Category Archives: Covid19

Mandatory “social distancing”?

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Hmmm…

Gov. Inslee says ‘mandatory measures’ under consideration to combat coronavirus in Washington

Since the novel coronavirus emerged as a threat in Washington, officials have sought to keep people here from infecting each other by offering advice, health care and other assistance. What they haven’t yet done to slow the spread of the virus is tell residents what they can and can’t do.

That could change at some point, however.

Officials are considering mandatory measures for social distancing as part of the state’s effort to combat the outbreak, Gov. Jay Inslee said Sunday.

Barb, my oldest daughter, her spouse, and I, all in Bellevue, have been doing our part for the last week. We have been working from home and minimizing contact outside our homes. We are also prepared for several more weeks as needed.

We live in interesting times.

Interactive COVID-19 database

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A nerd could probably spend hours looking at things in here.

It’s updated daily.

Working from home

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Health officials in King County (Seattle area) are recommending, among other things:

Workplaces should enact measures that allow people who can work from home to do so.

About 5:00 PM on Wednesday a blog reader told me::

Microsoft just told all employees who can WFH to do so until March 25

My employer said something similar yesterday. My team started WFH the day before that.

I can work from home for almost everything except meetings where someone is likely to be using a real whiteboard (we have virtual whiteboards in some conference rooms).

My first thought was, “Will the VPNs fall over?” So far both my MS contact and I have had not had any problems with our Internet connections to work. I suspect they have self-scaling VPNs.

Barb has been working from home exclusively for years now. It’s a little odd for both of us to be working from home every day. It’s nice but it just feels a little odd to only see each other for such extended periods. I wonder how it will feel after three weeks.

Yesterday I asked Barb if we are going to get “cabin fever” and get irritable or something. She thinks she will be okay as long as she doesn’t feel physically trapped as in being snowed in or something.

We’ll probably will go for walks occasionally. That should help and it should be safe as long as we don’t have contact with other people.

Quote of the day—Caren Park

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admit it, joe, it’s funny.

image

Caren Park
March 4, 2020
Comment to my Facebook post about someone intending to deliberately infect people with COVID-19
[The Facebook post links to this blog post.

About three hours later Caren’s comment, my response to her, and Kathy Jackson’s response are all inaccessible to me.

My response to Caren:

I don’t see someone saying they will deliberately attempt to infect others, of any demographic, with any deadly disease as funny.

Would it be funny if they said they were going to attend every LGBT rally they could? How about someone with HIV deliberately having sexual contact with people for the purposes of infecting them?

Sure, there are going to be people at any event that don’t know they are carrying a contagious disease. But that is a much different thing than doing it with the intention of harming others.

I’ve known Caren for over 35 years. We’ve always had differences in political leanings. But never, that I recall, difference of substance regarding basic human decency.

The politics of this country have skewed peoples thinking several standard deviations away from what I have perceived the norm to be.—Joe]

They want you dead

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Via Benny @bennyjohnson:

Solidarity

And how is this different than deliberately spreading smallpox to Native Americans* 150 years ago?

* Yes. I know. There isn’t convincing evidence to indicate Native Americans were deliberately infected.

A good read on COVID-19

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Reddit has a really good post on the statistics of infection and death rates by demographic in China.

A little close to home

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Almost all of the COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths in Washington state (and US) are at EvergreenHealth (formerly Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland).

All of my children were born there (30+ years ago). My ex-wife and I lived about a 10 minute walk from the hospital.

The hospital is still less than a 20 minute drive of where I live and about half of that for to my oldest daughter.

COVID19 in Iran

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From a reliable source, we have some plausibly good data and some speculation:

A coworker is an Iranian immigrant. She says her siblings are in the medical field back home in Iran, and the situation there is vastly worse than is being officially reported. The leaders didn’t want to disrupt the anniversary of the revolution, so they pretended there was no problem, causing it to be spread rapidly across the nation during the mass gatherings and official celebrations, where close (face-proximity-to-face) greetings are common, and it spread like wildfire. Her sibling’s estimate is over a million are infected just in Iran. (Considering the viral video of the imam “blessing” water bottles by spitting in them, and other personal hygiene practices that are epidemic-friendly, it’s not an impossible number).

Assuming the fatality rate of~2% is correct, that’s 20k dead just in Iran…. so far. Considering it hits the elderly and infirm the hardest, it might be the “magic bullet” that takes out the entire leadership group so they can be replaced, which would likely be a good thing. But on a human tragedy scale of things, if it hits a nation with a failing healthcare system harder than two percent, it’s a major tragic event.

We live in interesting times.

Taking orders for lentils and wheat

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I’ll probably be going to the farm in the next two or three weeks. If anyone in the Seattle area would like some lentils or soft white wheat I’ll bring it back with me. Quantities are limited.

Let me know how many pounds you would like. I get them in 50 pound bags but frequently break them out into three to five pound Ziploc bags. You would pick them up in the Bellevue area.

Wheat is $0.20/pound and lentils are $0.30/pound.

Send me an email if you are interested: blog@joehuffman.org.

Update: All the wheat has been asked for. There are still some lentils left. There will be more wheat available in November or perhaps October.

I also have a few pea and lentil cookbooks I purchased from the USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council in bulk. List price is $24.95. I sell them for $10.00. You can sometimes get them used from Amazon for less.

King County conronavirus death confirmed

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Via KOMO News:

KING COUNTY, Wash. — A man in King County has died from the coronavirus, the Washington state Department of Health said Saturday in a media advisory.

No other details were given about the death as of Saturday morning.

Officials plan to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. with more details. KOMO will livestream the press conference.

Just as my source told me last night.

First Covid19 death tonight, in King County

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Via email:

I work in the fire department as a medic and our medical service officer just informed us of that info.

And that’s literally all we know.

Choose safe, be ready.

King County is the county surrounding Seattle and east to basically to the top of the Cascades.

I don’t recognize the email alias and have no basis upon which to judge the accuracy of the information.