Work From Home (WFH) tip:
- Start every day (after dealing with urgent email) by mapping out the day on iCal or Google Calendar. Red is for family activities, Green is for work, Yellow is for dumb chores, Orange is for birthdays (set for yearly repeat).
- If you’re a parent and you have a ton of dumb chores, like food shopping, dinner making, and now… fun, fun, fun… homeschooling. Put it all on the calendar. Recognize ALL the work that you do.
- Make sure you put time on the calendar for exercise. If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t happen.
And taking my own advice, I’ve made my list of chores for the day. Writing chores are slated for after lunch today, but I do have some links that I want to jot down now.
Stuck home with your kids next week without school, camps, outings, and playdates to keep them home. Looking into the abyss? Here are some online activities that are getting passed around. Ian will probably do a computer class, but it’s structured and a full day program.
Looking for something to do with all those canned beans? Cheesy White Bean-Tomato Bake looks good.
Great map from the NYT about where people didn’t obey social distancing/travel rules.
When we’re done with all this, we’re all going to have a long chat about federalism. Some governors are making good choices. Others, like that asshole in Florida, are downright stupid and evil, ie those cruise ships outside Florida begging for help.
My in-laws subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter. Everyday, she breaks down & explains the big news stories of that day. She’s a history professor at BU. She writes for regular folks, like my in-laws, but leans into her academic background.
Back this afternoon.
Apt. 11d 
There’s a developing pattern in my area involving schools. We had our first COVID-19 fatality very recently–it was a public school principal. I see that another local principal has a mild case and a local teacher is quite ill.
Our local schools shut down right after spring break (around March 16), and it looks like that was not a minute too soon. In fact, both of the principals unfortunately participated in distribution of educational materials to students before being diagnosed.
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Sometimes I can’t tell whether people are all using the same data, but I liked this analysis of mobility from Descartes labs: https://medium.com/descarteslabs-team/covid-19-the-road-to-economic-and-social-recovery-6638866e3e4c (Medium post) and their technical paper: https://www.descarteslabs.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/mobility-v097.pdf
They’ve made their data available, but I haven’t figured out how to plot it.
And, all the data is incomplete, but I found this visualization of the New York Times data (which can also be downloaded) useful, especially the time course: http://covid19usmap.com/?fbclid=IwAR1m6nB9xKLuKmrDjL0KbknYZG05MFL_y5W-cNCGm4iYbVCvtOlaQ19BppI
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I think watching the decrease in travel as a measure is useful, but that the amount of travel, and the distancing it evokes important, too.
Say, there are large swathes of Montana, where people traveled less than elsewhere all the time (though, potentially, in areas only occupied by bison and wolves, who don’t have cell phones). Do they have bison?
The graph that says that travel i Seattle has decreased from 3.8 miles to 61 feet seems pretty accurate. February 28 was the date of my 2nd to last outing (except for groceries).
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I really wish I understood the NYT visualization better. Areas of west Texas where people live 60+ miles from a grocery store look recalcitrant, and while that may be so, I really do expect that someone there who radically scales down their visiting (from, say, a trip to town to visit friends, go to bible study, and grocery shop to a trip to town to just grocery shop) will not even make a blip.
It’s also interesting to see the tourist-friendly counties of the trans-Pecos in happy green (probably due to tourists like us cancelling trips) right next to the oil-and-cattle counties in angry red.
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Ben Brumfield said, “I really wish I understood the NYT visualization better. Areas of west Texas where people live 60+ miles from a grocery store look recalcitrant, and while that may be so, I really do expect that someone there who radically scales down their visiting (from, say, a trip to town to visit friends, go to bible study, and grocery shop to a trip to town to just grocery shop) will not even make a blip.”
Yeah.
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O please. The New York Times and its readers (of whom I am not one) think you’re all yahoos. Fine grained distinctions among “those people” are a waste of time.
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If you don’t read the NYT, you don’t know what it covers. Depending on your other news sources to tell you what it covers doesn’t count. That’s not what it “thinks” and it’s not what its readers (of whom I am one, and I am from the Midwest and now live in a rural area of it) think. I grew up in a family that subscribed to both the St. Louis evening paper, the Post Dispatch, and the now-defunct St. Louis morning paper, the Globe Democrat, and the Times is just as even-handed in its coverage of the Midwest as either of these papers ever was.
