Good thing the day of the week is displayed on my watch, otherwise I wouldn’t know. “Maybe this is what it’s like to be retired” I wondered as I jogged around the block. “It doesn’t matter what day it is; tomorrow is going to be the same as today anyway.”
“Snow Day” was the SCWBI DrawThis prompt for February, and as I put the final snowflakes on my picture today I reflected, pessimistically, that the snowflakes could be virus particles and the picture could be titled “Isolation.”
I did, however, listen to an interesting podcast or two today while I was gluing my snowflakes. NPR’s Planet Money had one titled “The Race to Make Ventilators,” featuring a small company that typically makes 200 ventilators/month, and how the whole game changes when a huge company like a car manufacturer gets their supply chains mobilized. It seems like a wonderfully American response to a problem. While we’re hiding in our homes to prevent infection, America is wallowing in infectious crowds, and gearing up to deal with the fall-out by mass producing ventilators. I’ve also read little news blurps about Johns Hopkins reviving an old medical technique of sharing blood antibodies from recovered patients with the uninfected to temporarily boost their immunity, with the wry commentary that with this disease, there will at least be plenty of people with antibodies. In America, we fix our problems with ingenuity, technology, and economies of scale!
On a more serious note, it’s like we’re inadvertently part of a huge global trial. Which country’s strategy will end up better in the end?
Give It A Burl 
Since we don’t have enough testing here to know how many people have the disease, we don’t have a denominator for any of the numbers. As my boss says, the only accurate number we have is how many dead bodies there are. It makes comparing approaches in the global trial hard to compare. The Swedish have decided not to send everybody home from work, which I find intriguing. Comparing different populations with different age bracket demographics seems hard also. Perhaps most intriguing is the difference in cultural difficulty in controlling any kind of large scale behavior. My own reaction to the news that Rhode Island police were stopping cars with New York license plates is a case in point. I said, “They can’t do that! Get the ACLU on that!” The Koreans probably would have said, “Serves them right!”
Yeah, it is frustrating that even when it’s all over, it’ll be hard to compare “apples to apples” to see which nation’s strategy worked best for saved lives or for economic recovery.
AK feels like a country in itself with our containment strategies. Luckily our deliveries continue well & our consumption is less in the Lower 48. I -working at a bookstore – am employed & busy filling educational & personal needs all via technology requests & arctic entry pickups. Mark is truly retired -Thank goodness for his woodworking & the greenhouse.
Hi Maria, what’s an arctic entry pickup? sounds frigid!