Hello from the plague-ridden city of Boston! I wish first reassure everyone that I am fine. I am at no particular risk of catching the novel coronavirus, and if I somehow defy the odds and come down with COVID-19, I am mainly in danger of spending a couple of weeks with a really shitty cough. The hospitalization pattern for this thing is a lot like that of the seasonal flu -- the very old, the immunosuppressed, and those with restricted lung function, otherwise known collectively as 'people who get pneumonia a lot' -- with the interesting twist that, much like varicella zoster, young kids seem to be much less affected. The COVID-19 experience according to both CDC graphs and trip reports from redditors who have tested positive for it is that otherwise healthy people who aren't super old and fragile get to sit through the flu. I did that back in November with the regular rogues gallery of viruses and am not eager to do it again, but at this point I have better odds of landing myself in the hospital by slipping in the shower.
On the other hand, I live with someone who has Crohn's and is on immunosuppressive medications, and someone else who has been having mystery medical problems for the past couple of years, involving but not limited to shortness of breath unresolved by asthma inhalers. So my role in this pandemic is to wash my hands a lot and protect the more vulnerable members of the herd. As of yesterday all of my in-person jobs have canceled themselves, and I am consequently stuck at home not sick for the next couple weeks at least.
As of this writing, Boston is not officially on lockdown. No one's bolted inside the house, the shops are open and we can all go out and get stuff unfettered. The governor has declared a State of Emergency, mostly so they can access the extra funds and enforce a quarantine on people who have actually been exposed to the virus. Everyone lost their shit for about a day and a half and went out to buy toilet paper like it was about to be illegal. Then we calmed down a tick and realized the situation was less "T-Virus outbreak" and more "influenza++ bonus level". You don't need to hermetically seal yourself inside the house, just, like, don't go to any parties. Or hold a leadership conference, like the fuckwickets at BioGen. Those particular arrogant motherfuckers are directly responsible for most of the chaos here, since they're in an industry that's centered in the same part of town as most of the big universities, which are now either running classes online, or shut down completely.
It's quiet but not dead outside. The weirdest part is actually seeing this happen in pleasant spring weather. Every other time I've lived through this, it's been because the National Weather Service has given us a couple days' warning that we're about to be on a first-name basis with a fuck-off huge storm. Although it is interesting to see how many people don't really know how detergents work. They seem to think "hand soap" is some sort of magical virus-killing substance and freak the fuck out at the empty shelves, when there is an entire aisle full of shampoo, body wash, and facial cleanser two feet to their left. It's all based on sodium laureth sulfate, guys; just pick the bottle that smells the best and go on with your day.
Most of the anxiety is, as usual, caused by ignorance. Not just in the sense that people don't know a lot of things, but also that we can't know some of it until more time has passed. The R0 ("r-naught", basic rate of reproduction, or the average number of people infected by a contagious carrier) of coronavirus is 2 and a bit, which is worse than most varieties of influenza (1-2) but way better than shit like measels (10+), AIDS (2-5), bane of my childhood chickenpox (3-5), or the classic poliovirus from back in the day (5-7). The mortality rate is being reported as up to 3.4% (as figured using only confirmed cases), but postulated as more like 1% (as estimated by the CDC), which is about ten times seasonal flu, but way the fuck under other university-closing favorites like community-acquired meningitis, which runs right around 20%.
All of these numbers are to be taken with a small boulder of salt. The problem is that all of the math you use to get them depends on having an accurate count of cases, which we do not. It's becoming increasingly clear that Novel Coronavirus 2019, like other things in the coronavirus class, can cause symptoms that range really widely in severity. You might get a week of fever and coughing, you might get viral pneumonia and die. The majority of people who catch this coronavirus will probably never see a doctor; they just stay home and swill NyQuil like they would with any other cold. The official count, by definition, includes only people who come to the attention of those doing the counting. Which, in the beginning stages, is restricted to those with symptoms severe enough to require medical treatment.
In other words, odds are that COVID-19 is a lot more widespread than we think, but also a lot less dangerous to most people. This is not to say we shouldn't do anything about it. Most kids didn't die of measles, either.
I find the graphs of mortality rate by age to be particularly intriguing. The absolute rates are basically zero for small children, don't go up by any interesting amount through the 50s (that is, a lot of the increase could be attributed to people picking up confounding factors, like pulmonary damage from other illnesses or smoking, or progression of other co-morbid conditions), and then shoot way the fuck up for 60+. I've seen the hypothesis floated that kids don't suffer much because their immune systems aren't primed for this thing and don't react too strongly. Which raises the question of whether people in the 60+ category are dying at much higher rates as an artifact of the math (i.e., small sample size of elderly cases combined with the general fragility of age might cause an artificial jump in rates), or because they were exposed to something in their youth which the younger generation were not that has prompted their immune systems to over-respond with inflammation, thus raising their odds of developing severe hyperthermia and pneumonia.
