Category Archives: News

The pandemic update from Britain: research, testing, and spitting your coffee

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Britain hit its arbitrary goal of testing 100,000 people a day by the end of April, the government announced triumphantly. How’d they do it? By including 52,000 tests that hadn’t been analyzed yet. Or taken, for that matter. They’d been put in the mail. Presumably to real people, although I can’t vouch for that. I have a picture of some hapless intern sent to the corner mailbox and stuffing them in by the handful. After being told to address them to his or her entire third-grade class, thousands of times over. At the addresses they had then. 

Third grade? Sorry. It’s an Americanism. In Britain, it’d be year three, more or less. 

Without the intern’s work, the number was 73,191.

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Irrelevant photo: rhododendron

The New Scientist article where I found the real test numbers (although for some reason it didn’t mention the intern) also tells me that the U.S. director of national intelligence announced that Covid-19 was not engineered in a Chinese lab, or in any other lab. It’s a natural occurrence. 

Sorry, Don. 

It also mentions that the English and Welsh coronavirus death rate for people from black African backgrounds is 3.5 times higher than for it is white people in England and Wales. Other ethnic minorities are also getting hit harder than whites. 

I don’t have statistics for the U.S., but I do know it’s hitting black people much harder than whites. Which makes the scenes of armed white guys demanding to end state lockdowns particularly chilling.

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Since we’re messing around on the New Scientist website, let me quote another article: Just four coronaviruses (virii?) are responsible for 20% to 30% of our colds, and they may once have been deadly, toning down as time went on until now they’re no more than a damned nuisance. 

“Researchers now believe that all four of these viruses began to infect humans in the past few centuries and, when they did, they probably sparked pandemics.”

A careless person could almost get hopeful, reading that. Waiting this one out, though, is not a workable strategy. All those people who want to wait for herd immunity? They think they’re not part of the herd. They are.

The New Scientist is a good website and very much worth a trip. Especially since a lot of us can’t go anyplace real these days. 

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Just to prove that it’s useful, and to lead us all quietly away from that dangerous spark of  hope, I’ll draw on one more article from it: It’ll be a long time before we have a vaccine, it says. If, in fact, it turns out to be possible to develop one for this bug. 

The average experimental vaccine has a 6% chance of being safe and effective enough to make it to the market. Of the vaccines that get as far as trials, about 33% make it to the market.

So let’s assume one of the vaccines being frantically worked on in labs around the world works. It’ll take twelve to eighteen months to manufacture enough doses for it to be widely available, and that would be a remarkable speed. The fastest vaccine ever made to date was for Ebola, and that took five years.

To make a vaccine available faster–. Well, basically, you have to start step two before step one is complete, and maybe step three as well. So if the drug fails somewhere along the way, a lot of money gets lost–and time with it. 

Speed also raises worries about safety. There’ll be less time to study the vaccine’s long-term effects, so problems can be missed. And, let’s face it, when an awful lot of money has been committed, people will be under pressure not to quibble about minor problems that might turn out to be major.

Because we all know how all existing political systems welcome whistle blowers. 

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Some scientists (and in the U.S. at least, some lawmakers, in a rare moment of bipartisanship) and pushing to test vaccines by deliberately exposing a test group to the virus instead of letting nature take its course and seeing how many people get sick. It could shave months off the trial. It could also kill people or leave them with long-term complications.

If you’re spitting your coffee across the room right about now, I have the impression that the idea made immunologist Matthew Memoli from the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases do the same thing, although what he actually said is fairly mild: “Where you’re going to give somebody a virus on purpose, you really want to understand the disease so that you know that what you’re doing is a reasonable risk.”

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The crews from cruise ships–some 100,000 of them–have been left stranded on the ships after their passengers were repatriated. The crew are shut out of ports and banned from air travel home, leaving them stranded. Covid-19 is rife on some of the ships. 

A couple of class action suits have been filed. On some ships, crews report being treated well while on others food it running out and many people aren’t being paid. 

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An article in the Guardian’s worth your time if you’re trying to wrap your brain around how this virus works. I’ll pick some pieces out of it, but there’s a lot more. It’s accessible and it’s informative.

One subset of patients are showing brain inflammation, agitation, and personality or behavioral changes. Another–including some young ones–are getting strokes. Some patients have low oxygen levels in their blood but aren’t showing much lung damage. If they were suffering from altitude sickness, it would make sense, but they’re not. One doctor’s hunch is that it must have to do with the blood vessels, but the research hasn’t been done yet. 

Another doctor’s hunch is that the virus affects men more than women because it’s activated by androgens. But again, that’s a hunch. 

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While we’re talking about subsets, a subset of scientists are trying to figure out how this beast spreads. Ending lockdown without understand that is–

Um. It’s hard to find the right word. Dumb? Dangerous? Dicing with disaster?

No, that last one’s three words. 

Anyway, let’s settle for “a problem” and move on.

So various groups of sciencey minds are coming at this from different angles. One is figuring out how virus-laden aerosols (those are–at the risk of, ahem, oversimplifying and distorting just the slightest bit–the tiniest of spit particles, being ridden like race horses by virus jockeys) behave in air. Another gropu is trying to work out if the aerosols carry enough of the virus to be infectious or if infection can only happen with larger droplets–the kind that go flying on the winds of a cough or a sneeze. They can carry larger doses of the virus (someone’s already told you that more isn’t always better, right?) but don’t travel as far as the aerosols. This involves a high-containment lab where they can spray the things around, varying the temperature, humidity, ozone, and sunlight levels. 

Some people get to have all the fun.

Other groups are studying the pathways the virus follows to pass from patients to health and care workers and then to new patients. Half of all new cases in Britain a couple of weeks ago (sorry–I’m always limping behind events here) were among healthcare workers. 

A lot of modeling has been done on the disease’s spread, but so far it’s all based on assumptions about how it spreads. This is research that could fill in that gap.

In the meantime, I am really tired of washing my hands. I just thought you might want to know that. 

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In the meantime, 77% of Britons want the lockdown to continue and 15% want to see it end.

What happened about the others? They’re watching Coronation Street and won’t notice the lockdown until they run out of new episodes in June.

The pandemic update from Britain: testing, protective gear, and condom sales

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Britain’s still in lockdown, but the government–after a good bit of pushing–has announced that it’s preparing an exit strategy.

That’s not pushing from people who want the freedom to infect their neighbors and loved ones but from people who accept that lockdown’s necessary but want to end it in some way that doesn’t undo the progress. Along, predictably, with pushing from business people who get to sleep at night by counting money disappearing over the fence instead of sheep.  

Stay tuned. We’re told we’ve passed the peak of the epidemic. Stay tuned on that too. I hope it’s true.

Testing & Protective Gear

Britain’s been frantically trying to test more people because the government set an arbitrary goal for itself and doesn’t want to look like the kind of government that can’t meet its own arbitrary goals. Also (and I can’t help thinking it’s their secondary concern, but then I’m getting more cynical by the minute) because testing’s necessary if we’re ever going to get the virus under control. 

Irrelevant photo: begonia

The government is managing to perform more tests. It may even meet its goal. But the testing’s a shambles. To get a test, people are having to drive all over hell and gone and wait in a long line of cars only for some of them to be told that the tests have run out and then (by the computer) that they can’t rebook because they were just tested. (Yes, that seems to have happened to at least one someone.)

A statement from NHS Providers, the organization of National Health Service hospitals, says, “NHS trust leaders…feel they are on the end of a series of frequent tactical announcements extending the testing criteria to new groups with no visibility on any longer term strategy, and are being expected at the drop of a hat to accommodate these changes with no advance notice of planning.”

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Britain had a chance to buy 50,000 home testing kits from a company in the U.S. but wrote back to say, “Ho, hum, boring boring boring. Not interested.”

The test is less invasive than and at least as accurate as what it’s using now, and it allows people to test themselves at home instead of booking an appointment, driving, waiting, being told they’ve run out of test kits, and all the rest of that joy. And all that sounds good, but the home testing kits didn’t come with a side of fries, so why bother?

And as long as the right number of tests get performed–or at least logged–it’s all good.

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British coroners have been told not to look at systemic failures to provide protective gear when they consider deaths among NHS workers. They can consider human failure, though. So basically, they can blame the individual but not the system. 

And they wonder why people break windows.

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Britain isn’t the only country struggling to get protective gear to frontline staff. German doctors have posed naked to draw attention to how vulnerable the lack of protective equipment has left them.  

But Britain is probably the only country that, in order to boost the amount of protective equipment it can boast about providing, counts each glove separately instead of counting them in pairs. It also counted body bags, paper towels, and cleaning equipment as protective gear.

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A British textile factory belonging to the department store chain John Lewis has at long last been contracted to make 8,000 clinical gowns, but other textile firms say they’re desperate to help and can’t get the government to respond.

See breaking windows, above.

Other Triumphs in the Supply Chain

A batch of 250 ventilators that were bought from China on April 4 have turned out to be unusable and possibly dangerous. They supplied a variable level of oxygen and the oxygen connection base was marked “non-EU.” Technical staff spent days trying to make them work and couldn’t.

They also had a fabric case that made them hard to clean and were designed for ambulances, not hospitals.

Other than that, they were great, though.

They cost somewhere between £1,000 and £2,500 each. I’m not sure why there’s a range of prices but if you’re in the market for a few hundred, you’ll want to hold out for the lower price.

Light Relief and Good News

Three London roommates missed their commute so much that they recreated it in their shower and posted it on TikTok. 

Yeah, go on, follow the link. 

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Captain Tom Moore, the 99-year-old (now 100-year-old) who raised £33 million for the NHS by walking laps around his garden, supported by his walker, received 125,000 birthday cards. By now it’s probably more. The post office was overwhelmed and his grandson’s school offered to open and display them. 

They found £60,000 inside the cards.

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This probably won’t surprise you, but condom sales are down since the lockdown started. 

‘Nuff said. 

