May 9

The Weather Channel says our temperature is now 27F. I did move plants into the shed. I hope they are alright. I will find out after it warms up a bit after the sun comes up.

I found this interesting item on Euronews right off the bat. The population of the Czech Republic is only 2million more than New York City and has had 270 deaths and 8000 infections. I'll let you look up the stats for New York which, last I saw, are considerably worse. They seem to have had chaotic messaging from their political leaders just as we have also had. But the main feature seems to be that the Czechs spend more time outside. The preliminary studies the story mention indicate the virus doesn't spread in an open environment as easily as an enclosed one. We spend a lot more time in enclosed spaces over here.

CNN had an interview with a senior nurse who wrote a piece oh the 8 things she will be doing after the "lockdown" ends. The featured item was continuing to wear a mask in public. We pretty much came to the same conclusion a while back when Dr. Fauci predicted a resurgence of the coronavirus in the fall just when the seasonal flu begins to ramp up. I wondered what her other 7 things were so I googled it. I will let you read it yourselves. Some we already have done from a good while ago like reducing non-essential errands. We find we like shopping every two weeks as opposed to weekly. We have paid more attention to hand washing and paying attention to often-touched surfaces. A couple of her strategies for the future aren't relevant to our situation and a couple of our long-standing strategies  weren't included: avoiding crowds and shopping in "off" hours when stores aren't crowded.

I often wonder as I see headlines with contradictory information concerning the coronavirus and our responses to it. I get a feeling that we won't really "know" anything about this pandemic until it is over. I noticed a headline that proclaimed Seoul, South Korea is closing bars and clubs again because of a resurgence of the virus. They had, from all accounts, done a good job of containing their outbreak. Another headline asserted that most of the Covid field hospitals are being dismantled without ever treating a Covid patient. True? False? Something in between? Who knows. One thing the virus has done is shine a light on all our divisions and the splintering continues.

Just read Ugo Bardi's latest post on Cassandra's Legacy. I had heard one media comment on Dr. Neil Ferguson's little sex scandal involving a visit from his mistress during the coronavirus lockdown he had advised. I hadn't heard that his modeling had been getting a critical second look that revealed some shoddy science. Over on this side of the pond we have had some heated discussions about the models, and science and assumptions behind them. I don't think most of us really understand science or what the models based on the science can, and can't, tell us. It is rather like telling a person that doing x has a 25% chance of yielding y disastrous result and 75% chance of giving a wonderful outcome. That person decides to go ahead because those seem to be pretty good odds of getting what s/he wants but suffers the adverse outcome and then blames the model(er). It is all a matter of probabilities until the event happens--then you have certainty for good or bad. One interesting comment in the piece concerned the binary choices the government faced according to Ferguson's arguments: accept a high rate of infection and death or tank the economy with a lockdown. Unfortunately that is a false binary. The first would have caused also caused an economic crisis with large numbers of people sidelined by illness and/or death and more unwilling to go about business as normal for fear of getting sick. It seems to me to be a "damned if you do, damned if you don't situation" with no good way out.