It is still, in some ways, a New York paper, so its coverage focuses more on the city and state than on the rest of the country. It also covers the ridiculously wealthy more than I would like (the “which $1 million one-bedroom condo would you buy” feature is especially entertaining). But its coverage of the rest of the country does not depict us all as yahoos.
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We’ll see, since the data will continue to be updated. There’s another map that shows when people decreased their travel to less than two miles, which is also interesting.
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Might be frivolous but I can attest to the yumminess of the Cheesy Bean recipe, it’s been a family favourite here for a while. There’s a spicy bean bake upgrade on the NYT cooking site as well. And if you want to make the first into pizza beans, just add pepperoni and olives or whatever other toppings you like.
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oh, cool. Not frivolous at all. We need good news, like happy bean recipes.
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Agree, food is not frivolous. My problem is that many of the “comfort food” recipes have cheese, and I have a kiddo who does not eat cheese. I like cheesy comfort food, though.
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In that case I’ll share a couple more. This one, especially once your garden’s in if you have an herb garden, is really awesome: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/marinated-mixed-beans – we eat a lot of beans. 🙂
And one of our comfort foods here is hummus bowls – there’s something about the creamy hummus base that gives my family, anyway, the sense of cheese. (We have a lactose-free person & we frequently run out of LF cheese.) You can find lots of recipes online but my tip is to have something crunchy – if you’re a meat person we usually do a ground chicken or turkey cooked until bits are crispy, by flattening the ground meat in a pan and cooking until it has an edge.
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Here’s another spectacular group infection story:
70 UT Austin students flew to Cabo San Lucas for spring break. On return, 44 of the 70 tested positive for coronavirus.
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Our school is now closed until May 4 (I believe this has something to do with TX state orders).
We’re also going to pass/fail for the rest of the year, which I believe a lot of schools are doing now. My husband’s college is giving pass/fail as an option. The college is also planning that the summer courses will be online, with the hope of having some in-person activities as restrictions ease.
I believe that our town has stricter rules than TX generally. I was joking to the family yesterday that maybe we could escape from Town to Texas?
I see that Laredo now has rules saying that anybody who goes into a building that serves the public needs to have their face covered somehow
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/coronavirus/laredo-residents-ordered-to-cover-mouths-nose-amid-covid-19-fight/2344478/
“Residents in one Texas city are being required to wear something that covers their nose and mouth when they’re out in public during the coronavirus outbreak – or else face a fine of up to $1,000.
Starting on Thursday, all people over the age of 5 in Laredo will have to wear some kind of covering, such as a homemade mask, scarf, bandanna or handkerchief when entering a building open to the public. Residents will also have to cover their mouth and nose when using public transportation, taxis, ride shares or when pumping gas.”
Not stupid!
There’s been a lot of talk about less strict states, but a lot of looser states contain strict municipalities.
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But, the problem is that the immediate (though mind you, constantly changing) consensus is that we need to shut everything down. Americans are just too mobile to imagine that restricting one location (NYC or Laredo) won’t just result in a spread to other locations.
I’m starting to think that this is a zebra of a virus (as opposed to a house) that is behaving in unexpected ways that significantly complicate its management: asymptomatic transmission, long lasting illness in some (even in those who don’t need to be hospitalized), a rebound trajectory in which people get better and then get worse again, with a relatively high transmission rate, with unknown factors on airborn, droplet, surface contact, . . . .
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bj said, “But, the problem is that the immediate (though mind you, constantly changing) consensus is that we need to shut everything down.”
We can’t shut “everything” down, because we still need to eat, have running water, electricity, AC (if we live in hot climates), internet, police, local government, jails, plumbers, delivery services, hospitals, ambulance services, semis, mechanics, etc.
We have to shut a lot of things down (especially stuff that involves a lot of people in the same place), but there is a danger that we will shut things down that will wind up biting us–for example, manufacturing. It’s not going to be immediately crystal clear what is and isn’t an essential service or good. For example, it may well be that craft and fabric stores, garden stores and appliance stores are essential. We will eventually have substantial maintenance/replacement needs and there is the possibility of running out of stuff if we are too strict about what is “essential.” (For example: What are the odds that one of the posters on this blog is going to have a major appliance or home system fail during the pandemic? Pretty darn good.) The only question is how soon that happens.