Drug Dealing

Not long ago (time’s adrift in lockdown, or at least I am, so let’s keep it vague) I wrote that a test of remdesivir had been abandoned because it wasn’t helping and the side effects (liver and kidney problems) were too damaging. But the preliminary results of a different test show more promise: It cut recovery time from 15 days to 11 and the death rate in the group on remdesivir was 8% compared with 11.6% in the control group.

The full data from the trial hasn’t been released and it’s not a knockout blow in any case, so I wouldn’t set off any fireworks yet, but the drug hasn’t been ruled out.

More Light Relief and Good News

A 7-year-old, dressed as a tricertops, has been riding his toy tractor to deliver food to neighbors. Who could fail to be nourished?

I’d love to give you a link for that but you’ll just have to take my word and say “Awww,” because he looked very cute. It was on the evening news and all Lord Google wanted to talk about when I looked for a picture of the kid was a 65-million-year-old triceratops skull that was found somewhere or other and isn’t going to deliver lunch to anyone. 

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A couple of companies have come together to refurbish bikes that have been abandoned at train stations so they can be donated to key workers. 

No, I don’t know why anyone would abandon a bike at a train station, but some 20 are left behind every month. And they’re lonely. So this is good news for everyone. 

Religion and the Coronavirus

Germany’s government and religious groups are trying to work out safety guidelines for religious services as the lockdown there eases, and one sticking point is how to handle singing, which is not only an important part of many services but a great way to spread the virus. You know all that business about projecting your voice? When you do it, you also project tiny droplets of spit, and riding on them, if you happen to be harboring the virus, are even tinier little viral warriors, looking for new humans to assault, all of them yelling some viral version of “Yee ha!” but they’re so small that you can’t hear them.

I don’t think any controlled studies of this have been done yet, but I can offer you an impressive bit of anecdotal evidence from one Protestant cathedral in Berlin: 59 out of 78 choir members became infected.

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Many evangelical churches in the U.S. have pushed their members to keep on showing up to services, and they’re logging–this may not surprise you–a high incidence of coronavirus. And hinting that there might be some sort of cosmic justice, that includes their ministers. 

The All-Important R Number

Germany, having slowed the spread of the virus, is warning about the danger of a second wave in the summer or fall. It all has to do with the R number.

You know: the R number. 

Okay, I didn’t know the R number either. It sounds like one of those things from algebra class that helped make high school such a misery, but it’s not. Or if it is, I’m damned if I’ll admit it.

The R number measures how many people an infected person passes the bug on to–in other words, the reproduction rate of the virus. Without controls, an infected person passes it on to two or three people. The German R number is now below one. That means it’s spreading, but slowly. 

If it stays below one, the theory goes, the virus will eventually fizzle out. Anything above one and it will grow exponentially: I give it to, let’s say, one and a quarter people (c’mon–we’re dealing with averages here), they all give it to one and quarter people, and those people all and so forth, and before you know what’s hit you, a lot of people are sick.

German researchers recommend using this time while the spread has been slowed down to massively expand testing capacities and contact tracing.

A German coronavirus expert writes that “to achieve herd immunity we need 60-70% of the population to carry antibodies to the virus. The results of antibody tests suggest that in Europe and the U.S. in general, we are in the low single digits, but the tests are not reliable.” 

A second wave of infections, he says, can’t be contained only by humans handling the contact tracing. Electronic contract tracing will be needed.

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The British R number right about now is estimated to be somewhere between 0.6 and 0.9. Keep your eye on that word estimated.

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A study from Imperial College London and Ipsos Mori will follow 100,000 people to see if transmission rates are low enough to come out of lockdown safely. The participants will be given home test kits to see if they’re currently infected, then tested again in four to six weeks, or when it loooks like lockdown restrictions are ready to be relaxed. 

The International Grab Bag

As of April 28, Hong Kong had had just four Covid-19 deaths and 811 recoveries.

Worldwide, there had been 220,000 known deaths and 957,000 recoveries. When you look at those numbers, though, remember that not all coronavirus deaths are officially attributed to the virus. In Britain, for example people who died of Covid-19 in care homes are only now being added to the list of pandemic deaths. It’s a small victory for sanity and reliable statistics, although I’m not sure how much practical difference it makes. I’ve been trying to find out if deaths in the community are being counted and I’m still not sure. 

That still leaves the problem of deciding who’s a coronavirus death when testing isn’t available. To a large extent, it’s up the doctor who signs the death certificate, which could easily lead to undercounting.

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In the U.S., the number of known coronavirus deaths is now larger than the total number of American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. If you feel the need for a statistic, 58,220 died in the war. 

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Brazil’s response to the virus has been in a category of its own. It’s had 50,000 deaths. When reporters asked its president, Jair Bolsonaro, about the death rate having reached 474 in a day, he said, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do about it? I’m a Messiah, but I don’t do a miracle”

Only he said it in Portuguese, so you’ll find varying translations.

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Meanwhile, China is trying to contain a new outbreak in a northeastern province, Heilongjiang. 

Money and the Virus

The British government, in its wisdom, has rejected a call to bar companies that use offshore tax havens from receiving bailouts and support packages resulting from the pandemic. 

It was a silly idea anyway. I mean, just because they avoid taxes, why should that keep them from getting taxpayer support?

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I’ve gone on longer than I meant to, even after booting out a lot of news. I’m going to try posting shorter updates more often and see how that works. In the meantime, stay well. It’s crazy out there. 

The pandemic update from Britain: visors, volunteers, and outsourcing

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The ongoing saga of why the British government can’t provide protective equipment for health and care workers just keeps getting stranger. The government’s said all along that the problem is about distribution, not supply. Did anyone believe them? Why would we? Truth’s a scarce commodity lately. It turns out, though, that in a strange way they were telling the truth. 

It all starts with the outsourcing of the British stockpile of  emergency equipment. 

Outsourcing? That’s when the government pays the lowest bidder to do work it used to do itself because, um, it’ll be more efficient that way. And cheaper. And even if it turns out to be neither of those things, by the time that happens no one’s watching anymore and it fits with the political orthodoxy of the moment so it’s all good. That means we have private companies deciding who’s eligible for government benefits, a company with no ships got a contract for post-Brexit shipping, and a private company is managing the nation’s stock of essential emergency equipment. 

A store in Launceston, Cornwall, has set out a table offering free fabric to anyone making protective gear. Someone in our village is sewing masks to sell at the local shop as a fundraiser for the Air Ambulance.  She ran out of elastic yesterday and offered a free mask to anyone who’d give her some. I think she ignored the woman who offered to cut up her underwear.

Which brings us back to our tale:

In three years, that stockpile’s been in three different warehouses. The company in charge of it has just been sold. There’s also a lawsuit involved, along with a landlord who’s threatening to lock the warehouse gates, with the stockpile on the inside and the need for it on the outside. The cars of warehouse workers were searched one day as they left work and I wish I knew the story behind that but I don’t.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock swears the government’s rising to the challenge and–um, something, but don’t worry about it, it’s all going to be fine. 

The Department of Health and Social Care explained why it would all be fine even if it wasn’t yet by saying, “We’ve had to create a whole new logistics network, essentially from scratch.”

That was on April 12. So far they’ve invented the wheel part of the logistics network. Any day now, they’ll work out how to get the wheel on a truck. Then they’ll drive that much-needed equipment where it’s needed.

As soon as they locate a map. And invent a driver. They’re working on the DNA even as I type.

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While that was going on, the government made a deal to buy protective gear from a company in Turkey. Planes were sent. Or one was sent and others were on standby The press was called: Look! Protective gear! Eighty-three tones of it! Aren’t we clever? See how we take care of our frontline health workers? It’ll be here on Sunday.

Then the aforesaid Sunday came and the gear didn’t. 

Either someone hadn’t gotten export approvals in Turkey (which the people in charge of that deny) or something else had gone wrong. One theory is that the company that was supposed to supply it overpromised.

On the 22nd–that was the Wednesday after the Sunday in question–a planeload arrived. According to one guess, it carried ten percent of the order.

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I still haven’t seen an explanation of why the protective gear can’t be made domestically. In 2010 (the most recent year I can find statistics for) £1.5 billion worth of clothing and accessories were made in the U.K. I can’t break out the accessories from that to give you a number for clothing alone, but basically a lot of cloth is involved in this, with all the machinery and skills that involves. And then there are all those people sitting home with pinking shears and sewing machines, pitching in locally, or ready to. They can’t make ventilators, but scrubs? For anyone who can sew, scrubs are easy.

Could local efforts be scaled up with government support? You bet your dining room curtains they could.

Surgical gowns need to be “made from either impermeable material or a water-resistant, tightly woven fabric,” so we can’t all cut up our old sheets and make them, but if the garment industry and the people at home who sew are provided with the fabric, it could be done. They may not turn out everything that’s needed, but right now anything would help. 

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Semi-relevant comment: “People at home who sew” is an awkward thing to call anyone, but if you’re at all at ease with English you’ll understand why sewers doesn’t work. Seamstresses is gender-specific and so not necessarily accurate. In a tweet, the linguist Lynne Murphy (@lynneguist) mentioned the word sewists, which turns out to be something some people actually call themselves, but I don’t think I can manage it so I’ll just leave a gap in the language and fill it with awkward phrases.

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With that out of the way, let’s check in on a few volunteer efforts. In Somerset, 700 people are making scrubs and wash bags. They’ve set up a warehouse in a driving school and driving school staff do the deliveries. Local people are donating the fabric. That translates to, Keep an eye on those curtains if they matter to you at all.

In Bedfordshire, a design and technology teacher and a group of volunteers are making visors, with a group called Discover Islam providing funding for the materials and bringing lunch. So far, they’ve made 7,500.

In Kent, a school has been working with the fire brigade, making 20,000 visors. And two brothers in Wrexham, who are eleven and thirteen, started using a 3D printer they got for Christmas to make protective visors for people working in care homes. That sparked thirty volunteers to start working at a school, using donated and crowdfunded printers. They can make two hundred visors a day and hope to shift to an injection-molding process that will turn out eight thousand a day.

