Pandemic Diary — January 3 to 17, 2022

Tuesday, January 4, 2022

Warmer weather coming. Intermittent rain today, fairly light but still enough to keep everything pretty soggy. You do not want to walk through our backyard without waterproof shoes.

We stayed indoors and finished the jigsaw that we started on New Year’s Eve. Almost immediately a Lego shark turned up in San Fransisco Bay. Yikes.

Luckily, a Lego response unit was on the way.

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

Much warmer today, high 50’s most of the day, touching 60 at one point. Something of a shock.

The COVID news in Oregon is pretty much the same as a lot of other places: a very high number of confirmed cases, but also a general sense that things are not as bad as they might be. The number of hospitalizations is high but not quite crisis level high. We continue to have daily COVID deaths, but the numbers are lower than November and have not yet risen in response to Omicron–as far as we know. Here is the latest update to the Pandemic Diary curve chart:

During the last few months, the OHA has been reviewing records for the entire period of the pandemic. So far, this review has resulted in the addition of hundreds of deaths to the official COVID death toll. More than 150 of these newly added deaths occurred in November. These have been added of the Pandemic Diary database also, thus changing the height of the November bar on the chart. However, we are not going back and redoing anything before November in any precise detail. So you might be wondering: Is this home-made chart accurate? Well, accurate or not, you can’t get these numbers anywhere else! Committed to accuracy as we are, we have even taken on a new staff member in the statistics department. See that vertical bar on the far right–the one for  December? E played a key role in generating that one.

Thursday, January 6, 2022

Quite warm again today. M had an allergy attack in the evening. And yes, these two things are related. It happens to a lot of people around here at this time of year. 

Friday, January 7, 2022

The media narrative these days is that we are seeing a tremendous spike of COVID case numbers, which can be attributed to the Omicron variant. As always, the supposed “case numbers” are actually just counts of positive test results. But the number of people who get tested in any given period is just a fraction of the total population. How many more cases would be find if we could test everybody? We have no idea, which is scary. If the people tested on one day constituted a random sample, we could use that sample to make an estimate of the total. Let’s say we tested 10,000 people on a particular day in Oregon and we got 1,000 positive results. That would be ten percent. Oregon has a total of 4,200,000 residents. Our estimate would be that the real number of COVID cases in Oregon on that day was 420,000. 

Unfortunately, the number of people tested in Oregon on a particular day is never a random sample. Some people are required to be tested, some people are tested because they are showing symptoms, some people are feeling fine but know that they have been exposed. In general, you might assume that the group of people being tested are in fact at higher risk than the general population. According to that assumption, if the group rate was 10% positive, the rate of the general population would be much lower, maybe 9%, 8%, 5% or 2%. Who knows? Or maybe you might assume that the group that gets tested are actually at a lower risk because they are generally taking better care of themselves and that’s the real reason they’re getting tested, in which case the rate in the general population would be higher than theirs, maybe 12%, 15%, 25%, or 50%. Hard to say. 

But, not only do we know that the ‘new cases’ number doesn’t tell us much, we also know that the more people we test, the more new cases we find. Below are four days of recent COVID test results in Oregon. Of the four, the report for Jan. 6 is the one that made headlines. How could the number of new cases go from 4,540 on Jan. 3 to 10,451 in just four days? Well, note that there were almost twice as many tests given on the 6th as on the 3rd. That factor alone would account for roughly 85% of the difference. 

	Tests Administered	Percent Positive	Number of New Cases
Jan. 3	26,869	16.90%	4,540
Jan. 4	34,728	17.92%	6,223
Jan. 5	38,880	19.59%	7,615
Jan. 6	52,761	19.81%	10,451

So we have this number, (10,451 in this case) which tells us the result of some non-random testing, which therefore tells us very little about the total spread of the disease in the population as a whole, and which is nine times more dependent on number of tests given than it is on the extent of the infection. But it’s a number, so we jump right on it. You bet.

P.S. And by the way, what caused the number of tests to go up so much from the 3rd to the 6th? Could it be that at about that time the media really played up the dangers of the Omicron variant, causing a lot of people to get so nervous about COVID that they just had to go out and get tested? That would suggest that these semi-meaningless numbers have developed the ability to increase themselves over time, sort of like a virus….

P.P.S.  This is not to suggest that Omicron isn’t real. The percent positive numbers–a somewhat more useful statistic–are very high for all four of the dates above. The number of reported deaths is not very high lately, but deaths are a lagging indicator; so we’ll have to wait and see. 

Sunday, January 9, 2022

Walked in the OSU forest today, through the intensive management area and looping around Calloway Creek. Along the way we came across this disaster scene. Since there have been no high winds, and the ground is very wet, we are assuming the soggy soil is to blame for the demise of this venerable tree.

Monday, January 10, 2022

We spent a lot of time prepping for skiing, shopping for groceries, preparing food to take with us, and digging out all our various winter accoutrements. 

