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).