One injection-molding machine was donated by a company, Toolmakers Ltd., and the other was donated by the North Wales Freemasons. Who, I’m sure, had one sitting around in the basement, waiting to come out of mothballs.

The brothers are still turning out visors on their home printer.

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As for the protective gear available in hospitals, it isn’t designed to fit women. On one unit, half the women failed the fit test, meaning they can’t work with the most infectious cases without putting their lives at risk. The only men who fail the fit test are either very small or refuse to shave their beards.

Since eight out of ten (or three out of four, depending on your source, and possibly on how you define your sample and whether you round the numbers up or down)–

Let’s start that again: Since most of the people working in healthcare are women, it only makes sense that the equipment is designed for men.

The problem was raised as long ago as 2016. The people in charge stuffed their fingers in their ears and sang, “Don’t Worry. Be Happy.”

We are all very, very happy.

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Poison control centers in the US report an increased number of calls from people asking about disinfectants–presumably whether to drink them, inject them, or do both at once while gargling bleach and juggling fire. 

A Fox News article reports that the New York Poison Control center saw thirty cases of exposure to bleach and other cleaners in eighteen hours after Trump suggested that they might cure coronavirus. In a similar period last year, they saw thirteen cases.

Trump is now claiming that when he recommended disinfectants he was being sarcastic, and I recently saw a tweet saying that only a liberal would be stupid enough to drink bleach and liberals are the reasons that products have safety warnings.

My friends, satire is dead. 

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In Italy, even a Covid-19-impaired sense of smell can catch whiffs of lawsuits related to pandemic deaths. Prosecutors are looking at heavy clusters of deaths to see whether people in authority are responsible. Lawyers are advertising to the bereaved. 

One group of people took to Facebook, first just to bear witness to their losses, but the group quickly turned to gathering evidence for a lawsuit–not against healthcare workers but against “those in leadership positions.” 

“We do not want financial compensation,” Luca Fusco, who started the Facebook group, said. “Our main objective is to have justice from a criminal perspective, so if someone is responsible, we want them to be charged and brought to trial.”

While we’re talking about lawsuits, the state of Missouri has filed a lawsuit against China for economic damages caused by the virus–presumably because China screwed up and the U.S. has handled it so effectively. And an Italian ski resort is suing China’s health ministry.

When all else fails, sue someone. Once upon a time, in a very different world that we all used to live in, I’d have said, “Suing someone? It’s the American way,” but I don’t think I get to make that joke anymore.

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A drug that looked promising as a treatment for Covid-19, Remdesivir, has failed a double blind test and the trial was stopped early because of the side effects. It was used in China in uncontrolled–for which read, desperate–trials and seemed to help. The drug’s manufacturer says it may be useful in patients who are not as ill as those in the trial. 

I think I hear a hint of desperation in that, caused the sight of money disappearing out the window, but I’m ready to admit (a) that I’m getting more cynical every day and (b) that they could well know something real about this.

Remdesivir was originally developed to treat Ebola.

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Speaking of privatization–which we’re not anymore, but we were not long ago–a privately run coronavirus test center has managed not to send any test results to some people and to send the wrong test results to other people. 

It’s a drive-through center in–I don’t make this stuff up–Chessington World of Adventures. It’s being run by Boots (a drug store chain, or in British, a pharmacy chain), Serco (an outsourcing company), and Deloitte (which is basically an auditing company and I have no idea why they’re photo-bombing the operation).

They’ve all covered themselves with glory. 

A government lab doing diagnostic tests isn’t doing great work either. Because the country has had trouble getting reagents and assorted chemicals (unnamed, mercifully, otherwise I’d have to spell them), they’ve had to rely on substandard ones and may have missed some infections.

And the government turns out to have ignored offers from leading scientific institutions to help with testing. Along with a businessman’s offer to produce 450 visors a day, which sounds like it’s one of many.

The Cabinet Office said it’s “incredibly grateful for over 8,000 offers of support from suppliers as part of the national effort to ensure appropriate PPE is reaching the front line.

“We are working rapidly to get through these offers, ensuring they meet the safety and quality standards that our NHS and social care workers need, and prioritising offers of larger volumes.”

It has, it says, engaged with over 1,000 companies and is working with 159 potential UK manufacturers.

So that’s going well.

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A few weeks ago, I mentioned that the government bought some 3.5 million antibody test kits, which were supposed to test whether people have been exposed to Covid-19 and might therefore be immune. If, of course, having had the virus turns out to confer immunity, which no one’s sure of yet.

The best of the tests are only seventy percent accurate. The worst? They’re fifty percent accurate. Given that only two answers are possible, yes and no, that means you could do as well by flipping a coin. 

Sorry, I tried to come up with a better image but couldn’t get a 50/50 chance out of throwing socks at the washing machine or letting the dogs loose in the back yard.

The government’s trying to get its money back. And I’m trying to get back my lost youth.

Not my lost innocence. Innocence is overrated. Or mine was, anyway.

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South Korea is being looked as a country that might show us how to get out of this mess. It brought the rate of infection down from some 900 daily to dozens and then into the single digits, all without going into lockdown. How? By testing. It set up hundreds of free testing centers–drive through, walk through, mobile. (Not in a World of Adventures park as far as I know. They may not understand what an adventure we’re all having over here.) Then it traced the contacts of people who tested positive and alerted them. 

To avoid pointing a finger at infectious people, they’ve anonymized the alerts. 

Although they didn’t institute a lockdown, they did convince people to distance themselves and urged companies to allow employees to work from home, and they placed some restrictions on public places, schools, and religious services. 

They’re worried about a second wave when those are relaxed, so we can’t say they’ve solved the problem yet. 

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What are all the lockdowns going to do to the world’s economies? The short answer is that we’re going to be in deep shit. Different types and amounts of shit in different countries, of course, but nobody’s likely to come out of this smelling good.. The International Monetary Fund says the world’s facing the worst depression since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Some experts are predicting famines in the poorest countries

I know. You come here to have a good laugh. Don’t I just know how to have fun?

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We need one feel-good story. A former paratrooper who was walking the entire British coast, with his dog, to raise money for an armed forces charity was offered refuge on an uninhabited Shetland island for the duration of the lockdown. He was given the key to a former shepherd’s hut–no electricity, no running water–and coal, water, and food are dropped off every couple of weeks, weather allowing. In between, He forages, fishes, collects driftwood, and keeps a three-week supply of dog food on hand.

He had been homeless after he left the forces, struggling with anxiety and depression, and started his walk with £10 in his pocket when he faced homelessness a second time, starting out .

Since he’s been on the island, he said, “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

The pandemic news from Britain: no guns and no protests, but not much protective gear

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Britain’s pandemic lockdown has been extended, and no one’s out waving guns and flags and demanding the right to exchange germs on the open market. Instead, the lockdown’s widely supported, although I’ve seen reports that a few people, mostly young and assuming themselves to be immune, have used coughing and spitting as a way to attack  health workers, police, and random civilians. Or pretend to attack them, since I believe their claims that they’re infected as much as I believe their claim to have brains.

My best guess is that this isn’t widespread, but it has a huge resonance. It’s now illegal, but only if you catch them.

Why is the lockdown accepted better here than in the U.S.? For one thing, although British politics are crazy, they’re not as crazy as American politics, and it’s a different breed of craziness. The underlying assumption that the pandemic has brought out is that we’re all connected and everyone is in it together. 

If you pay attention, you’ll notice that some people are in it a whole lot deeper, but that’s not–yet–the dominant note of the national conversation. It’s mostly just cranks like me pointing it out.

It helps that there have been some efforts to support people who are out of work. People who’ve been furloughed from their jobs are promised 80 percent of their pay up to £2,500 per month. None of that money–as I understand it–has reached people yet, but it is in the works.

Some people will fall through the cracks, though: They were hired too late; they weren’t furloughed from their jobs but canned. The system’s chaotic and patchy, but it’s better than leaving everyone to rob stores or understand why they should’ve been donating to food banks back when they could’ve afforded to.

If you’re self-isolating because of the virus, you’re eligible for sick pay.

For the self-employed, everything’s messier, and self-employment is something any number of people were pushed into rather than chose. Delivery companies in particular are known for using the mythically self-employed, although the conditions they work under don’t read like a description of self-employment–or of a decent job.

A mortgage holiday’s been announced. Renters, though–. 

Yeah. Renters don’t get a break. One group of tenants wrote their landlord to ask for reduced rent and were told that they were saving so much on the lunches they weren’t buying and the holidays there weren’t going on that they didn’t need a break. They hadn’t lost a penny.

Which came as a surprise to the tenants, who had a whole ‘nothing impression of their financial situation, but what do they know?

Some tax breaks have been announced.

Businesses have been promised loans, although they’re being channeled through banks and only a small percentage of them have been approved. And, of course, they’re loans. They’ll have to be paid back. 

Richard Branson, the UK’s seventh richest person (£4.7 billion at last call), has promised to mortgage his private island to help get his Virgin Group through the pandemic. He’s also, incidentally, trying to get a £500 million government loan.

Denmark and Poland have refused  to bail out companies registered in offshore tax havens. They’re not in Britain, I know, but it strikes me as worth mentioning anyway. And while we’re crossing borders–or things that soon will be borders–the European Union has banned executive bonuses, dividends, and share buybacks for any company that gets state aid to get through this mess. 

I’d love to do a decent roundup of what support’s promised to who, what’s actually been received, who’s been left out, and how well or badly it’s working, but I haven’t been able to find my way through the maze. What I do know is that some people are getting help and some people aren’t. And most of the ones who aren’t getting help don’t have £4.7 billion under the mattress. Or a private island to mortgage.

