COVID-19: Part 22

April 17, 2020 7:41 pm
  • Quarantine Day 32
  • Another 5.2 million first-time unemployment claims filed last week.
  • South Korea reports 163 patients who recovered and re-tested positive, including 61 becoming symptomatic.
  • China corrects some death statistics upward by 50%, raising further concern over the veracity of their data.
  • Brazil's president (who denies there's an issue) fires their health minister (who was trying to prevent catastrophe). So they're pretty well hosed.
  • Livermore cases: 30
  • Alameda County cases: 1,021; deaths: 39
  • U.S. cases: 661,000+; deaths: 33,000+

The information out of South Korea is probably the most alarming news recently. Research continues to determine what's really going on. It's possible they're false positives and it's possible the patients becoming symptomatic have something else causing the symptoms. Also, transmissibility hasn't been determined. If, however, it turns out that reinfection is possible and transmissible then the war we're in is going to get much longer and uglier. Right now the only real information is, "More information needed."

I jogged down to Contreras Market (the nearby Mexican shop) for more milk on Wednesday. Their shelves were looking pretty good. I was only grabbing milk, but on my way through the store I saw bags of beans and rice. The milk cooler was full and there weren't any obviously barren shelves.

I made oatmeal cookies last night and tonight will be cheese pizza and, if we're not all insane, s'mores at the backyard firepit. Ooh! Oatmeal-cookie s'mores!

We are starting to make a noticeable impact on our supplies. We're down to one loaf of bread, one bag of bagels, and one bag of tortillas. We ran out of corndogs and are low on chicken nuggets. I believe tonight's pizza will use the last of our mozzarella cheese. Our cereal stockpile is probably down by about half. But we have lots of pasta and rice (not from stockpiling, just usual supplies). I probably have about 25 lbs of bread flour and I opened my last (50-lb) bag of all-purpose flour to make the cookies. I'm also on my last jar of yeast. But, most importantly:

We've eaten only meals prepared at home for over a month now. We had Thai food on March 14. We don't eat out very often, but even so, that feels like really long time ago.

In addition to the north-east coalition and the Pacific coalition there is also a coalition of 7 states in the mid-west (IL, IN, KY, MI, MN, OH) that will coordinate relaxation of suppression measures.

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