Gotta catch up with Italy before they do anything rash.
(The United States is about 11 days behind Italy, but it’ll take time to actually implement any response.)
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Jair Bolsonaro has tested positive for COVID-19, as did his staffer who posed for photos with Trump a few days ago.
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I usually avoid having to watch him speak, but in the case of last night’s oval office address, it was blessedly short. If it had been any longer, that would just have been to insert more lies.
And, frankly, what I was hoping for, he didn’t mention at all. We’re all in this together. Any one person’s risk of being infected isn’t very high, but this is a society. The reason for washing your hands and keeping your distance isn’t ONLY to protect yourself. It’s to keep the spread limited, for everybody. And everybody includes you.
I just listened to Doctorow’s Masque of the Red Death. And, honestly, I want everyone in the country to read it. It’s super fucking timely. The protagonist is a master of the universe, rugged individualist type prepper. It did not end how I expected, but it was extremely realistic.
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There are very few people on this planet that I would actually wish it on, but that sentence included two of them.
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To quote Paul Ford from Teahouse of August Moon.
“THAT’S COMMUNISM!”
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Roger that!
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Hey, it’s on YouTude!
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We switched to online instruction. I don’t love that for the hands-on labs. I’m lobbying for a better video conferencing software that allows us to do break out rooms for small group discussions and will allow screensharing for coding based classes. Not concerned about cheating, just my ability to keep doing active learning exercises that are demonstrated to increase student learning and reduce achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students.
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Journal of the Corona Year
3/12
Today has seemed like a week.
I don’t know why, but I checked my corporate email account over my morning cereal. Good thing I did — the office is closed for the next week and there was a group phone call in 15 minutes.
Outcome of the phone call; there is still nothing we the design staff can do without physically touching our desktop computers. I was so tired from worrying for the past two days that I went back to bed. I have short hair, so no one would notice.
Day 1 of working from home.
There was very little to do all day but monitor all the work piling up and have no way of doing any of it. I didn’t like the feeling. It reminded me too much of unemployment.
I wish I hadn’t done my laundry on Tuesday evening. I could have done it today.
Some levels of management over-promised what Marketing could deliver while working from home. Apparently they were unaware of our inability to work remotely, or they were lying to themselves. Either way, I have a bad feeling some heads may roll over this snafu. But perhaps I still have lingering fears built-up from my time unemployed.
Perhaps they hadn’t heard that the entire island of Manhattan was shutting down today.
Management resolved this morning to rush out and buy we three designers a new laptop computer each, which IT will sprinkle with holy water. I have not heard anything more about that plan.
I took a lunch break around 3:30. I got a cappuccino and some groceries. The grocery store was packed. Perhaps everyone’s office is closed. Maybe this is a normal after-school shopping level, but I doubt it. The store was as full of people and the shelves were as empty as you normally see before Thanksgiving, the Super Bowl or a hurricane.
Still dealing with expectations via email up to 10:00. I spent most of the past 24 hours in my apartment and didn’t go completely crazy, so I guess it’s not a bad place.
Time to go to bed. I’m exhausted but not tired.
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Experts believe that only 13% (80% uncertainty interval: 4-30%) of all COVID-19 infections (symptomatic and asymptomatic) in the US were reported to the CDC as of Monday, March 9th. This implies that as of the beginning of this week there were between 1410 and 10575 undiagnosed infections with COVID-19 in the US.
eight out of ten cats say we’re all going to die.
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They’re just getting revenge for Schrodinger.
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Fabulous article. I was wondering why the cases in China were leveling off.
I received an email from a conservative friend with some perfectly correct information with all the wrong conclusions. And I actually believed some of it for a while. I would send this Medium article to him but it wouldn’t do any good.
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My professional society made the decision to cancel our annual meeting. I’m heartbroken, but it’s the right thing to do.
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Could they just do this with the Deep Fake™ technology so it would at least appear coherant.
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I’ve had this site up on my Meeting Monitor for the last couple of weeks.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Which was a “nice” conversation starter. With a fairly even split between “Well, we’re all gonna die” and “Do we do this for the Flu?”. Management types being more on the “this is over-hyped side”
Until this week.
My “company” is basically an in-house MSP for several businesses all owned by the same group. And the Business Unit leaders all started to get antsy. And now the last two days have been “Oh my god, can we support the majority of the corporate staff working from home??!!?!?!”
And finally, non-essential personnel for my business have been “encouraged” to work from home. Of course, guess who is “essential”
Oh well…
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As many of you already know, I lost my job due to circumstances beyond my control (they’re not called "accidents for nothing, lol) in a way that could’ve killed or left me crippled (I lucked out on that part).
So I get what’s going on, I’ve been living it myself since the end of July 2019; and this includes the lack of social interaction. Just not due to the threat of a virus.
I went to the dr. today for a checkup re my Lexapro Rx (got a 1/2 dose increase, which works fine for me), and pre-appt. had to not only fill out a paper form but also had to check in using my phone, AFTER I’d been contacted by phone yesterday by someone at their office asking me about travel and contact with others and any symptoms AND confirming my appointment via phone call. Everyone used hand santizer almost constantly if they weren’t wearing gloves, and the check-out nurse asked me to do so before checking me out, which hasn’t happened before.
I find it most disturbing that folks are wasting time with blame, fear and hate when they should be practicing protective measures for themselves and others. The POTUS doesn’t own stock in any COVID-19 test-kit company; nobody’s government released it to “rule the world” (those folks can’t even agree on what to get for lunch much less who’s going to run the world, fercrissakes).
And all this is happening JUST as I’m starting to feeling hopefully confident/confidentally hopeful (?) about going out into the world. My timing sucks, eh?
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