Almost a quarter of all British families have taken a financial hit. More than a fifth are struggling to pay their bills. Prices on basic food, toilet paper, and sanitary goods are up 4.4 percent. Or more. Or possibly less. The picture’s changing too fast for the numbers to be accurate for more than three minutes at a time. And I’d love to give you a link for that but the article’s behind a paywall. 

Some of the homeless have been housed, but if you’re both homeless and a migrant, and if the migrant category you fall into doesn’t allow you to have recourse to public funds, you’re shit out of luck: No one’s going to pay the local government to house you, and so local governments aren’t going to house you. 

Some thirty homeless people–both native-born and refugees–are sleeping in Heathrow Airport. One said the airport staff have been kind to them. 

The government’s announced a program to get laptops or tablets to some of the most disadvantaged students while schools are closed, along with broadband, so they don’t fall behind in school. I don’t know when that’s supposed to happen, but I know two kids who don’t have them. 

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Lots of official programs are bringing together volunteers and people who need help, and so are a lot of unofficial ones. All of them remind us that without each other we’re all lost.

I’m the reluctant recipient of some of that help. I’m 73. Ida–my partner–is 80. It’s a mystery how we got that old. We didn’t start out that way. We stay out of supermarkets–it’s just too hard to control the exposure–although the smaller local stores are manageable. Younger neighbors have picked things up for us when they shop. It wasn’t easy to accept at first, and then somehow it was. 

I’m grateful–and I really, really want to do my own shopping. 

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Crime’s down in several predictable categories. With so many people stuck at home, houses aren’t getting broken into much. With so few people out in public, muggings are down, along with all the other crimes that concentrate in busy public spaces. 

Football hooliganism? That’s out, since there’s no football. 

What’s football hooliganism? As far as I can figure out, it’s a particularly British thing involving disorderly and sometimes violent behavior at football matches. For some people, getting into a fight seems to be the point of the game.

I wanted to include categories of crime that have gone up, but the Department of Silver Linings vetoed it. Sorry. Everything’s great. Don’t worry.

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Worldwide, a quarter of a billion people face starvation unless the world gets its act together and sends food. 

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In Launceston, Cornwall, a fabric shop set a table outside the door, with a sign telling people to help themselves if they’re making protective equipment.

See? I told you everything was okay.

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Medical people and social workers still can’t get protective gear, and the government’s still saying it’s on the way. The government’s only been in touch with 1,000 out of the 8,000 relevant manufacturers in the country and is working with just 159. Many say they’ve offered to provide certified equipment quickly and have been ignored. It’s being sold abroad. What else are they supposed to do with it?

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Half of all care workers make less than the living wage. I haven’t found any statistics on what all the delivery drivers and food and farm and store workers are paid. They used to be called low-skilled. Now suddenly they’re being described as essential. 

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Something in the neighborhood of 700 fake sites are sucking in people who want to set up subscriptions to Netflix and Disney Plus.

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Folding@home is using donated time on home computers to figure out the workings of the Covid-19 virus and identify drugs that could attack it. Combined, the computers are six times more powerful than the fastest supercomputer. They can perform 1 followed by 18 zeros operations per second. That’s called an exaflop–a quintillion floating operations per second.

Don’t say you didn’t learn anything here. And don’t ask me what a floating operation is. 

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A flower farm in Somerset is donating its flowers for funerals, key workers, a nearby hospital, and a nursing home. The flowers “keep on growing,” the farm’s managing director said. They don’t know “we’re in lockdown.” 

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Parliament will meet semi-virtually: 120 MPs will use a video link and no more than 50 will be physically present.

No more than 50 are physically present most of the time anyway. A fair number of debates take place in a nearly empty chamber, with MPs rushing in to vote when bells ring. They’re like Pavlov’s dogs, looking for food to appear in their troughs. But the new system will keep them out of the hallways and lobbies as well as the chamber.

That chamber business makes it sound like you wandered into a movie you won’t want to tell your friends about, doesn’t it?

The problem with the videolink is that MPs who are low on the food chain used to count on buttonholing more important people in the lobbies and corridors. That’ll be hard to recreate. And the time-honored bizarrity of bobbing–alternately standing up and sitting down to get the Speaker’s attention–won’t be possible. Neither will the noisy heckling that MPs indulge in. 

That could only be an improvement.

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In Muthill, in Perth and Kinross, two women have turned a retired red phone box into a food bank, inviting people to take what they need. The stock ranges from canned goods to chocolate, from fresh fruit and vegetables to jigsaw puzzles–which I admit aren’t edible but can keep you sane in crazy times.

It’s on a give what you can, take what you need basis. 

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A couple in Westhoughton, in Greater Manchester, have taken to running through town in what the British call fancy dress–in other words, in costume–to keep people amused. Click the link to see them dressed as a dinosaur and a cavewoman. 

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In New Zealand (which is not in Britain but don’t worry about it), rats are enjoying the lockdown. Pest control was categorized as non-essential–a particularly problematic decision in a country whose ecosystem didn’t evolve in the presence of rats. They threaten any number of native species. 

If there’s a positive side to the story, it’s that people who’d normally be out hunting deer are now hunting local rats. 

The deer have asked me to pass on their thanks.

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New Zealand went into lockdown earlier than most countries and has had only 13 deaths and not many more than 1,000 confirmed cases. Its prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, took a 20% pay cut in solidarity with the country’s workforce.  

So when comic Laura Daniel was in a TV competition and had to make an iconic New Zealand cake, she baked a tribute to Ardern by creating her face in cake. It was so bad that it went viral and Ardern took the time to send her a couple of emojis. I’m not sure what emo- the -jis are supposed to represent, but hey, who cares? The prime minister she admires texted her.

What did Daniel learn from the experience? “Don’t bake your heroes.” 

I’d add that, if you’re going to lose a competition, lose spectacularly. She’d never have gotten as much publicity if she’d won.

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A British citizen repatriated from New Zealand last week reported landing in Heathrow and finding no health checks and no Covid-19 testing. 

“All arrivals in New Zealand are quarantined in hotels for 14 days at the government’s expense,” he wrote.

Which might be vaguely related to how few cases the country has.

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The Taneytown, MD, the police department posted the following on Facebook: “Please remember to put pants on before leaving the house to check your mailbox. You know who you are. This is your final warning.”

 

And just so speakers of British and British-influenced English are clear on this: In American, pants are trousers, not underwear.

My thanks to cat9984 for letting me know about this important story. 

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Back in Britain, people may be buying–or trying to buy–more flour, yeast, and toilet paper than usual (not, we hope, all for the same recipe), but they’re buying less makeup.

Is anyone surprised?

They’re also buying more alcohol but less toothpaste and fewer toothbrushes. The kindest explanation for that business with the toothbrushes and toothpaste is that people stockpiled earlier. The other possibility is that everyone’s keeping six feet away anyhow.

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At least 100 health and care workers in Britain have died of coronavirus.

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The Medical Defense Union has called for emergency legislation to protect medical practitioners and the National Health Service against negligence claims during the pandemic. Many doctors are being asked to work outside of their areas of expertise. Others have been called out of retirement. Medical students have been thrown in at the deep end of the pool slightly before they finished their training. 

If they don’t get immunity to lawsuits, the NHS could be liable for any claims against them, because the government has promised to cover any lawsuits. 

Some US states have emergency legislation protecting them from civil liability for “any acts or omissions undertaken in good faith.”

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Horrifyingly, in the US, federal agencies have been seizing shipments of protective gear ordered and paid for by states and health organizations in what is effectively a blockade–the kind of thing a country might mount against an enemy state. The Intelligencer writes, “We don’t know where these supplies are going. We don’t know on what grounds they are being seized, or threatened with seizure.”

The Intelligencer isn’t a publication I know, but its article relies heavily on reporting from the New England Journal of Medicine, and you don’t much more respectable than that.  

Again, from the Intelligencer: 

“This is not just the federal government telling states they are on their own, as it has done repeatedly over the last few weeks . . . [which is] itself a moral outrage . . . because, in many cases, states are legally barred from deficit spending, which means in times of crisis . . . they are functionally unable to respond at all. In such situations, the federal government is designed to serve as a backstop, but over and over again throughout this crisis, the White House has said states will get little to no help — that they are entirely on their own. (The federal medical stockpile isn’t meant for the states, as Jared Kushner has said, as though the country is anything more than its states.)”

The federal government is also bidding against the states, driving the prices up, sometimes until they’re ten times higher.

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And because we need some good news after that, the Minneapolis StarTribune ran some fine photos of chalk art in the Twin Cities area. I don’t know if they’re from before the recent snowstorm or after it, but I lived there long enough to testify that it wasn’t during it. It’s worth a look.

Sorry this has been so long. The hardest part is deciding what to leave out.

Pandemic news from Britain: conspiracies, opera, and where the flour went

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Unemployed air crews have opened a first class lounge in several hospitals so they can give National Health Service staff a break. One of the organizers, Dave Fielding, says the crews offer tea, coffee, snacks, and “fifteen to twenty minutes of escape from the decisions they have to take everyday, because coronavirus has increased the pressure on them so much.” 

In spite of what the lounges called–and to everyone’s credit–they’re open to doctors, nurses, and support staff equally.

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The conspiracy theory du jour links Covid-19 to 5G masts. At least 20 masts have been attacked in the UK since the crisis started, including one serving a hospital. 

As far as I’ve been able to figure out without doing a deep dive into this particular swamp, the idea is that Wuhan was the first place 5G technology was tried, it weakened people’s immune systems, and that boosted the virulence of the common cold, creating Covid-19.

The fact-checking site FullFact reports that Wuhan seems to have been one of the early cities where 5G was rolled out, but not the only one. There’s no evidence that 5G has any effect on the immune system. It’s carried by radio waves, which are non-ionising–in other words, unlike x-rays and UV rays, they don’t affect our DNA. And Covid-19 isn’t a variant on the common cold anyway. 

Other than that, though, the theory’s solid.

