Beautiful real spring day today and AB and I got on the bike late in the afternoon and did an 11-mile ride, just to take in some air and some healing ultraviolet light. AB asked me “What if it snows again this year?” and it was my regrettable duty to concede that I couldn’t rule that out.
By contrast with the grocery store, almost nobody on the bike path was wearing a mask; maybe 10%? We didn’t either. It was pretty easy to stay far away from people, and everything I’ve been reading suggests that outdoor transmission is rare. Tell me if you think that’s antisocial.
You could see that people were working to comply, getting into single file and hugging the edge of the path when someone came the other way. All except the guy with a big red parrot perched on the back of his bike, who kept stopping and letting kids play with his parrot. When I mentioned this to a neighbor she said “You saw the parrot guy? I’ve heard about him but I’ve never seen him in real life!” Somebody on Reddit saw him a few months back, on the same path we were on. Last we saw him he was still heading southwest, deeper and deeper into Fitchburg.
We have mostly settled into a routine here. In the morning the kids have school. The 8th grade has a couple of on-the-screen meetings most days, but the 3rd grade has almost no real-time instruction, just assignments described in video clips by the teachers. That feels right to me; I’ve heard about kids in other cities asked to be in front of the laptop camera for six hours a day as if it made sense to hew to the usual schedule, and that sounds nuts to me. In the afternoon AB has “camp” for two hours where she does art projects with a counselor and a group of kids, mostly from here and there in the US, one from Costa Rica. CJ is still baking a lot — oatmeal raisin cookies yesterday.
It works, basically. I had a lot of ambitions for “things I’ve always wanted to do with the kids but we’re too overscheduled to get to them,” and most of those have been unrealized. I wanted us to play music together and record some tracks. I wanted CJ to do a coding project. I thought, being in the house all day, we could do some reorg and cleaning of the house. Those things didn’t happen (for the good reason that the kids didn’t actually want to do them.) On the other hand, both kids are doing AOPS courses, AB and I have learned to throw a Frisbee forehand, CJ and I watched The Mandalorian (much better overall than any of the last three movies). I always felt I should get into gaming with the kids and AB and I are now working our way through Pikuniku.
Of course, the fact that I can even think about opportunity as well as burden is because I am in the very lucky position of having a job that doesn’t go away during a pandemic, and I don’t have people in the house at high risk of serious illness, so I can safely accept the modest risk of infection that comes with shopping, taking walks, etc.
Nobody I know has died of this yet. Two people I know have lost parents, another an aunt, another a grandparent. I guess it depends what you mean by “know.” John Conway died of COVID last week. Is that somebody I know? He’s somebody I’d chat with when I was around the Princeton math department. His famous theorems are familiar, but in the round of admiration attending his death I learned one I didn’t know; given any six points in R^3, you can partition them into two groups of three in such a way that the resulting two triangles are linked. That’s cool, but the proof is even cooler — it turns out that the sum of the linking numbers over all 10 such partitions is always odd! My favorite kind of existence proof is “there are an odd number of these things so there aren’t zero of them.”
Our neighborhood bakery and our favorite breakfast place got PPP small business loans so they can continue to pay their employees for the next couple of months. That loan program ran out of money in 28 seconds or something but Congress is planning to fill the bucket with money again, they say. Campus is still closed but the undergraduates are rebuilding it in Minecraft. The governor has released a plan to start reopening schools and more businesses, once cases in Wisconsin start showing a consistent decline. That looked like it might happen soon, but now there’s a new outbreak in Green Bay, tied to spread in the meatpacking plants there. (Yes, non-Wisconsinites, that’s why the football team is called that.) The workers who keep the food supply going, just like the doctors and nurses treating patients, are unavoidably going to be exposed to a lot of risk, because, unlike me, they do work that can’t be done on a screen and can’t not be done.
Trader Joe’s on Friday: the first time I had to wait in line to get in the store. To maintain an appropriately low density, they don’t let a new shopper in until someone comes out. This week, about 90% of shoppers were masked. The people who weren’t were mostly college-age. The food supply still seems pretty normal; a few things, like butter, were out, but it’s Trader Joe’s — there’s always something they’re for some reason out of. I asked the store manager whether they were selling more beer than usual, and he said, beer, no, hard liquor, yes.
Large majorities in Wisconsin support the governor’s safer-at-home order, but there are always dissenters:
Protester from Menomonee Falls: “This isn’t common throughout the state. It’s common in Milwaukee. It’s common in Madison. Lock them down.”
You might be surprised to hear I have some sympathy for this point of view, though he needs to be more broad with his lockdown; Waukesha County, where Menominee Falls is, has just as high a case rate as Dane does.
But it’s not crazy to imagine that COVID spread might be slower in less dense regions; maybe so much slower that the pandemic could be kept in check with less stringent suppression measures. Let’s posit that, eventually, we open schools and some businesses in rural Wisconsin before we do the same in Milwaukee. So this guy gets his wish.
