Covid-19, Day 63

On 30 December 2019 a doctor in Wuhan, China, described a SARS-like virus for the first time. The first news I saw of it was one day later in a story I saw in netnews. At that time there were 27 known patients and no sign of human-to-human spread. Shortly there after the disease was linked to a meat market where live animals were traded (and slaughtered) and popularly called "Coronavirus". The name COVID-19 was coined later.

Today's news has more than 86,500 known cases in sixty countries, 8,700 of those cases outside China and over 125 deaths outside China.

That's pretty impressive work for nine weeks.

It's a bit surreal living through this. I don't feel particularly worried, but a lot of people are very worried. When I went grocery shopping yesterday, a lot of shelves were bare. People stocking up on non-perishable foodstuffs, in particularly canned goods. I read about face mask shortages and misuse daily now.

I take public transit to work, am attending a gathering of ~350 people tomorrow, many of whom travelled internationally to be here, I'm almost incapable of not touching my face frequently (a bad thing, apparently with this particular disease), and I'm weak-of-lung. By rights I should be panicking. I have started to make a point of washing my hands more often, such as as soon as I can after going outside. So there's that.

I am distressed that our Trump-led government seems to be hell-bent on making a mess of this. Trump just seems incapable of standing aside for others to do work, and considers himself quick to become "expert" in too much. Urg. A lot of people are getting sick or dying, and there's not much hope of this getting under control soon. At least cities and states seem to be stepping up rapidly.