You don’t have to dive very deep before you find claims about a link between 5G and mind control. I found them while I was looking for something else, but my mind was being controlled by outside forces and I didn’t click the link although I so wanted to. 

According to newspaper stories, if you dive deeper than I did you’ll find claims that the Jews are behind it all. The far right, apparently, just hates 5G–and, of course, Jews. 

Which brings me to what I want to know about all these Jewish conspiracies: How come no one ever lets me in on them? I’m Jewish. I can keep a secret. And who’d listen to me if I did tell?

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South Korea has reported that a group of people who recovered from Covid-19 later tested positive again. Some had no symptoms, others got sick. It’s not clear if they were reinfected or if the virus stayed active in their systems, but either way it raises troubling questions about immunity. And a vaccine.

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A hospital in Wales is injecting blood plasma from patients who recovered from the virus into patients who are struggling with it. It’s the first trial. If you don’t hear any more about it, assume it didn’t work. 

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One of the mysteries of these Covid months is where all the flour went. 

The answer is that it didn’t go anywhere. It’s still out there, but it’s not on your supermarket shelves. With so many people stuck at home, the retail demand for flour almost doubled (that’s in the four weeks before March 22 in case you care). The problem is that suppliers can’t move easily from selling it in bulk to selling it in small bags. That involves production lines and machinery and packaging. And, inevitably, money. If you want a tankerful of the stuff, you can probably arrange for a truck to pull up in front of your house. The problem’s going to be storage. 

It’s also easily available in bags, but we’re talking about the kind of bags that weigh 16 kilos or more. In pounds, that’s 16 x 2.2, which equals more than your back’s going to be happy with since it comes in an awkwardly shaped, and possibly floppy, package. Flour mills may not be quite as happy to send a truck out with a single bag, and it won’t amuse your neighbors for nearly as long as a tanker.

Have I mentioned that flour’s flammable? Or not just flammable: explosive. If you decide you need that tankerful, do be careful. I don’t have so many readers that I can afford to lose any.

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A doctor who changed careers and became an opera singer has returned to medicine to help out during the crisis. (What the hell–who’s staging operas these days anyway?) In quieter moments, he sings to the staff–through a mask. A co-worker filmed him. 

He’s a tenor. And only drawn to careers that take years of training.

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Have I mentioned lately that humans are a difficult species? So who-all’s getting blamed for Covid-19? In China, African students and expatriates are getting tested repeatedly–not to mention evicted and turned away by food stores because they’re assumed to be carrying the virus. 

Incidents of online, off line, and presidential blaming of Asians who just might be Chinese are too numerous to count in both the UK and the US–and for all I know elsewhere.

In India, Hindu extremist groups blame Muslims. 

And of course there are 5G masts, Jews, and the Chinese government–a natural alliance if there ever was one. 

As long as we have someone to blame, we can face anything.

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I wrote last week about Britain’s shortage of protective gear for medical and social care workers, and of course you memorize every word I write. It’s the shortage that lovely and creative volunteers are moving mountains to make up for. The shortage that’s helping spread the disease, especially to health and care workers and the people they treat.

That shortage. 

It turns out that Britain had three chances to buy masks, gowns, and gloves in bulk. But it would have meant buying them along with the European Union, so the government didn’t do it. Because, hey we’re leaving the EU. And what really matters, after all?

Brexit. That’s what matters.

Or possibly it was because they forgot to read the email. Or because the dog ate their homework.

And, what the hell, as long as I’ve depressed us all, I’ll toss this in: Some hospitals are so short on equipment that they’ve stopped using the usual way of checking staff members’ masks to see if they fit safely. It involves a chemical spray and they’re having trouble getting hold of it.

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We’re going to skip lightly over some pandemic stories because they’re either too heartbreaking or too frustrating, but I do want to mention a few very briefly. The one about the Home Office refusing to take unaccompanied child refugees from the Greek camps, which are overcrowded, undersanitized, and disasters in the making. The one about foreign doctors living in Britain who aren’t allowed to work here because the General Medical Council is too busy doing whatever it’s doing to register them. One particular group were at the final stage of accreditation when their final exams were canceled. Because, of course, of the virus.

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After Boris Johnson recovered from the coronavirus and left the hospital, he had high praise for the NHS, mentioning two nurses by name. He didn’t mention that he voted against listing a long-standing cap that had kept nurses’ pay from going up.  

One of the nurses he mentioned is from New Zealand and the other from Portugal. Anyone from the EU working in Britain pays £400 for the privilege. For every member of the family. Per year. After Brexit, that’s due to go up to £625. I believe that’s the amount non-EU workers pay, but I haven’t verified that. 

But hey, we are grateful to them. What, they want better pay too?

Britain has a shortage of 40,000 nurses. 

None of those figures are connected in any way.

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Britain’s on track to test 100,000 people a day for Covid-19 by the end of the month. The fact that halfway through the month we were only testing 18,000 a day has no bearing on anything. 

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Sorry–we’re getting a bit grim here. Let’s lighten things up. A ninety-nine-year-old World War II veteran decided to raise £1,000 for the NHS–the National Health Service–by walking laps around his back garden, which is what Americans would call a yard, but a yard in Britain is someplace junky, so he was in a garden. Last I checked, he’d raised £3 million. He uses a walker and is doing ten laps a day.

Britain does have a national religion: It’s the NHS.

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In London, a couple of actors staged the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet from their  windows. A neighbor played the sax, flute, and cymbals. Probably not all at the same time. 

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Someone who was missing his regular pub quiz set one up on Facebook and accidentally made it public. Again, it was a fundraiser for the NHS. The next thing he knew 30,000 people had signed up. 

It’s become a regular thing, with 150,000 people involved, and it’s raised £93,000.

Pub quizzes? No, I don’t understand them either. They’re a British thing and people here just love them. Or people who aren’t me do.

The pandemic news from Britain: cats, profiteers, rule-breakers, and the Dunkirk spirit

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People in Belper, Derbyshire, are dealing with Covid-19 isolation by going to the window or doorstep at 6:30 every evening and mooing. The instigator, Jasper Ward, said he figured it would last a day or two but after six weeks folks are still crazed enough to think this is a great idea.

My thanks to Autolycus for pointing me in the direction of this important information. My life would be poorer without it. And so would yours.

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In Hong Kong, the zoo’s giant pandas are coping with coronavirus isolation by mating for the first time. Pandas aren’t thrilled about mating in captivity, and artificial insemination doesn’t have a great track record, so zookeepers are delighted, even though the last time I checked it wasn’t clear whether a little pandalet was on the way.

We can assume the pandas are happy as well.

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Britain’s Tesco supermarket chain is also making the best of things. It got a £585 million tax break from the government in emergency coronavirus support (I’m not sure why since food stores seem to be doing very well, thank you, but what do I know?). Then it announced that it would pay out £635 million in dividends to its shareholders–a total of £900 million for the year.

Tesco’s chair, John Allan, said it was the right thing to do.

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Cats and their people were in a frenzy for a day or three over bungled advice to keep all cats indoors during the pandemic. A tiger in the Bronx Zoo had caught the disease from a keeper, leading the world to realize that cats and ferrets (but not dogs) are susceptible.

So the British Veterinary Association (apparently–there seems to be a lot of confusion involved in all this) advised people to keep their cats in.

All cats. All the time.

The website got so many hits that it crashed. Just to be on the safe side, our cat, Fast Eddie, spent the night outside. He knew which side of the window he wanted to be on if it closed forever and he knew that enough other cats were on the internet to keep that website crashed.

The next day, our veterinarian’s office sent an email saying they don’t recommend keeping all cats in and cats are not suspected of transmitting the disease to humans, although they could transmit it to other cats.

Eddie came back inside. It was time for breakfast anyway.

Daniel Kuritzkes, head of infectious diseases at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the information that’s available does support “the recommendation that people who are with COVID-19 should be distancing themselves, not only from other household members but also from their household pets, so as not to transmit the virus to their pets, particularly to cats or other felines.”

That’s good news for cats–and for the government, because it had made no moves to keep its prime ministerial cat, Larry, indoors. Even when the prime minister and some good portion of his cabinet came down with the virus, Larry strolled around outside Number 10 Downing Street as imperturbably as only a cat can.

No, I wouldn’t want to be in charge of telling him he couldn’t go out, but if Eddie’s expected to stay in while Larry’s out for a stroll–well, I don’t want to be in charge of that conversation either.

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Speaking of creatures who don’t want to stay in, the housing secretary, Rober Jenrick, got caught driving to his parents’ house after he’d made public appearances telling everyone else to save lives by staying home. It was okay, though, because he was bringing them food and medicine–something at least one newspaper reports that community members were already doing.

That was worth a couple of days of flapping before it was forgotten. It’s not like the thing with the cats, after all.

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The prime minister himself is now out of the hospital and recovering not where he lives, above Number 10, where Larry has been doing his frustrated best to advise him, but at Chequers, the grace and favor country residence that prime ministers get to pretend is theirs for as long as they can stay in office.

Sorry about that “residence” bit, but when a building’s expensive enough you end up using words like that. It’s all the fault of real estate agents–called simply estate agents in Britain, possibly because the British don’t believe they’re real.

He’s at Chequers because he’s the prime minister, and because his government’s been telling everyone not to travel to their second homes.

It will, I’m sure, surprise you to hear this, but not everyone in Britain actually has a second home. Or a first one.

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But we were talking about cats. They’re more interesting than prime ministers and they have fur..

Veterinarians, veterinary nurses, and veterinary dentists have been recruited to help out in hospitals to help alleviate the shortage of medical personnel. Their training will include the suggestion that they not offer patients their hand to sniff.

Across the land, cats breathed a sigh of relief.

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In Shetland, the hospital’s communications officer, Carol Campbell, posted a note on social media that staff were running out of scrubs–the clothing they wear and change out and wash endlessly to prevent cross-contamination. Across the island, volunteers broke out their sewing machines, found patterns, and started cutting up every piece of cloth that wasn’t currently on somebody’s body. Hospital staff have been running around wearing floral patterns, cartoon characters, and the giant faces of the band One Direction.