“I’m starting to think that this is a zebra of a virus (as opposed to a house) that is behaving in unexpected ways that significantly complicate its management: asymptomatic transmission, long lasting illness in some (even in those who don’t need to be hospitalized), a rebound trajectory in which people get better and then get worse again, with a relatively high transmission rate, with unknown factors on airborn, droplet, surface contact, . . . .”
It would have been really nice if the powers that be had entertained the possibility of asymptomatic transmission earlier and put some thought into what the implications of that are. So much energy went into urging the public that minor stuff like handwashing would be adequate and that they could otherwise go about their normal lives. Gosh, if only the people of Wuhan and Lombardy had known about handwashing!
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Yes, it is shut everything down that we can, and indeed, we will be wrong about somethings we thought we could shut down.
Some things, for example, fabric stores can be shut down and reopened if we find they are needed (i.e. home made masks). We might also be able to do tele shopping (beyond online), where someone skypes/zooms/ into the store. Some things need to stay on (electricity, water, sewer, garbage, . . . and some of those things require other things). But, shut everything down does mean shut everything down we can, and remain flexible.
Hobby lobby does not need to stay open as a store that people can visit until we see greater evidence that it needs to. And, as much as I weep for our lost flowers (I made a trip to get flowers from our flower market vendors, who had flowers that would die if someone didn’t buy them), I can’t argue that flowers are essential, except for the owners of the flower fields. We need to separate those essentialis and do our best to mitigate the harm and to be flexible about changes.
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Hobby Lobby needs to stay open so that the Greens can pay for more illegally smuggled artifacts and forged parchment fragments.
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“It would have been really nice if the powers that be had entertained the possibility of asymptomatic/minor symptom transmission earlier and put some thought into what the implications of that are”
yes, and it would also have been better if the nation’s leadership had considered that there might be community transmission (which is related to asymptomatic/minor symptom transmission) and not relied on a weak strategy of presuming that transmission would come directly from those who had visited certain countries and tested. And, “asymptomatic” transmission would not have been as significant a problem if only droplet/surface contact transmission occurred.
Ed Yong has a nice piece describing the confusion and miscommunication about transmission, with some news we can use: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-airborne-go-outside-masks/609235/
I’m often attached to technical definitions (i.e. “airborne”, “allergic”, “addiction”) which sometimes fail in straightford communication. Yong explains airborne, which he thinks has resulted in miscommunication about the topic.
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bj said, “And, as much as I weep for our lost flowers (I made a trip to get flowers from our flower market vendors, who had flowers that would die if someone didn’t buy them), I can’t argue that flowers are essential, except for the owners of the flower fields. We need to separate those essentialis and do our best to mitigate the harm and to be flexible about changes.”
Home vegetable gardening is potentially very important this year!
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bj wrote, “yes, and it would also have been better if the nation’s leadership had considered that there might be community transmission (which is related to asymptomatic/minor symptom transmission) and not relied on a weak strategy of presuming that transmission would come directly from those who had visited certain countries and tested.”
For a while there, they were only testing people who had a demonstrated China-connection because there was supposedly no community transmission–but we couldn’t see community transmission because we weren’t testing people without the direct China-connection.
Also, so much of the public health messaging seems to have been driven by the perceived need to paper over various shortages (tests and masks), rather than public awareness of shortages creating political pressure to eliminate shortages.
When this is all over (or at least when it’s more under control), we need a post-mortem on all of this.
“I’m often attached to technical definitions (i.e. “airborne”, “allergic”, “addiction”) which sometimes fail in straightford communication. Yong explains airborne, which he thinks has resulted in miscommunication about the topic.”
I think that use of the term “asymptomatic” may also have been a problem.
It sounds dumb, but I think that “infectious coronavirus carriers may not have obvious symptoms” would have been more helpful to the public (and a surprisingly large number of public officials).
I have at least two older relatives who both seem to believe that a person with coronavirus would be obviously sick.
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We had our stay at home order extended through May 4th. There’s a lot of hope that we are “flattening the curve” but I feel like we need more data.
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bj said, “We had our stay at home order extended through May 4th. There’s a lot of hope that we are “flattening the curve” but I feel like we need more data.”
Coming soon!
@politicalmath (a Seattle guy and one of my main coronavirus people) says that it’s very important to understand coronavirus in the US as a regional phenomenon with distinct trajectories in different areas. WA and CA are having completely different experiences than NY/NJ.
