Hey!!
Look, we’re not entirely self isolated here. Taking reasonable precautions, things aren’t maniac yet – though they will be soon.
So I’m comfort blogging.
Our kids are due back to school tomorrow (we’re in Northern Ireland, today was St Paddy’s day, normally there’s a parade, in previous years we’d take ourselves off somewhere but not this year.)
When I was a kid, in the 80s (yes, Virginia, I am that old) I dreamt of being confined to a nuclear bunker (you can tell how much I enjoyed school like that this was my dream) stuck in bunk beds with rooms connected via tunnels to my parents room and a small living room and I fancied we’d have some sort of video setup with a large video library (stored in another part of this bunker, which, weirdly, was – I fancied – directly below our actual house).
Anyway, that was the place I put my imagination while the world seemed to be ticking towards nuclear war. And I know, you’ve probably read Watchmen and the stuff about the nuclear war doesn’t seem any where near as urgent now, but by god it did then.
So, we’re all at home. Kids not going to school (my youngest is in the at-risk group) and if he’s at-risk it seems like idiocy to send my older son to school. Both schools are being cagy, not telling you to keep your kids home but certainly not encouraging you – to quote the youngest son’s school :
“Please keep your child at home tomorrow if…
they are in the at risk group OR they have any symptoms OR neither of the above but you are anxious about them attending school.”
Which, I think, given government guidance, that’s a fair enough shake.
Other news: it was claimed amazon were stopping shipping anything but medical or nonessential home goods to warehouses. But, it turns out that’s not true (although some small tiny vestigial grain of truth is in there)
To be honest, I’ve been wondering what would happen with amazon deliveries.
On Wed 11 I opened up a spreadsheet and threw in some numbers of where we might be headed, based on the idea that we were likely to see this thing have an exponential increase – the numbers I used where taking the previous days cases (54) and the then current days cases (83) work out the ratio 1.53 and just multipled that by each days numbers and man it gets scary quick.
Today they announced 413 6 days later. My spreadsheet had 413 at 5 days later (the official numbers took a weird dip yesterday, going from 332 down to 152 then back up to 413. I think the dip was a change or confusion over how many people were being tested – as the Govt decided to not test everyone, I think that had enough backlash they changed their minds)
The Government Dashboard – where you can see these figures updated daily is here.
Assuming my spreadsheet is a day out, and going at that continuing rate you’re looking at 1,500 in one day a week later, and 9k per day two weeks from now.
And that’s why we’re all in lockdown. So far as I can tell every country that’s really locked down has seen a corresponding drop in infection rate. Which is good.
What’s not so good is it’s likely without a vaccine that rate will leap right up there again.
That’s the thing, in the 80s I was scared we’d be at war, and now… now we’re at war.
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