Here we are

The other day someone wrote on Twitter “I know we’re all just stuck inside…” and I nodded my head in appreciation.  It wasn’t until 24 hours later that I realized that the author was talking about the fact we’re all supposed to stay indoors, rather than our collective emotional state. 

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One of our cats has an artificial ureter.  It needs to be flushed out every three months, and the Kleintierklinik in Bern is the nearest place qualified to do it, so we drove up there on Thursday.  The notification boards on the near-empty highway urged us to “STOP CORONA.  RESTEZ A LA MAISON.”  Closer to Bern, the message switched over to German.

When we arrived, there was a truck with a University Hospital logo on the side backing up to the front door.  The driver lowered the hydraulic ramp-thing in the back, and I thought we were going to get to see them move one of the cows or horses (or camels!) they’re known to treat in Bern.  But instead we watched as they wheeled two or three ventilators out and into the truck, I assume for transfer to the regular hospital.  Human needs taking precedence over those of the Kleintieren these days.

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I’m avoiding the numbers this weekend.  For a couple of days at least, I’m eschewing the exponential curves in the NYTimes – the upward-right slope which in my day job signifies growth and success and which in this case signifies the opposite.   Same thing for the canton-by-canton breakdown in the Tribune de Geneve, Geneva now competing with Vaud for top of the table in Switzerland.  The cantonal authorities also publish daily detailed charts for Geneva, including how many new cases there are, how many people are in the hospital, how many of those are intubated.  Earlier this week I had a glimmer of hope that we had peaked, as the daily new diagnoses seemed to be trending downward.  On Friday, though, they modified the chart to show both negative tests and positive cases, and it was clear that the numbers had only come down because fewer people had been tested.      

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It helps that the Swiss are good at following rules.  On Wednesday I ventured out to the grocery store at the larger shopping center by the stadium, as we thought it might be less crowded than the one closer to our place in town.  A friendly security guard in a face mask was at the entrance, directing people to the back of line that stretched down the corridor, past the other (darkened) stores in the shopping center.  There were around 15 people in front of me in line, and we all idled our carts in between the hashmarks of black tape that had been stuck to the floor every two meters.

 

I made it to the front after only 10 minutes or so, but not before the guy in front of me (who wore a high-tech-looking mask with Velcro at the back and complicated-looking valves over the mouth part, giving him the appearance of a post-apocalyptic skier) had an awkward exchange with the security guy, who tried to hand him a laminated card with a number on it – evidently the mechanism they were using to keep track of how many people were in the store.  I couldn’t hear their voices given the masks and the hashmarks, but it became clear that high-tech-mask guy wasn’t thrilled with the idea of taking something from someone else’s hand.  Robot-dance-like gesturing and pointing ensued, until finally the security guy produced a bottle of hand sanitizer from his pocket, which settled matters.

I wore a mask myself, even though I’ve read the same articles you have about how they don’t really help.  I felt the odd warmth of my deflected breath on my eyeballs, and my glasses kept fogging up.  All of us in the store seemed to be moving at around 75% of normal speed, careful not to get too close to anyone else.  Fortunately, there was plenty of pretty much everything in the store; only the pasta aisle looked a little denuded, but not bare like last week.

At the checkout, an older guy in the lane next to mine was mildly admonished for violating the distance de sécurité.  The checkout woman in my lane and wore powder blue latex gloves and a mask.  After bagging and paying, I thanked her and said I realize it’s not easy for everyone who works in the store, etc..  She shrugged and replied, “Oui, mais on est là.”  

Grounded

It's like November 2016 all over again.  With each morning a fresh sprig of existential dread as I check the overnight news on my phone.  Today I learned that all of Italy, not just the northern provinces, is now on full quarantine, as their total number of cases approaches 10,000.  The financial markets got clobbered again yesterday – the S&P losing 8% and SAN.PA dipping below 80 (my online sell order for 85 thus blithely ignored).  My better half insists it's time to buy gold.

My company’s “non-business-critical” international travel ban is still on, so I continue to work from home at least until the end of March.  Working from home is what I do anyway when I’m not traveling, so it’s not too a big cramp in my style, so to speak.  Ask me again in four weeks.

The left-leaning media outlets in the US cannot resist engaging in some schadenfreude around Trump’s arrogance and ill-preparedness for all this.  There are 729 confirmed cases in the US as of this morning, but since test kits have been in short supply, one suspects that this is a gross underestimation, kind of a negative ascertainment bias. 

The Economist had a good piece in their “Graphic Detail” section (the one in the back near the obituary) analyzing travel patterns between other countries and China to predict how many cases a country should have versus the reported cases.  The US seemed to be underestimating only slightly, while Russia (“nothing to see here!”) should have many times more cases than they’re reporting.

Seeking succor in probability theory, I spent some of my Saturday fiddling with Excel to calculate the number of cases per capita by country.  A problematic exercise given the testing issues mentioned above, but I thought this might provide some context and clarity.  Here it is, sorted by cases per 100,000 inhabitants (cases as of Mar 10 am CET):

My Excel defaults to European decimal style, so the number for Italy is one-point-five cases per 100,000 inhabitants, not one thousand five hundred.  So one could look at this and conclude that there’s nothing really to worry about: you would have to shake hands with around 65,000 (100,000/1.5) Italians to encounter one infected person.  The current situation in the US – only one case per 14 million people – seems like nothing to lose sleep over.

Of course, this kind of logic crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.  In the Italian scenario above, there’s no way of knowing whether it will be the 65,000^th or the 1^st person you encounter who’s infected.  And of course it’s not the number of confirmed cases; it’s the number of carriers, most of whom are asymptomatic, out there, somewhere.  The numbers rise faster than we can keep track of them.  In the time it took me to write, edit, and post this entry, the number of cases in Switzerland went from 374 to 485.  My alma mater just told all its students not to bother coming back from spring break.  I don’t believe I will be seeing the inside of an airplane for a while.