Other groups around the country are doing similar work, but without, as far as I can establish from the safety of my couch, the nifty graphics because the hospitals they’re giving them to are holding out for regulation colors. One group has a GoFundMe page, Helping Dress Medics, to raise money for fabric. That effort was started, appropriately enough, by the costume designer for His Dark Materials, Dulcie Scott, and involves costume makers from the film and theater world.

But the larger story isn’t all Dunkirk spirit and lovely people with pinking shears. Hospitals are running out of protective gear of all sorts. A group of nurses made do with bin bags. All later tested positive for the virus. Government ministers say it’s a distribution problem. Everything will be arriving tomorrow.

Okay, but it’ll be there over the weekend.

Or possibly next week.

After a where’s-the-home-secretary campaign on social media (which may or may not have affected anything but did make me aware of her disappearance), Priti Patel finally took center stage at the daily Covid-19 briefing and said, “I’m sorry if people feel that there have been failings. I will be very, very clear about that.”

So that’s very, very clear. Especially the “if” and the “feel” part.

Meanwhile, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said, “There’s enough PPE to go around, but only if it’s used in line with our guidance.”

In other words, stop playing football with the stuff, you reckless idiots.

The British Medical Association says supplies are at dangerously low levels around the country and lives are at risk.

Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, a doctor who went on Facebook pleading with the prime minister to provide protective equipment for front line staff and to ensure that healthcare workers get tested for the virus, has died of Covid-19.

I’m having a hard time being funny all of a sudden. I heard his son interviewed on the radio. He asked people to remember his father’s name.

Refugee doctors whose accreditation comes from other countries are asking to be fast tracked so they can help alleviate of the shortage of doctors and nurses. The British accreditation process, they say, is long, difficult, and expensive. RefuAid says it has gathered copies of the qualifications of 230 doctors, which come from their home countries

The health secretary said he’d discuss the proposal. He didn’t say who he’d discuss it with.

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On a cheerier note, the Faroe Islands, with a population of 61,000, haven’t yet had a single death from the virus and have only one person hospitalized with it. They’re getting ready to reopen schools.

What did they do right? They listened to a veterinary scientist, Debes Christiansen, who warned them that the virus was coming.

Christiansen’s lab is set up to test salmon for viral infections, but he bought the supplies he’d need to test humans and 10% of the population has now been tested. The contacts of people who tested positive were traced and quarantined. Christiansen said it was easy to adapt his lab and to get hold of the materials he needed. He could, he said, use a wider range of suppliers than hospitals could.

No, I don’t understand that last bit either, but he could do a thousand tests a day if they were needed.

So why is the UK having such trouble testing people? See that bit neither of us understood about the range of suppliers. It probably means something along the lines of “We have regulations and we’re not going to abandon them just because people are dying.”

Or possibly not. I’m in the dark and making guesses at where the door is.

An opposition MP praised not just Christiansen but also the government for setting up a drive-in testing facility and quarantine facilities at an airport hotel.

The Faroes, in case this is useful information, are a self-governing territory of Denmark.

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And finally, the spacecraft BepiColombo made its closest approach to Earth on April 10, took a good look at the mess we’re in, and headed off to Venus. Can’t say I blame it.

Stay safe, be careful, and try not to let it make you crazy. We’re hiding from things we can’t see. It’s easy for that to tip a person over the edge.

Pandemic news from Britain: the good, the bad, and the bizarre

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At the end of March, someone named Sarah Buck tweeted, “Just had a knock on the door and sat on the doorstep was 2 bottles of milk and a loaf of bread. The man who put them there was stood back on the footpath and told me that the items were gifts from Banbury Mosque! They went to every house on our street delivering these!!”

There are many stories like this, all over the country–people stepping in to help as best they can where they’re needed. We’ll let this one stand in for them all.

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Someone put together an impressive dalek costume and rolled through Robin Hood Bay, near Whitby, announcing, “By order of the Daleks, all humans must stay indoors, all humans must self-isolate.” 

And if you don’t know what a dalek is, you’re making better use of your time than I am. It’s a bad guy from Dr. Who. With a toilet plunger for a nose.  Or maybe it’s an antenna, not a nose. It’s definitely a toilet plunger, though.

You can find the video here.

(That was important enough that it got two links. I hope you’re impressed.) 

*

Startlingly relevant photo, but you’ll need to read to the end to understand why

The prime minister is now in intensive care with Covid-19. Ever since he came down sick, his government has been reciting a soothing drone that consisted mostly of the phrase mild case. 

Then he went into the hospital. For–we were assured–routine tests. On a Sunday night. But he was still running the country.

How dumb do they think we are?

Very.

Now he’s in intensive care and not running the country. So who’s is? Dominic Raab. [Update: True, but it turns out he has no power. He can’t make decisions without the cabinet’s okay.] But Larry the Cat has been edged out. I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. 

Government ministers, by the way, have taken to blaming top civil servants for the mess they–that’s the government, not the civil service–have made in responding to the crisis. 

*

In the interest of fixing this mess, the government has bought 17.5 million home testing kits (or possibly an option on them–I’ve seen it explained both ways) that would allow people to find out whether they’ve had Covid-19. This would allow people who already had it and are immune to go back out into the world.

Unfortunately, they don’t work well enough to be much use. The milder a person’s symptoms were, the less likely the tests are to detect antibodies. On top of that, no one knows for sure if people who’ve had it actually are immune and if so how long their immunity lasts.

Other than that, they’re great and we’re well on our way to solving our little problem.

*

Scotland’s chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, warned the public not to go anywhere unless it was essential. It put people’s lives at risk. So listen up, people, we can’t fool around with this.

Then she went to her second home. Twice. And got caught. 

And resigned.

It’s funny how much more essential a trip looks when it’s yours.

*

In response to the local humans going into hiding, goats have wandered into Llandudno, in Wales, and are looking very picturesque, thank you. These are Kashmiri goats, originally from India, and they’ve been in the area since the nineteenth century–long enough to acquire the local accent. In normal times, they only come into town in bad weather. Or when they’ve saved up enough money for ice cream.

The photos are worth a click.

*

I was going to report on what NHS staff are having to use to protect themselves from infection in the absence of genuine protective equipment, but it’ll either make you depressed or homicidal. Ditto the reports of them being warned not to speak out about the lack of equipment and how it’s putting their lives at risk. Both are happening. Read the real news, not just the stuff I post. I can’t make this stuff funny and if I could it’d be immoral. 

After a decade of underfunding the National Health Service, chopping it to pieces, disorganizing it, privatizing it, re-disorganizing it, understaffing it, and blaming the problems on the people who work for it and the previous government, suddenly the Conservatives love the NHS and everyone who works for it. Without proper protective equipment. 

And when this is all over, they’ll privatize more of it. In the name of making it more resilient. You heard it here first.

Me? I lean more heavily toward the homicidal. 

*

Let’s cheer ourselves up. Something called Brewgooder has worked out a way for people to buy four-packs of beer for NHS staff. 

“It’s not much,” it said, “but with beer nationally recognised as a currency of gratitude, it’s a small gesture to show your appreciation to a tireless NHS worked that you don’t know and may never meet.”

*

Postman Jon Matson, in South Tyneside, is doing his bit to lift people’s spirits. He’s delivered mail dressed as Cleopatra, Little Po Beep, a cheerleader, and a soldier. 

Did I mention that he’s got a full beard? You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Little Bo Peep with a beard.

The response was good enough that he’s promised to dress up as someone new every day. And yeah, that’s worth a click as well.

*

In Stockport, someone goes out for an hour a day dressed as Spiderman to cheer up kids. Parents can request a visit to their street as long as the kids promise to stay in and wave from the window. 

*

And finally–and irrelevantly–I put a note on my village Facebook page that I’d lost one of my favorite earrings and if anyone found it I’d love to have it back. I didn’t think I stood a chance of seeing it again, but I had to try. The earring’s small and kind of pavement colored, but in less than an hour a neighbor was at my door with it in his palm.

About thirty seconds before that happened, another neighbor offered a box of chocolates to anyone who found it. She’s now in debt to the tune of one box of chocolates.

Thank you, Paul.

Birds, bills, booze, and the virus: It’s the (old) news from Britain

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In early March, with northern Italy beset by the corona virus, a winery in Castelvetro had a problem with one of its valves and ended up sending lambrusco into the kitchen sinks and showers (and, presumably, bathtubs) of twenty neighboring houses. The leak lasted three hours–long enough for the neighbors to bottle a fair bit of wine. 

No one’s demonstrated that it cured the virus, but it did keep twenty families occupied and happy for a while.

*

The British papers reported a rush in the U.S. to buy guns and ammunition in the face of the corona virus. “Why?” people here asked, since American gun culture’s a foreign language to them. “You can’t shoot the bug.”

As the interpreter of all things American, I had to explain: “It’s to protect their toilet paper.”

Irrelevant photo: Crocuses. They’re not afraid of the corona virus.

*

I knew the Covid-19 epidemic was serious when I heard that EastEnders–that essential BBC soap opera–had suspended filming. I’d have thought the world was ending, but they making box sets of dramas available to get people through their isolation. They’re also using local radio stations to coordinate volunteers offering to help the elderly–and I hope other vulnerable people, but that’s not what the new story I read said.

Two notes before I move on: 1) The definition of elderly is “older than me,” even though they seem to have mistakenly asked me to stay out of everyone’s way so I don’t get sick. 2) I am not now watching nor have I ever watched EastEnders.

*

This next story starts with a man getting a bill from a utility company he doesn’t have an account with, Scottish Power. He figures it’s a scam and ignores it. 

He gets calls from the same company. He complains to them about it. He gets referred to the complaints line. 

The complaints line tells him they can’t help because he doesn’t have an account with the company.

