Day 3779

You know what I said yesterday. Yep. Same thing today. Even by my admittedly low standards, this quarantine life is getting monotonous. The weird thing is that unless you know someone personally who has gotten sick, the danger doesn't seem real. You hear these horrible things on the news, but it all seems distant, like the war in Syria or something.

Nobody I know well has gotten sick. Three people I've met at one point or another have been tested for the virus. One guy tested positive and the other two tested negative. All three showed exactly the same symptoms. To this day, the two people who tested negative remain convinced that they had the virus. They were never tested again though, because they weren't sick enough to be admitted to the ER and test kits were scarce.

Luckily, these three people all recovered without requiring hospitalization. The guy who actually tested positive spent fourteen days confined to his bedroom. The two who tested negative were free to go anywhere they wanted. Each of these experiences make me wonder about testing. Everybody admits that current tests frequently return false results, but still testing appears to be vitally important.

I'm sure that mass testing will greatly improve all the mathematical models and projections I keep seeing, but what does the test do for the individual being tested? If you test negative today, you could still test positive tomorrow. If you've actually had the virus and have acquired antibodies, nobody knows whether this means you are safe to reenter society. Some say that people with antibodies could still get sick again or even continue to infect others. So with this in mind, does a massive testing program remove any uncertainty at all? Not for me. I guess the best a testing program could do is find some of the asymptomatic people who actually have the virus and remove them from circulation.

If we do wind up with a massive tracking/surveillance program, I'd prefer the type of high-tech tracking being proposed by Apple and Google. I'm comfortable with my phone warning me that a sick person is nearby. I'm not very comfortable at all with an army of human trackers going door-to-door. Nobody in their right mind who lives in a city would open their door to a stranger who says "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." At best these people are probably Jehovah's Witnesses. At worst, they are planning a home invasion.

It will be interesting to see how all this develops. Right now it feels a lot like the blind leading the blind. When you read about the early day of polio or the Spanish Flu, the same thing happened. People were scared and many of the early remedies did nothing or even made matters worse. If you are unfamiliar with the history of polio, you should read about it. The first documented polio epidemic in the United States occurred in 1894. The disease wasn't eliminated in the Western Hemisphere until 1994. We live in an age of instant gratification. I don't think many of us are ready for a hundred year war on the coronavirus.

It's a safe bet that nobody is going to find a solution tomorrow. I'll continue walking and see how many days I can continue my 20,000 step streak. Last night's violent storms weren't as bad as everyone expected. I removed the water from the roof today and am ready for the next storm. I'm still thinking of upgrading all my computers to solid state drives. If I can't go out for breakfast on Friday morning anymore, it might take a fast computer to keep me happy.

Parker is today's Dalmatian of the Day

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