virusfest 2020 (part 3)

Here is why I bought a bunch of food, slightly before everyone else did (or tried to).

In the summer of 2003, my aunt died, of mysterious complications related to breast cancer. Her widower capped off decades of being a bad husband by refusing to release the medical records to her brother the cancer researcher, who might have been able to make some sense of the whole thing.

Remember, folks, don't leave your kids enough money to skate through life as alcoholic wastrels.

Anyway. The funeral was more stressful than it needed to be, and after a few days of eating out in a region where half the menu was deep-fried and a "salad" was a wedge of iceberg lettuce coated in ranch dressing, my immediate family, at least, escaped to our ancestral village, relatively nearby. It's a good place to decompress, being a Rust Belt town with, I think, the same population and pace it had when my parents were growing up.

I think the day after we got there, we decided to grab some ice cream and go stare out at the very large lake outside town. We drove to the ice cream place, and discovered the power was out, much to the annoyance of the staff, who said "We just got the insurance check from last time." Ice cream was on sale, anyway.

As we drove away, we turned the radio on, and...there wasn't any radio, just static. As we got to the lake, we eventually picked up some faint Canadian stations, which had enough information to know that this was nothing like an ordinary power outage. Details were hazy, but it seemed the power was out from New England to Ohio, at least. In 2003, 9/11 was still pretty fresh–kids born in 2001 are now midway through college–and mobile technology still sucked, a lot, and mobile Internet ranged from "poor" to "theoretical," and that was in big cities. We followed the only rational course, eating our ice cream and enjoying the view, before heading back to the B&B.

Through intelligence-gathering around town, it emerged that it was actually just about impossible to buy food! For reasons I'm hazy on, all the stores responded to the absence of electricity by not selling anything, even the stuff that didn't need electricity. I don't know if they didn't trust their employees to handle transactions without the registers, or if it was corporate policy, or the law, or they all just preferred the idea of going home for the day, but it meant we couldn't even feed ourselves on snack-sized bags of Cheetohs.

It's not that we were going to starve to death–that takes a while, and we had water–but this was supposed to be less difficult than the funeral.

The streets were mostly empty, but I saw a pizza delivery car go by. Thinks me, "Why would they bother driving around, if they weren't delivering pizzas?". I called them, and they delivered what they said was the last pizza before they shut down. Voilá! Food!

That's, right, folks. I flew in for a funeral and just happened to be around for one of the biggest blackout events of the past 50 years.

The things we need can become unexpectedly unavailable. We don't normally keep a lot of food around: we mostly eat stuff that doesn't keep very well, we're not prone to long power outages or snowstorms, and we've always been more like 75% prepared for an earthquake, and food was a weak point. I did some shopping in stores and on Amazon, and we have various tranches of food durability and desirability, emptying out our freezer until we land on piles of pasta and sauce, cans of beans, and finally emergency rations, which I'm sure are better than both hardtack and starvation, though I'd rather not find out for sure.

Speaking of hardtack, I could make some, except that ironically, by the time I got serious today about stocking up on flour and yeast, lots of food deliveries are either suspended or operating at capacity and with delays. I seem to have a bag of self-raising flour, although I don't know why: it came from a couple we're friends with, who have two incomes, no kids, impeccable taste in everything, and now live in Dublin. Some kind of old-school scones, maybe, the same way one might have fond memories of Bisquick pancakes?

You can survive on homemade chocolate chip cookies, right? Asking for a friend.

virusfest 2020 (part 2)

One of the mysteries (and mercies) about SARS-CoV-2 has been that it hasn't affected children: at one point, there had been no one symptomatic under the age of 10, and I've since heard 12. We don't know why, but there are some indications that kids can just hang out with the virus until whenever: one preliminary case study from China was a 6-month old boy, asymptomatic, who entered the hospital with his symptomatic mother. He tested positive for 16 days without ever showing symptoms, while his mother recovered.

I don't know if there's been a documented transmission from asymptomatic children to adults yet, but. Uh.

It's a bit of a truism that any pandemic contagion must be getting a bunch of parameters just right to nail us so well. Setting aside the many opportunities provided by a narcissistic Republican President with dementia, SARS-CoV-2 has:

1. Long incubation time.
2. Long time to symptom onset.
3. High, but not too high, fatality–given proper treatment, which leads to...
4. Very high health system resource usage.

#4 is the really striking one. It seems pretty clear that a whole lot of us have been exposed, and developed cases of COVID-19 that don't need a trip to the hospital, but the virus generates enough hospitalizations, and those hospitalizations can require such intensive and specialized care (ventilators and ICUs and things so exotic I'd never heard of them), that it can overwhelm a health-care system. This seems to have already happened to Italy, so around here, the hospitals and clinics are already at battle stations, getting ready.

In computing, we call this a "denial-of-service attack." It sucks.

Make good choices. Stay home. We haven't actually hit the really hard part yet.

virusfest 2020 (part 1)

The COVID-19 virus is justifiably all over the news, as we've failed to contain it, but at the same time it doesn't look like the kind of virus that can be fully contained. It's true the U.S. is doing a terrible job, what with the lack of testing and all, but it's also true that with an incubation period of 14+ days–I've also heard 24–and unknown levels of asymptomatic transmission, that there's only so good a job to be done, as it were. The WHO didn't think very clearly and blithely announced a significant fatality rate (3.4%) and is now learning why you don't just say shit like this without embedding it in the context required to interpret it correctly.

Which is to say: you can be alarmed about a 3.4% fatality rate, and/or you can be alarmed by a lack of testing that doesn't tell us how many infections there, but neither of those facts is really meaningful until you put them together in the equation

[fatality rate] = [# of fatalities] / [# infections]

which tells us that we don't actually know what the fatality rate is. It's starting to look like it might be endemic here already–in the U.S. and especially here in the West Coast Asian travel crossroads where we live–which might explain various unknown-but-not-fatal respiratory illnesses that folks have been getting over the past few months.

As half-assed as our response is being, though, it is most definitely having effects, as some very large conferences are canceled or delayed, and sizable companies like LinkedIn and Microsoft are not only canceling travel, but telling people to work from home. Consumers have been buying up freeze-dried food, and toilet paper, but probably not for the right reasons: they seem to be thinking "zombie apocalypse" or "FEMA declares martial law" or "we're all going to die," but the problem addressed by stockpiling is just the disruption of supply chains in a globalized world that is even more interconnected than we usually notice. Being reliably able to buy stuff whenever, we tend to keep a relatively small amount of food around.

Next time: the story about why I've been building up our stocks of durable food (without panicking or otherwise working very hard).