Anyway. I'm going to be bored as fuck and bereft of income for the next few weeks, so expect to see a lot of drivel here. I think the personal things are mainly going to go on Patreon, seeing as I have to do something for money while all the theaters are shut down, but I'll try to also finish a lot of half-complete things and dump them here, so y'all have something to read.
On the other hand, I live with someone who has Crohn's and is on immunosuppressive medications, and someone else who has been having mystery medical problems for the past couple of years, involving but not limited to shortness of breath unresolved by asthma inhalers. So my role in this pandemic is to wash my hands a lot and protect the more vulnerable members of the herd. As of yesterday all of my in-person jobs have canceled themselves, and I am consequently stuck at home not sick for the next couple weeks at least.
As of this writing, Boston is not officially on lockdown. No one's bolted inside the house, the shops are open and we can all go out and get stuff unfettered. The governor has declared a State of Emergency, mostly so they can access the extra funds and enforce a quarantine on people who have actually been exposed to the virus. Everyone lost their shit for about a day and a half and went out to buy toilet paper like it was about to be illegal. Then we calmed down a tick and realized the situation was less "T-Virus outbreak" and more "influenza++ bonus level". You don't need to hermetically seal yourself inside the house, just, like, don't go to any parties. Or hold a leadership conference, like the fuckwickets at BioGen. Those particular arrogant motherfuckers are directly responsible for most of the chaos here, since they're in an industry that's centered in the same part of town as most of the big universities, which are now either running classes online, or shut down completely.
It's quiet but not dead outside. The weirdest part is actually seeing this happen in pleasant spring weather. Every other time I've lived through this, it's been because the National Weather Service has given us a couple days' warning that we're about to be on a first-name basis with a fuck-off huge storm. Although it is interesting to see how many people don't really know how detergents work. They seem to think "hand soap" is some sort of magical virus-killing substance and freak the fuck out at the empty shelves, when there is an entire aisle full of shampoo, body wash, and facial cleanser two feet to their left. It's all based on sodium laureth sulfate, guys; just pick the bottle that smells the best and go on with your day.
Most of the anxiety is, as usual, caused by ignorance. Not just in the sense that people don't know a lot of things, but also that we can't know some of it until more time has passed. The R0 ("r-naught", basic rate of reproduction, or the average number of people infected by a contagious carrier) of coronavirus is 2 and a bit, which is worse than most varieties of influenza (1-2) but way better than shit like measels (10+), AIDS (2-5), bane of my childhood chickenpox (3-5), or the classic poliovirus from back in the day (5-7). The mortality rate is being reported as up to 3.4% (as figured using only confirmed cases), but postulated as more like 1% (as estimated by the CDC), which is about ten times seasonal flu, but way the fuck under other university-closing favorites like community-acquired meningitis, which runs right around 20%.
All of these numbers are to be taken with a small boulder of salt. The problem is that all of the math you use to get them depends on having an accurate count of cases, which we do not. It's becoming increasingly clear that Novel Coronavirus 2019, like other things in the coronavirus class, can cause symptoms that range really widely in severity. You might get a week of fever and coughing, you might get viral pneumonia and die. The majority of people who catch this coronavirus will probably never see a doctor; they just stay home and swill NyQuil like they would with any other cold. The official count, by definition, includes only people who come to the attention of those doing the counting. Which, in the beginning stages, is restricted to those with symptoms severe enough to require medical treatment.
In other words, odds are that COVID-19 is a lot more widespread than we think, but also a lot less dangerous to most people. This is not to say we shouldn't do anything about it. Most kids didn't die of measles, either.
I find the graphs of mortality rate by age to be particularly intriguing. The absolute rates are basically zero for small children, don't go up by any interesting amount through the 50s (that is, a lot of the increase could be attributed to people picking up confounding factors, like pulmonary damage from other illnesses or smoking, or progression of other co-morbid conditions), and then shoot way the fuck up for 60+. I've seen the hypothesis floated that kids don't suffer much because their immune systems aren't primed for this thing and don't react too strongly. Which raises the question of whether people in the 60+ category are dying at much higher rates as an artifact of the math (i.e., small sample size of elderly cases combined with the general fragility of age might cause an artificial jump in rates), or because they were exposed to something in their youth which the younger generation were not that has prompted their immune systems to over-respond with inflammation, thus raising their odds of developing severe hyperthermia and pneumonia.
Anyway. I'm going to be bored as fuck and bereft of income for the next few weeks, so expect to see a lot of drivel here. I think the personal things are mainly going to go on Patreon, seeing as I have to do something for money while all the theaters are shut down, but I'll try to also finish a lot of half-complete things and dump them here, so y'all have something to read.
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