Cyprus, a hillside village in the spring.
After a supper of reasonably high-quality leftovers, we settled in front of the TV to check out Ted Lasso, an Apple-produced series about an American football coach who is hired to manage an British professional soccer team. We thought we’d watch just a little to see if it was any good, but we found it quite wonderful and ended up watching four half hour episodes. Just about everything about this show is excellent: complex characters, good acting, substantive situations, meaningful dialogue, and a tone that is at once naïve and highly sophisticated. The level of maturity and insight in Ted Lasso is so far above that of Cable Girls that it made us laugh for joy. (We did miss the subtitles, though, some of those Brit accents…)
Friday, September 25 Deaths 542 (+3) Cases 32,314 (+449)
We’ve been doing a crazy amount of online shopping lately. The purchases seem okay in each individual instance, but taken in total, it doesn’t look completely rational. M has ordered an electric Turkish coffee maker, which we clearly don’t need. E is buying a new fall fleece jacket and some winter socks, which are a bit more practical. M has ordered a bunch of new ice cube trays–hey, the old ones were terrible, the summer was hard on them–and together we’re getting a new pantry cupboard for the garage.
And then there is the nice new mask with lanyard that E got for $16 from Tom Bihn, a Seattle company that has donated 115,000 masks to underserved communities.
Saturday, September 26 Deaths 546 (+4) Cases 32,581 (+267)
We watched more episodes of Ted Lasso last night. Liked them a lot. This morning E fetched us croissants from Le Patissier. After that, she went out to the country again to walk her friend’s dog. M watched a movie called Soledad, which is pretty good, and worked in the garden trimming away some things whose times have passed.
Dinner was a real treat. We went to a place in Vancouver, WA called Andrea and Andy’s. Andy make an extraordinary thing out of spaghetti squash plus a wonderful fall soup made out of sweet potatoes and more other things than we can remember. E contributed a tomato and cilantro salad, an elaboration of an old recipe we got from Flo. We ate in the back yard, warmed by the late afternoon sun.
For dessert we had a brief ride in the Cadillac CTS-V, sampling the lovely seats and the “Comfort” ride setting. Also the “Sport” ride setting and the 6.2 liter supercharged V-8 with 556 hp and 551 lb-ft of torque connected to some sticky Michelins with hefty Brembos nearby in case you ever wanted to slow down. Nice car. Back at the house we had more dessert–a flan that Andy was not too proud of but which was quite delicious for the rest of us.
The statewide media today are making a big to-do about the 449 new COVID cases reported on Friday. They note, correctly, that this is the highest single day total of the pandemic. The suggestion is that things are worse than ever and we’d all better do something now, even if all we really can do is stay home and moan quietly in our living rooms. But as so often happens in this crisis, this contextless number serves more to mislead than to illuminate. Of course the discovery of 449 new cases is bad news, but how bad is it? Let’s add some context.
First, these 449 new cases were from a total of 12,385 tests, far more tests than are usually reported. That right there should make you stop and think a little. And of course you could compare this new record number with the old record number. The old record was 405 new cases, and it was set on August 15th, a day when there were a total 12,994 tests, which was also many more tests than usual. In fact, those two numbers, 12,385 and 12,994, are the two highest days of COVID testing ever done in Oregon. For comparison, on the third highest day of testing the number was just 7,337. So the two days with the highest ever number of new cases also happened to be the two days of the most extensive testing ever done. This is not news; this is just math, working as it always has. The large number of tests may deserve a headline; the number of new cases does not.
We can get somewhat more useful information by looking at the test positive rates on those two days. On August 15th the test positive rate was 3.13%. On September 25, the rate was 3.63%. Compared to other days, those two numbers are actually pretty low. People say that if we can maintain a rate under 5.00%, we’ll have chance of getting the pandemic under control. So maybe these two days did deserve headlines, not for being bad news, but for bringing such good news.
And, just for fun, let’s look at the data for two other days: September 20th and 21st. On the 20th, the new case number was 202, which sounds a lot better than 449. On September 21st the number of new cases was 194, even better. Should those two days have made us feel hopeful? As it happens, there were very few tests reported on either of those days, just 2,159 on the 20th and 1,215 on the 21st. The test positive rate for the 20th was 9.36%. For the 21st it was 15.97%. If you wanted to make a headline for these two days, would you really want to celebrate the relatively low numbers of new cases confirmed? Not if you had a clue.
The truth, of course, is that it’s impossible to know much of anything just by focusing on any one number on any one day. There is too much natural variation in the system. But possibly the worst possible number to fixate on is the number of new cases confirmed. As we all should realize by now, if you want that number to be low, all you have to do is stop testing and just let everybody die.
Sunday, September 27 Deaths 547 (+1) Cases 32,820 (+239)
Lovely weather for a quiet Sunday. Croissants again for breakfast. They were a day old, but when E rewarmed them, very briefly, in a real oven, they were delicious. Later in the morning we went for a walk on campus. We parked at the old Poultry Science building and walked east past the tennis courts and the giant artificial turf intramural sports field. We climbed up to the top of the parking structure to have a look around, then went back over toward the vet school to see some animals. We returned through the unfamiliar back lots of the College of Forestry compound. We passed by an odd new building, quite a large one. It was industrial looking, a windowless unmarked black rectangle. We paused for a bit to take a closer look. There was a huge garage type door at one end and on the other a loading bay with a glossy black hopper feeding into a heavy cart-like container, also black. The whole place was deserted and felt mildly strange. From there it was just six minutes or so back to our car. As we were about to leave, a campus security truck cruised by. We saw it turn and go down to that same black building and stop there. Had security cameras alerted headquarters to a possible threat? Unlikely. Funny coincidence though. We departed forthwith.