He writes the chief exec and gets a letter back assuring him they’ll restore his account to a dual-fuel tariff and thanking him for accepting a phone call he’d never gotten.

He continues to get calls from the company. 

He makes a complaint to the Energy Ombudsman, who (or maybe that’s which) tells him they (or possibly he or she) can’t help because he hasn’t exhausted Scottish Power’s complaints process. 

He gets a newspaper’s consumer column involved, but they can’t manage to get through to the company’s press office. The phone numbers they call aren’t answered, the email addresses are dead ends, and the contact people aren’t contacts. Or, quite possibly, people. In the past, when the paper’s gotten other complaints about the company, the best it’s been able to do is roll the stories together and make them public, hoping to embarrass the company. 

The man blocks the company’s number while he’s at work so at least he can get some work done. 

Last I heard, nothing’s been resolved.

*

Meanwhile, a driver paid an Irish toll electronically. Then she or he–let’s call him or her them for the sake of my sanity–got a letter from Euro Parking Collection saying the payment was overdue. 

The driver sent a screenshot of their bank statement to prove it was paid.

They got a letter asking for more details and sent them.

Silence.

They looked at the website to make sure it had been resolved and ended up resubmitting everything they’d already sent and got a letter back saying the payment couldn’t be traced.

They called and got an automated message that convinced them the company doesn’t respond to calls. They called some more and got someone who said the company would look into it.

Silence.

They called again. It would be looked into.

They got a letter from a debt collection agency. The toll had now gone from £5.52 to £88.43. 

They contacted the company that administers the toll system and got an email asking for the information they’d already sent twice. When they sent a reply, they were told the sender’s mailbox was full.

When the same newspaper column got in touch, the information still couldn’t be located but the company did at least cancel the payment. 

The columnist had almost as hard a time getting through as the civilian.

*

While we’re on the subject of driving, new British cars are cranking out 7% more carbon dioxide than older ones, even though they meet the new emissions standards and have all the cleaner-air bells and whistles. 

How come? They’re bigger and they’re heavier. 

And yes, that includes hybrids. 

Excuse me for a minute while I go slit my wrists.

*

Judith Niemi, from Minnesota, sent me this: The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior reports that “house sparrows [still generally by non-birders called ‘English sparrows’] have even learned to open automatic doors to grocery stores, cafes, and other sources of food by hovering in front of the electric eye sensors.” 

Judith adds, “The book does not explicitly say that none of the new world sparrows have caught on to this trick; I’m pretty sure it’s just those scrappy, street-smart birds whose lineage has been perfecting various dodges in London streets for centuries. Distracting people with their lechery, perhaps, while their chums picked pockets? Incidentally, since being imported to these shores the species has evolved to be more variable, and often bigger. Just as aggressive. There’s a metaphor in there.”

*

Somehow or other, this story follows from that, although I can’t explain why: In Yorkshire, a pig set fire to its pen. How? Well, first it swallowed a pedometer that another pig was wearing. Then it digested it and–with apologies to those of tender sensibilities–it shit it out, as both humans and pigs will do with the things they swallow. Copper from the battery “reacted with” dry hay and started a blaze. 

Why was the other pig wearing a pedometer? To prove that it was–or presumably they were–free range. 

How did the battery start a fire? It was a lithium-ion battery–the same kind that’s been known to spontaneously combust in cell phones and such.

Why did the pig eat the pedometer? That’s harder to answer. My best guess is jealousy. You know how it is. Why didn’t I get the pedometer?

Was anyone hurt? No. Four pig pens burned but the pigs were fine and headline writers had a wonderful time, writing about pigs pooping pedometer, firefighters saving the bacon, and calories being burned. 

*

The fashion house Hugo Boss has a history of taking smaller businesses and charities to court for using the name Boss, so a comedian formerly known as Joe Lycett went to court to change his name to Hugo Boss. In a tweet, he explained the background and wrote, “All future statements from me are not from Joe Lycett but Hugo Boss. Enjoy.”

*

A newly published British Medical Journal survey from 2016 reports the MPs–that’s Members of Parliament–are more likely to binge drink than the general public is. Binge drinking is defined at six or more units of alcohol at a session.

MP Dan Poulter commented, “It is extraordinary that there are so many bars in parliament where alcohol is available at almost every hour of the day.

“This is not the case in other parliaments elsewhere in the world and is certainly not the case in other workplaces, where drinking alcohol is not acceptable during working hours.”

To illustrate the impact, the Guardian told a tale from 1983, when a junior employment minister, Alan Clark, gave a speech while drunk enough to throw entire pages without reading them. Why not? As far as he could figure out, they made no sense anyway. An opposition MP “asked me what the last paragraph meant,” he wrote. “How the hell did I know?” 

*

And bringing together the tales of the pig and the MP, a plane headed for Iceland made an emergency landing in Edinburgh when a man got drunk enough that he tried to eat his phone. Or at least, he chewed on it hard enough to damage the battery, which fell out and started smouldering on the seat. A flight attendant threw water on it and put it out. 

The passenger was also abusive to other passengers, flight attendants, and the police who came to arrest him when they landed. 

He may be free-ranging again by now. He may even have an ankle bracelet to prove it. But that’s speculation.

*

In the late Victorian era, before mass car ownership, London traffic moved at about 12 miles an hour. In 2018, in Westminster and the City (two parts of London), it moved at 8 miles an hour.

I call that progress.

The pandemic news from Britain

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So you think you’re bored? An astrophysicist in Australia dealt with coronavirus isolation by trying to build a gizmo that would warn people when they started to touch their faces. He used four powerful neodymium magnets–and no, I never heard of them either but you can buy them online for any price between £4 and £2,000. I’m not sure what range his fell into.

I know: Australia isn’t in Britain. It’s too good a story to pass up. And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke. 

He wasn’t working in his area of expertise, but he figured that if he wore magnets on his wrists and made a necklace out of something else, it would buzz when the two got too close.

Nice try. It buzzed until the two got close together, basically nagging until you were driven to touch your face. So he gave up on that, but he still had those magnets.

“After scrapping that idea, I was still a bit bored, playing with the magnets. It’s the same logic as clipping pegs to your ears – I clipped them to my earlobes and then clipped them to my nostril and things went downhill pretty quickly when I clipped the magnets to my other nostril.”

What he’d done was clip one inside and one outside each nostril, and all was well until he took the outside ones off and the two inside clipped themselves together. When he went to get them off, they would fit past the ridge at the bottom of his nose. So he turned to Lord Google, who told him that an eleven-year-old had had the same problem and that the solution was to use more magnets, from the outside, to counteract the pull of the ones inside.

Do not believe everything Lord Google tells you. Even if you’re an astrophysicist. Lord G. does not have your best interests at heart. The magnets did indeed pull and he lost his grip on them and now had four magnets up his nose instead of two. So he tried to use a pliers, but “every time I brought the pliers close to my nose, my entire nose would shift towards the pliers and then the pliers would stick to the magnet. It was a little bit painful at this point.”

He ended up in the hospital where his partner works and they sprayed an anesthetic into his nose and pulled out three magnets, at which point the fourth one dropped down his throat. He was lucky enough to cough it out. If he’d swallowed it, apparently, he’d have been in real trouble.

He’s sworn never to play with magnets again.

*

In the meantime, how’s the UK coping with the virus? Well, it turns out that in 2018 it published a biological security strategy addressing the threat of pandemics. And then ignored it. As a former science advisor to the government, Ian Boyd, put it, “Getting sufficient resource just to write a decent biosecurity strategy was tough. Getting resource to properly underpin implementation of what it said was impossible.” 

Which is one reason that when the government heard a pandemic was coming, it put magnets up its nose. 

To be entirely fair, it’s been putting metaphorical magnets up its nose for years now, cutting money from the National Health Service on every week that started with Monday (or Sunday, depending on your calendar) until the service was barely handling ordinary problems.

The government tested the NHS a while back to see if it was ready to handle an epidemic. It wasn’t. So what did they do? Buried the findings. 

And three years ago the Department of Health got medical advice saying it should stock up on protective equipment for NHS and social care staff to prepare for a flu epidemic. But an economic assessment showed that it would cost actual money, so they didn’t do it.

Doctors and nurses are being asked to come out of retirement during the current crisis, and younger doctors are being asked to increase their hours or work on the front lines, but a doctors organization says many are hesitant because they would not be eligible for death-in-service benefits, “leaving their families in financial difficulty” if they died as a result. 

As I write this, our prime minister, health secretary, and chief medical officer all have Covid-19. So does the prime minister’s brain, Dominic Cummings. But Larry the Cat, who lives and works at Number 10 Downing Street, is immune and he’s prepared to step in as soon as everyone admits that he’s needed. 

He was originally brought into government to take charge of pest control, but you know what cats are like: They study everything everyone does. 

People, he’s ready for this. 

*

A lot of ink has been spilled over why Britain didn’t go in with the European Union on a bulk buying deal for ventilators and other medical equipment to help deal with the epidemic. First we were told it was because Britain isn’t part of the EU. Then it turned out that Britain was eligible. So last week we were told it was because the government missed the deadline by accident–it didn’t get the email. But Britain had representatives at four or more meetings where the plan was discussed, and there were phone calls about it.

The cabinet hasn’t commented yet but watch this space. They’re going to blame Larry.

*

Farm organizations and farm labor recruitment agencies say that between Brexit and the virus, Britain is short something like 80,000 agricultural workers. They’re calling for a land army to help with the harvest. It’s too early to say how well it’ll work.

*

Who’s at the highest risk of exposure to the virus? Low-paid women. They cluster in social care, nursing, and pharmacy jobs–jobs with high exposure to lots of people. They make up 2.5 million of the 3.2 million highest risk workers. So we’re all in it together, but some of us are in it a lot deeper than others, and with a lot less protection.

