And now the governor, Gavin Newsom, announced a Stay At Home order on all of California. Which I have been doing for the past week, because I live with people at high risk, and because I could kind of see this all coming.
The last time I was at the dentist, about a month ago, I was telling the assistant cleaning my teeth about how we were all going to die from coronavirus. She laughed it off, saying, "C'mon. We're not a third-world country." And here we are.
For now, I've been very lucky. My job is remote, and they still seem to have plenty of work for me. I have six months of salary saved as cash. My retirement fund has been invested in cash since July 2018 -- well mostly, I guess I screwed up the configuration. I have a full pantry, and three cubic acres of toilet paper (sorry world).
This is going to be a long haul. We keep talking about the Spanish Flu, which probably originated in Kansas but whatever. You know what we call that now: Influenza type A, H1N1. It's still around, and many variants show evidence of gene transfer with it. We still give annual vaccinations against it -- albeit not this variety every year -- and it's still a major killer. Given that immunity against other coronavirii only lasts for a year or two, we could see the novel coronavirus become a standard fixture of our society, and need to give annual vaccines against it. None of which is to say that we'll repeat the 1918 pandemic in terms of deaths or waves of the virus, but the transmission vectors and epidemiology do show parallels.
The models say that without shutting the state down, 25 million Californians would get the virus out of a total 40 million. Not everyone would even get sick, but for those who get very sick, there's no way we could handle that many cases. If we have to flatten the curve, that's what we'll do.
The last time I was at the dentist, about a month ago, I was telling the assistant cleaning my teeth about how we were all going to die from coronavirus. She laughed it off, saying, "C'mon. We're not a third-world country." And here we are.
For now, I've been very lucky. My job is remote, and they still seem to have plenty of work for me. I have six months of salary saved as cash. My retirement fund has been invested in cash since July 2018 -- well mostly, I guess I screwed up the configuration. I have a full pantry, and three cubic acres of toilet paper (sorry world).
This is going to be a long haul. We keep talking about the Spanish Flu, which probably originated in Kansas but whatever. You know what we call that now: Influenza type A, H1N1. It's still around, and many variants show evidence of gene transfer with it. We still give annual vaccinations against it -- albeit not this variety every year -- and it's still a major killer. Given that immunity against other coronavirii only lasts for a year or two, we could see the novel coronavirus become a standard fixture of our society, and need to give annual vaccines against it. None of which is to say that we'll repeat the 1918 pandemic in terms of deaths or waves of the virus, but the transmission vectors and epidemiology do show parallels.
The models say that without shutting the state down, 25 million Californians would get the virus out of a total 40 million. Not everyone would even get sick, but for those who get very sick, there's no way we could handle that many cases. If we have to flatten the curve, that's what we'll do.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto