It got really hot here. I hope the ac survives another summer.

Meanwhile, new covid cases have declined slightly since the latest peak. Just about everyone appears to be following the mask edict issued by our mayor. Several bars in the Short North shut down after an employee tested positive.

If only Tapatio were still around.

2: Yes, they had a great patio.

Patatio, they did not call it.

Our 7 day averaged positive rate is down to 4.5%. The bars are open but when I've walked by I haven't seen more than 1 or 2 people inside. I could actually sit down to eat at most of my favorite local spots, but I'm sticking with take out for now. It looks like most other people are as well.

So today, some late teen early 20's guy on a bicycle nearly ran me over on the sidewalk. I was walking in the direction of traffic. He was biking against it. Unfortunately, I couldn't easily cross the street because there was a divider at the intersection. Of course, he was wearing neither mask nor helmet.

Does anybody know if any masks have come out which are not clinical N95s but which actually filter out virus so that I can protect myself even if yahoos don't care? Washable would be the best. Is anybody serious working on this?

How many Zoom meetings in a row can you wear the same shirt for? Asking for a friend who doesn't want to get up.

6.2: Not that I know of, but from what I read it seems that risk correlates with time of exposure.

||

the herdsmen problem is like a sucking mosquito on a man's scrotum. If you hit it hard, you will severe the genitals. If you leave it there, it would suck your blood and invariably give you malaria.

8: I know, but I'd also like to be ale to ride the bus or even the subway some day. I'm working from home now, and before I drove 3 days a week, but I worked 2 days a week where I have no access to parking. So at some point before there's a vaccine I'll be told that it's safe, because of masks, and I have to come in. But public transportation does not seem safe.

It does not. I don't think I'm going back on the bus for a while.

I don't know how parking will work at my office because there's not enough for everyone. Many people took the bus. I may walk if we don't open up until after the hot weather ends.

I could ride a bike in, but my bike needs tires and also I have no idea of how to ride in traffic.

This is a month old now but it bears repeating: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/japan-ends-its-covid-19-state-emergency

Nobody who has looked has found lots of transmission on public transport - anywhere. Could be masks, could be that people don't talk or sing or yell. A twist is that quite a few London bus drivers got it, possibly because they clocked up a lot of continuous hours of exposure to the general public, or perhaps (given that this doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else in the world) they didn't get it on the bus.

There are early Chinese outbreak investigations on overnight long-distance buses, which makes a lot of sense because you know how they smell when the sun comes up? But AFAIK the only one on a plane (a plane!) was one that was parked for hours with passengers aboard and air-conditioning packs shut down. (And again, anyone who's had that experience knows exactly why; it gets hellishly stuffy and smelly very quickly.)

So at some point before there's a vaccine I'll be told that it's safe, because of masks, and I have to come in. But public transportation does not seem safe.

Public transportation appears to also be safe, because of masks. But not if people are turning the train cars into parties or places to eat and drink.

15: They keep saying that they will enforce the masks, but when I see a bunch of MBTA employees standing around and 2 are not wearing masks, I do not trust the officials to enforce the requirement. That's why I want a mask that doesn't rely on other people wearing theirs.

In DC you can't eat on the metro, but that's always been allowed here, so good luck getting someone not to.

Nobody who has looked has found lots of transmission on public transport - anywhere. Could be masks, could be that people don't talk or sing or yell. A twist is that quite a few London bus drivers got it, possibly because they clocked up a lot of continuous hours of exposure to the general public, or perhaps (given that this doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else in the world) they didn't get it on the bus.

During our initial outbreak when not one person in a thousand was wearing a mask, being a bus driver seemed extremely dangerous. Those in Detroit were hit hard I believe.

But AFAIK the only one on a plane (a plane!) was one that was parked for hours with passengers aboard and air-conditioning packs shut down. (And again, anyone who's had that experience knows exactly why; it gets hellishly stuffy and smelly very quickly.)

The lack of outbreaks on planes has been very interesting. We all know they recycle and filter the air over and over during flight, so the air generally seems bad but has also been filtered frequently! On the other hand I have always expected that there's a good chance of getting sick on a plane, my whole life. Clearly if you're next to someone who is sick there's a good chance of it, but maybe not just from being on the plane. Maybe we blame planes for sicknesses we contracted before we got on the plane.

MAYBE THE SICKNESSES ARE PUNISHMENTS FOR THE EFFRONTERY OF FLYING SO CLOSE TO THE SUN.

A twist is that quite a few London bus drivers got it, possibly because they clocked up a lot of continuous hours of exposure to the general public, or perhaps (given that this doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else in the world) they didn't get it on the bus.

A lot of London bus and tube drivers supposedly got it very early - IIRC 20% of tube drivers were off in late March/early April, very early in the lockdown, because they were either sick or self isolating. And tube drivers have virtually zero exposure to the general public - they sit in the cab by themselves. My (perhaps unfair) suspicion at the time was that they were taking advantage of the shiny new excuse to have two weeks off work.

43 TFL workers had died of COVID by mid June, 29 of whom were bus drivers.
But then TFL employs 28,000 people, including 25,000 and the death rate in London is 6,699 - one in 1400 of the total population (including children, who are much less vulnerable). The bus driver figure is abnormally high and TFL is investigating. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52752022 But the TFL death rate outside bus drivers seems to be not unusually high.

19 I'LL FLY WHERE I WANT, HOW I WANT.

We all know they recycle and filter the air over and over during flight, so the air generally seems bad but has also been filtered frequently!

We all know this, but it's wrong!

Airliners are not space capsules, they are not airtight, and they don't just recycle air over and over. A lot of the air you're breathing is bleed air from the engines - compressed in the pre-combustion stage, passed through filters and heat exchangers in the air pack, and fed into the cabin. The constant flow of air in compensates for inevitable leakage, especially around the doors. What comes out of the vents is about 50% from recirc and 50% fresh bleed air from outside.
That's why, if you shoot a hole in an airliner, you don't get "explosive decompression". You just get a small hole, and the air pack has to work a bit harder.

AND DIDN'T THAT JUST WORK OUT GREAT.

I bet it's hard to make even a small hole in an airplane with an arrow.

Before I had a kid, I used to get sick every time I took a flight. Since then, I assume I'm the carrier.

That reminds me of a time I was on a puddle jumper 9-seater on a 50 mile flight. Max altitude was something like 2000 feet. The pilot has a little window he opens when taxiing and a nervous passenger asked what would happen if the window popped open in flight. The pilot's response was, "It would get windy."

18 My theory has always been -- and I have neither evidence nor qualifications for having or advancing theories like this -- that it's the regional variations in viruses/bacteria that get you. I've been exposed to the varieties of the stuff that lives here enough to have a level of immunity, but if I go to Amsterdam for five days, I'm going to be around endemic stuff that I don't have immunity to. By the time I get home, I'm sick. So: not the plane, but the destination.

Or, I suppose, the Dutch passenger flying back with me.

If course, I've brought some amount of my Montana germies with me, so maybe it's been an even trade. On the plane, where people have enough time of exposure, but maybe not so much at the Rijksmuseum, where we've just passed each other in galleries.

Of course, whatever caused the window to pop will probably take down the plane.

"Sick" in 27 is mostly bad cold, and only rarely something flu-like.

Yes, that's what I was talking about too.

Except the one time my son vomited everywhere. I think we most have spread that to dozens of people.

27.1 maybe not the plane but the airport? I mean, I can go to Amsterdam for two weeks, feel fine all the time, come back and I'm sick in a couple of days, two weeks in Athens, same, London, same, NY for a month and back, same. Every time I travel I'm always down with something a few days after I get back.

32 I've only recently been modifying my theory to account for time of exposure -- as noted, this theory has neither evidence nor expertise (on my part) to back it up, but is purely anecdotal -- but once you start thinking of exposure time, then the airport is probably a better place to catch something than the Rijksmuseum. Solution: show up at the airport as late as possible, and I suppose a mask at the airport isn't such a bad idea.

It looks like Donald Trump's parents pulled an Aunt Becky.

Except they were only rich enough to get him into Penn.

As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton business school.
We should have the sitcom plot where Trump is still President but has to go back to high school and cram for the SAT and if he doesn't get at least the same score he's removed from office.

36 He's gotta post his SAT scores and his tax returns.

So, new record case number today. 80 new cases on 2,400 tests. Hospitalizations still pretty low: 22 statewide, out of 588 active cases.

I'm doing the pre-colonoscopy thing today -- no food and 16 oz of clear liquid per hour. That wicked clean-you-out shit starting at 5 pm.

Still alive and well. We're visiting Yosemite Thursday-- since they're limiting admission to 500 cars per day, it seems like a great opportunity to hike and sight see without the normal tourist loads.

Arming the bears with lasers would have the same effect on tourism.

38: I had that scheduled for March; they canceled my appointment just before I had to start drinking the stuff. Unfortunately, I know that it's only delayed, not canceled... so best of luck! Hope it's a smooth procedure.

If we can train them to go to a charging station often enough for the batteries to stay active.

Still doing fine here personally, but our second wave is continuing to build with no end in site. The latest twist is that hospitalization numbers are now starting to climb as well, though fortunately they're still well with hospital capacity. Deaths are still very low but we'll see. Of course the absolute numbers are still very low for all of this.

42: Just put little solar panels on the lasers. Like calculators.