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

Left town at around 9:00 today and made our way to Willamette Pass to do some cross country skiing. Willamette Pass is in the Cascades about a hundred miles southeast of Corvallis. We parked at the Gold Lake Snow Park, put on our boots and skis, and started out on the road to the lake. Alas we never made it there. The trail was easy, somewhat beaten down and well trodden but with plenty of snow. The scene was beautiful and the weather was fine. We had some fun on the way, zipping down a few of the steeper parts and not once falling down, so we’ll call it a success. But after a mile or two we started to get nervous about the fact that the trail was leading us so far downhill, thus promising us a long uphill route on the way back. After descending for an hour and a half, we decided to play it safe and stop for lunch somewhere short of the actual lake, after which we headed back.

We spent the night in a ‘chalet’ unit at Willamette Inn in Crescent, Oregon. We made dinner out of our food brought from home and settled down to rest. M read a Robert Parker novel he found in the bedroom while E amused herself on the internet before starting to read The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. We may have been the only guests at the inn. It was pretty quiet and pretty cold. Also pretty nice.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

The ski expedition returned to Corvallis in the early afternoon. All was well. But we were tired.

We Zoom watched a lecture/presentation on Bob Santelli’s Album Club. He was doing the album Blue by Joni Mitchell. What an album. He also played ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ from Ladies of the Canyon. An endless loop of that refrain is now trapped inside M’s head.

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Tertulia with J and R this morning out in the tent at Coffee Culture. The temperature must have been in the upper 40’s. Quite pleasant. J and R are having difficulties with the Hungarian exchange student who has been living with them. It turns out that both the student and her mother are distrustful of the COVID vaccines and although the girl did get two doses before she came here–as was required by the exchange organizer–that’s as far as she wants to go. This does not go down well with J, who has suggested that now would be a good time for her to get a booster, especially since one of her hosts has ongoing cardiac issues. It appears they are at an impasse. A new host family may have to be found. 

Thursday is dinner out day, but rather than risk the exposure of restaurant dining, we chose take-out dinner from Castor. Very tasty. E was particularly enraptured by the extra sweet butternut squash tartine.

Friday, January 14, 2022

We walked today with R on the boardwalk through the Jackson-Frazier Wetland. It’s wet all right, but we have seen it wetter. We saw eight or ten ducks gathered at a new pond in the open space to the west.

Later on we had errands downtown. E took her old down jacket to the resale place and left it for them to examine to see if it was of interest. M went to the tea and coffee place to pick up a pound of Yemeni coffee. The variety they have there is called Yemen Mocca Kulani. Although the word ‘mocha’ in U.S. coffee shops refers to coffee mixed with chocolate, in other parts of the world it was for a long time just another word for coffee. Coffee almost certainly originated in Ethiopia but remained a local phenomenon for a time, perhaps several centuries. It only became known to the wider world when in the 1400’s when some enterprising traders brought coffee beans across the Red Sea to the Yemeni port town of Mocha (also spelled Mokha or Mocca). The earliest consumers and growers of coffee in Yemen were Sufi monks in their mountain monasteries. But soon, more and more coffee was being grown in Yemen, much of it being exported to other areas of the Middle East and from there north into Europe. For a time–perhaps as long as 150 years–the Mocha area growers were able to maintain a sort of world monopoly on coffee production by exporting only sterile beans.

So for a long time coffee was called mocha because that’s where it came from. Only later did Arabic speakers begin calling it ‘qahweh’ an Arabic word that originally referred to a kind of wine. Qahweh is the etymological ancestor of our word coffee. 

Saturday, January 15, 2022

E returned to town only to find that her jacket had been deemed unworthy by the shop manager. She decided to go across the street and donate it to the OSU Folk Club thrift shop. This latter institution is famous in Corvallis for a number of reasons. It has been there seemingly forever in the same location; it has beautiful and interesting old things in the windows; and, finally, it is almost never actually open. They fact that the shop was open just when E needed it is a kind of miracle. M only found out about this later, as he had stayed at home to do a bit of compost stirring and moss raking. 

Sunday, January 16, 2022

We managed to choke down a breakfast of waffles with butter, maple syrup, and maple cream. We weren’t really planning to add the maple cream, but E looked at the label and it said right there on the jar “Use on waffles.” So we did.

After a modest period of recovery, E went for a walk in the OSU forest while M walked over to visit R to consult about a book project that R is undertaking. 

Monday, January 17, 2022

Grocery shopping in the morning; then a little bit of work on E’s transcription project. This involves four years’ worth of letters written by E’s uncle Charley while he was in the army during World War Two. During that time, he went to basic training, then to OCS, and later to the Europe in the last years of the war. The letters have become something of a family project. E’s grand nephew Ted scanned the letters, making an individual image of each one. He shared them on Google Drive. Now, E, A, and Ted’s father have begun transcribing them one by one so as to create digital text versions. M is helping a little with proofing and such.