“There’s chatter on my kiddo’s FB college parent page that next fall will be “remote” too. And, follow up chatter on whether their child might take a “gap” if that’s going to happen. I’m not ready to embrace that yet. I’ve found myself deciding that I’d rather accept uncertainty than worst case scenarios, accept the incremental increase of restrictions and losses.”
The possibility of fall 2020 college being remote has certainly crossed our minds. Looking on the bright side, it would certainly smooth the transition between high school and college for our senior!
Our Hometown U. had (the last I heard) way fewer freshmen locked down for the fall than they expect and want this time of year.
The problem with doing a gap year for 2020-2021 is that there may be nothing safe and wholesome for young adults to do other than online college this fall. It’s not like it’s a great time to get a job and we don’t want all those college kids roaming about…
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I don’t know that there will “nothing” to do, and I do know that my child would not want to do an online semester. She wants the college experience (as well as the degree) and was taking full advantage of all of it when things were shut down in mid march. The parent who posted about their child taking a gap had a senior — they wanted to have a real senior year with senior year opportunities even if it meant a break. But, I think we just all have to be flexible and scramble to make decisions in the evolving environment (as we have for the past month).
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There’s chatter on my kiddo’s FB college parent page that next fall will be “remote” too. And, follow up chatter on whether their child might take a “gap” if that’s going to happen. I’m not ready to embrace that yet. I’ve found myself deciding that I’d rather accept uncertainty than worst case scenarios, accept the incremental increase of restrictions and losses.
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super interesting. I asked around on Twitter to get the professor gossip. 50/50 chance that there will be only online school. We wouldn’t take a “gap,” because there would be nothing to do. Jonah will probably take extra online classes to try to finish early.
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You could let him try basement hydroponics.
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Yeah. That was his Week One plan. Humpf.
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Also, it is disingenuous to say that health officials weren’t worried about spread with minimal symptoms and also disingenuous to imagine that these pandemic concerns weren’t being discussed. Scientists were discussing methods of transmission and what the consequences would be (with a combination of spreading with minimal symptoms, without contact, with inadequate testing for the virus, and with a high enough medicalization rate) we would have had to do, I think, what we are doing now.
On Jan 27th, Nancy Messonnier was saying this: “We’re leaning far forward. And we have been every step of the way with an aggressive stance to everything we can do in the U.S.,” she told STAT. “And yet those of us who have been around long enough know that everything we do might not be enough to stop this from spreading in the U.S.” Her views were casually disregarded and then she was personally attacked.
There was a NSC playbook for pandemics that contained step by step advice (stockpiling protective gear for health personnel was a big point.
There’s a lot we don’t know about what we should have done, but what we should have known was also not done.
We’ve been grasshoppers and we are paying a price.
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Regional differences are shown in this set of graphs (hmh, there’s a lot of code, so that different states can be shown). I took New York off, but I think the critical question will be if the rest of the nation has started mitigation quickly enough that they will get the flatter curve that WA is displaying, rather than the NY/NJ curves. I hope so. Note that though the stay at home orders/school closures came later, major employers started telling their tech employees to work at home around March 4th or so.
https://www.covidbyregion.com/?fbclid=IwAR3_1KJLN0lVq7U6FZVDXIqJSIFEuqAzjbFf6uVurJ7QNq6Lax4cOquQPl4&country=US&state=Texas&selectedInfo=%7B%22color%22:6%7D&pinnedKeys=%5B%5B%22US$Washington%22,%7B%22color%22:1%7D%5D,%5B%22US$New%20Jersey%22,%7B%22color%22:2%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Florida%22,%7B%22color%22:3%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Ohio%22,%7B%22color%22:6%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Texas%22,%7B%22color%22:5%7D%5D,%5B%22US$California%22,%7B%22color%22:4%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Michigan%22,%7B%22color%22:3%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Massachusetts%22,%7B%22color%22:4%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Illinois%22,%7B%22color%22:0%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Louisiana%22,%7B%22color%22:1%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Pennsylvania%22,%7B%22color%22:3%7D%5D,%5B%22US$Georgia%22,%7B%22color%22:2%7D%5D%5D&graphA=dead&startDate=%222020-03-01T18:52:36.275Z%22&graphB=confirm
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This graph seems to use both JH/NYT data sets.
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