*

People whose health puts them most at risk from the virus have been contact by the government and advised to stay in for twelve weeks. And food parcels are being delivered to at least some of them–something I know not just from the papers but because friends received one and were also put in touch with a neighbor who’s able to shop for them. It’s impressive, but there are still huge gaps. People who have to depend on supermarket deliveries haven’t been able to set them up–there just aren’t enough slots. And sorting out who needs them and who wants them but doesn’t completely need badly? That’s not going well.

*

Emergency legislation had given the police the power to—

Um. Do something about slowing the spread of Covid-19, but no one’s sure what, and police forces across the country interpreted their new powers in new and interesting ways. 

One force dyed a lagoon black to keep visitors away. Another insisted people could only have an hour’s exercise a day, and a third issued a summons to a family for shopping for non-essential items. A fourth used a drone to film dog walkers and a fifth told a shop to stop selling Easter eggs.

Part of the problem is that there’s a gap between what the legislation says and comments from our notoriously loose-lipped prime minister, who said (before he got sick himself) that people should only exercise once a day. Another part of the problem is that the legislation was rushed through, without much time for thought. 

Senior police commanders are trying to bring some kind of sense to this mayhem. Expect the Easter egg ban to be lifted any day now. I glanced at a summary of the legislation. Easter eggs aren’t mentioned. 

*

The government has announced a program to get the homeless–called rough sleepers here–off the streets and into hotel rooms, which aren’t being used anyway, or into empty apartment buildings. As long as they’re on the streets, they can’t self-isolate, and until you address that you can’t control the virus. 

It’s funny how an insoluble problem becomes soluble once the solvers have an interest in doing something about it.

I admit, I was impressed. But the problem is money. Homelessness groups say cities aren’t getting enough of it to implement the program. And they need to provide not just a place with a roof but also food, medical care, and support people if it’s going to work.

At one estimate, 4,200 homeless people were found shelter in a couple of weeks, but thousands are still on the streets and food is hard to come by. Among them are people whose immigration status doesn’t allow them any recourse to public funds because of a Home Office policy that also keeps them from working. No one wants to find them shelter because there’s no money for it.

*

To do a decent job reporting on this, I should include the plans to keep people paid, at least partially, and not evicted from their homes, but they’re complicated enough that I sank. The self-employed are in one category. The employed-employed are in another. The self-employed who haven’t been self-employed long enough aren’t in either category. Renters are in a different category from homeowners. 

*

And now a non-pandemic bonus to reward you for having gotten this far with precious little to laugh at: Researchers are working on a program that can read brain activity and turn it into speech. 

It works by learning what happens in the brain as people speak, and to build it they had a group of people read the same set of sentences over and over. It started by spitting out nonsense and compared that to what it should have read, and gradually it got so good that it turned “those musicians harmonize marvelously” into “the spinach was a famous singer.”

I love this program. It’s going to write my next post for me. 

Protective gear and flaming vicars: It’s the pandemic news from Britain

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What’s happening with the coronavirus in Britain? Funny you should ask, because I was just about to answer that.

Let’s start with the Church of England, which had a hiccup when it went over to virtual services: A vicar set his arm on fire when he leaned forward at the end of his service and brushed against a candle flame. He had enough of a sense of humor to post the evidence online. It includes him saying, “Oh, dear, I’ve just caught fire.”

Which isn’t what I’d say if I’d just caught fire, but that’s the least of many reasons I’m not a minister.

*

Semi-relevant photo: What could be cheerier than a bare, windblown tree in the midst of a pandemic? Photo by Ida Swearingen.

Cornwall, where I live, is trying to stop the flow of people from (presumably) London, coming down here on the theory that it’s safer. Or nicer. Or something-er. Or that pandemic is another word for holiday (or vacation, if you speak American). Some of them, inevitably, have brought the virus with them. One Londoner–or so a reasonably reliable rumor has it–was told to self-isolate and decided to do it in his lovely second home, in Cornwall. He proceeded to self-isolate in an assortment of local cafes, spreading the bug all over the town he loved so well.

Thanks, guy. Rest assured that we love you almost as toxically. 

But that’s not the only problem people bring when they come down here to ride this out. Cornwall’s infrastructure is already overstretched during a normal summer, when reasonably healthy visitors pour in. Hell, it’s overstretched during the winter, when they’re nowhere around. Years of tightening the national budget in order to shrink the government have starved local services, which are dependent on central government. That’s a long story and we’ll skip over it. The point is that a tide of people, some percentage of whom about to get seriously sick, is more than it can cope with. 

The county council, Public Health Cornwall, and the tourist board have urged people to stay away. That’s the tourist board telling people to say away.

I doubt anyone’s listening, but they can say they tried.

The manager of a shop in Penzance is worried about incomers buying out her stock. She’s put some toilet paper in the back to sell to local people. If the lack of health services doesn’t scare the tourists off, the lack of toilet paper might.

*

A man who’d just arrived on the Isle of Man–yes, I do know how that sounds; I didn’t name the place–was arrested because the island had just imposed a two-week self-isolation period on new arrivals, whether or not they showed symptoms of the virus, and he hadn’t self-isolated. 

It turned out he was homeless and–well, yes, this is part of the definition–had no place to self-isolate. Or sleep. He faced a £10,000 fine and a three-month jail sentence. 

In a startling moment of sanity, the government decided not to prosecute. He’s been found some sort of accommodation, although I have no idea what sort.

Britain’s considering legislation that would let immigration officials put new arrivals in “appropriate isolation facilities.” 

Horse, guys. Barn door. 

But just to prove that the country’s taking this seriously, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace has been canceled. It doesn’t get any more serious than that.

*

Undertakers are so short on protective gear that they’re being told to make masks out of plastic trash bags, towels, and incontinence pads when they deal with suspected coronavirus cases. 

*

A couple of musicians spent some time playing outside people’s homes in London to cheer them up while they’re stuck there. You’ll find a video here.

You can also find a video of people using a basket and rope to shop from their balcony.

*

Self-isolation, by the way, is a ridiculous phrase. I apologize for using it, but these things are as contagious as the damn virus that spawned it.

*

The U.K. chancellor–he’s the guy with the budget–has promised employees who can’t work because of the pandemic 80% of their wages, up to a maximum of £2,500 a month, although I don’t think anyone’s seen any money from it yet. But the self-employed and the mythically self-employed–the gig workers and people on zero-hours contracts–were offered only a fast track to £94.25 a week in what’s called universal credit. Let’s not go into why it’s called that. What you need to know is that it’s a whole shitload less money.

You needed me to point that out, right?

The Independent Workers Union is mounting a lawsuit on the grounds of discrimination. I’m rooting for them.

*

In the U.S., two senators, Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler, attended a briefing about how serious covid-19 was. This was in January–the same day that Trump tweeted, “It will all work out well,” with the it being the virus.

What did they do? Sound the alarm on how unprepared the country was? They’re Republicans. If they’d spoken up it would have had some power. Well, no, they didn’t. In fact, Burr wrote on FoxNews.com that the country was well prepared. 

What they did was sell a whole lot of stocks before their prices crashed. 

*

As for me, the virus has driven to the extreme measure of acknowledging that I am an actual human being, with a life outside this blog. So here’s a personal note, which I wouldn’t usually include: Ida and I are fine. 

Our next-door-neighbor has what they’re pretty sure is just his usual winter flu, but they’re staying in for two weeks (with two small kids; I call that heroic) just to be on the safe side. We’ve done the same, since Ida has something involving a bad cough. No fever on either side of the fence, but we’re all being cautious. It feels a little crazy, but we’re gambling with other people’s lives and that has a way of focusing your attention. 

Or it should, anyway.

All the same, I’m finding it hard, since we’re trying to avoid things we can’t see, hear, or smell, not to either descend into paranoia (ack! I just touched a solid object! I’m gonna die!) or else decide they’re not real anyway and start licking doorknobs. 

As we all would in normal times.

I’m finding it easier to protect other people from whatever the hell Ida has (which for reasons I can’t explain, I don’t seem to have) than I did to protect us from what people around us might have. Maybe protecting other people is more finite. Maybe I’m just more used to it. 

A few days ago, Ida put in an online request for prescription cough syrup and that must’ve sent up a red flag at the doctors’ office, because someone called to ask why she needed it and how she was. The woman who called advised us to stay out of people’s way for two weeks, which we’d already begun to do. The government’s bungled this in more ways that I can count (mind you, it doesn’t take much to go outside of my mathematical range), but the people on the front lines are being amazing. 

Our village has been good about rallying around. It helps to be someplace where the scale is small and so many of us know each other. One of the essential services that threatened to fall apart was the group of volunteers who make sure people are able to pick up their prescriptions. That would normally be handled by a village store, but ours closed some time ago. All the volunteers except one were either over 70 or vulnerable in some other way or else had a partner who was. We put a notice up on the village Facebook site and younger volunteers have come forward, in spite of jobs and kids and all the commitments that go with not being retired. 

We’ve had several offers from friends and neighbors who are going grocery shopping to pick up whatever we need–assuming they can find it. Already, friends have brought groceries–fresh fruit, milk, onions, broccoli, stuff. Apples are hard to find, although a friend left us some yesterday. 

Why apples? 

Why not apples. Sometimes, I’m told, one store will have been emptied out and another will be fairly well stocked. It all leaves me with a sense of limits. Will the stores run out of cat food? Did I get enough peanut butter? Why didn’t I buy more frozen vegetables and potatoes before it all got serious, since we could see it coming? 

Because I didn’t want to hoard, that’s why. But I did want to stock up. Where’s the balancing point between hoarding and stocking up? (Answer: You hoard; I stock up.) 

How often can I cut the spinach I planted last spring, which is still growing, before it decides that I’ve asked too much of it? 

Am I using too much water?

Water isn’t one of the things we’re running short of, but for me, at least, an awareness of limits breeds an awareness of limits. We’re entering a new era here and I suspect I’m feeling its first vibrations. I hope life will go back to normal at some point, but I’m not convinced it will.

But enough about me. Wishing you and yours all the best. Be careful, be lucky, help others, and stay well.