Our contact tracing was pretty good until recently, but it's now starting to break down. The other day the city released a list of bars where infected people had spent time but they've been unable to do contact tracing. The bar owners are pissed and feel like their industry is being singled out, which of course they are because they're an exceptionally high-risk setting. In retrospect the city probably shouldn't have let them open back up at all.

It turns out there's a hidden downside to drinking.

Bars being the location where most infections are taking place in probably every town in America, I can see why they would feel singled out by the virus. They need a bailout.

I bet karaoke bars are the worst of all unless there are karaoke bars that also have you share needles with the original singer.

As a check, since the pubs reopened on Saturday, three of them in the whole country (hundreds of miles apart) have shut down due to suspicious contacts. All of those found out because the contact told them and started calling people up on their own initiative.

The suspicious person called the health department?

Not joking. I'm confused.

It's completely insane that bars are open.

I'm just marveling at my self-control for not going even once before they closed them again here.

52: Seriously. I mean, I feel like the government should pay bars and their employees until we have universal testing every day and a vaccine, because I don't want them all to go out of business through No fault of their own. That would require a functioning government.

Maybe instead of open-carry laws for guns we could have open-carry laws for alcohol, so people can hang out and drink outside where it's safer. Except that it's so hot we would probably have drunk people dying of heat stroke.

What if drunks could sip bourbon openly and militia protestors had to carry their guns in brown paper bags?

Or a guitar case.

49: either the virus haver informed the pub, or official contact tracers informed the pub, and the pub began calling people whose phone numbers it had taken down.

It appears the (usually lunatic) Texas Ed Agency has been reading Kevin Drum. They are requiring every district accommodate every student who wants to be F2F, every day. No breaking schools or classes up by cohort. Even if it sacrifices social distancing. I have big, mixed feelings about this. In many ways I'm super relieved, because it alleviates significant issues for precarious families. OTOH, boy are we putting a lot of faith in the idea that this will be safe.

boy are we putting a lot of faith in the idea that this will be safe.

Or just not caring.

38, 41: My colonoscopy was originally scheduled for early April. I postponed it due to the shelter in place stuff and not trusting that the hospitals were safe at that time. Just did it on June 30th, so I'm sympathetic. The good news is that they have a lot of anti-infection measures in place now, including having me do a coronavirus test a couple of days before I came in for the procedure (all good there). Hope your procedure went well, Charley!

Turns out my blood pressure was too high. So, I got to do all the drinking, fasting, and have an IV line in, and for nothing. I'd already independently decided that it was time to get treatment for my obvious HBP, but I had stalled so long that the earliest appointment I could get was this Friday. So, we'll give the medication they are sure to prescribe time to work, and then in the fall sometime I'll do it all again.

The hospital folks -- nurses, anesthesiologist, surgeon (whatever?) -- were really apologetic, but relieved that I was 100% on board with not doing an elective procedure with a risk that can easily be mitigated in the near future.

Let me be the first to recommend Lisinopril.

Except for the weirdly tight jaw muscles.

A stiff upper lip never hurt anyone.

Mine sometimes caused me to mumble orders.

So, Jammies semi-impulsively bought a bicycle built for 5, today. It's under our house. It's longer than our minivan, and has two tires, tricycle-style, in the very back.

I love that he's excited about it. I think it's hysterical. I think I'd be embarrassed to ride it around town and be that kind of twee family. Six can ride it, because there's a platform to put a little seat in the very back. BUT there are five actual seats.

So I think Jammies will be perfectly suited to take the kids out, without me. I can drown my sorrows in a quiet house, a nice charcuterie board, and Derry Girls.

Are you stealing my bit?

The only thing that could make 67 better is video.

Oh my. We do need video of that bike with Jammies and the geeblets.

63: I vote for an ARB over an ACE. I think they got the NDMA out of Valsartan and Losartan.

69 and 70: Yes! Yes!

38:Ha! I should have been reading I had mine yesterday as well, so was also prepping on Tuesdsay. Slightly different regiment, but same effect. Mine took a while to begin working so was up half the night (and it is being very slow to wear off*). I did have to drop off of Coumadin a few day earlier. (Am also on Lisinopril which controls my BP pretty well.) 2nd time for me, and once again amazed at how the anesthetic works*.

*And having glossed over the part of the instructions that saidd "do not do activities that require cpprdination or balance for 24 hours" I stupidly went to rowing practive this morning**. Only doing singles due to the thing, and I am new to them and suck at them anyway. Not a glorious outing on several fronts.

**I also glossed ove the "do not make critical decisions" part. You know like deciding to go to rowing practice.

Just back from a trip to the beach on the far west side of this small country with Pola and another friend from work. Visited two beaches there actually and the first beach we went to the water was very shallow but surprisingly cool (and also smelly because of all the cyanobacteria, I named it "Diaper Beach")