My concern is this: he is not going to then say “It’s just like I said, I want to work and be productive, I’m glad I’m able to do so and I support strong relief measures for my fellow Wisconsinites in Milwaukee who have to stay home for the sake of public health.” No, I think that guy is going to say “Why should my taxes be paying somebody in Milwaukee to sit at home when I have to work?”
I have occasionally worked to lose weight, never too seriously because my weight problem has never been too serious. I used to sometimes do the Scarsdale diet in sync with my dad and once, a few years back, I went six weeks without carbs.
Anyway, a month without restaurant food has gone by and I’m 13 pounds lighter. Even though I’m eating all the cakes and cookies the kids are baking, snacking at night, going through enormous amounts of eggs, doing everything wrong. I looked up the records from doctor’s appointments and this is the least I’ve weighed since 2011. Who knew all it took was an order from the Governor to stay at home and make my own food?
Already discussed: the fracas over the April 7 spring election, which should have been postponed, or held by mail if it was held at all. To my great surprise, Jill Karofsky, the liberal running to unseat Scott Walker appointee Daniel Kelly from the Supreme Court, did so, with a bang, winning by about 11 points. Incumbents usually don’t lose Supreme Court races here and I thought Democrats’ political attention was taken up by the Presidential primary, by now all but over. Since Trump’s election, conservative candidates have won only one out of seven statewide elections here, and that one (Brian Hagedorn for Supreme Court) was by half a percent.
Why did Karofsky win by so much? One natural theory is that the election being the same day as the Democratic primary helped bring Democrats to the polls. Boosting this: Bernie Sanders made the apparently strange decision to campaign in Wisconsin, stay in the race until election day, and then immediately drop out before the results were reported. It all makes sense if you understand his motive to be getting his voters to the polls to vote for Karofsky as well as him.
But did it work? This chart from Charles Franklin, who knows Wisconsin politics like nobody else, says otherwise:
Turnout was way up for a court election: 1,548,504 vs 1,207,569 in 2019. This is 2nd highest court turnout since 2000.
If it was the Democratic primary driving Democratic voters to the polls, there’d be a bigger turnout boost in more Democratic counties. There wasn’t. So either the primary didn’t really boost turnout at all, or Republicans were equally motivated to go to the polls and vote for Trump against — well, the state GOP didn’t allow Trump’s Republican primary challengers on the ballot, so against nobody.
Was turnout actually higher because of the pandemic? Maybe people are more likely to vote when they’ve actually got a ballot to mail than they are to find time on Election Day.
Our first Seder without family since 2006, when I broke my arm so badly a week before Pesach that I couldn’t travel: Dr. Mrs. Q, baby CJ and I did it alone. This year we had grandparents in by Zoom both nights. But I had to cook Seder dinner, which I’ve never done. We all have things we don’t do in the kitchen for no reason except it’s not our habit. For me it’s giant pieces of meat. Just not what I cook. Don’t know how to roast a chicken or a turkey, don’t ever make leg of lamb (butterfly? spatchcock?) and I have never, before this week, made a brisket. But it’s easy, it turns out!
I was extremely successful, to my surprise, in hiding the afikoman. Both nights I thought it was in too easy a place and both nights my kids required multiple hints and were very satisfied with the search. Either I’m more cunning than I thought or my kids are not born hunters.
We did a gefilte taste test this year; traditional vs. tilapia. Tilapia is better!
With two days left to go we have eaten just about all the eggs.
We have been playing 4-person Ultimate in the backyard, AB and I vs CJ and Dr. Mrs. Q. They always win. The team of AB and me is called “Violent Frisbee” and AB has made us a flag:
Election Day in Wisconsin today; every other state with an April primary moved theirs, but not us. The state legislature, seeing that a contagious illness centered in Milwaukee would be good for depressing Democratic turnout, decided the show must go on. I sent in my vote by mail. But a lot of other people tried to as well, upwards of a million, and the overburdened clerks couldn’t get all the absentee ballots mailed out in time. Some people still don’t have theirs, and that means they don’t get to vote.
I went to Metcalfe’s instead of Trader Joe’s because they have a better Passover selection, and because Trader Joe’s was closed after a worker there tested positive. Wore a mask again. This time the proportion of mask-wearers was close to half and included some of the employees. Metcalfe’s made its aisles one-way to avoid people passing each other, but the signage was confusing and compliance was weak. Shelves were pretty fully stocked but toilet paper/paper towels/hand sanitizers were one to a customer. I bought a giant brisket for seder, which is in the oven now. I’ve never cooked seder dinner before because we always have it at Dr. Mrs. Q’s mom’s house. This time we’re bringing her in via Zoom and hoping for the best.
The only store I saw open in the mall besides the grocery was the Sprint cellphone store. More restaurants than I’d have thought were open for takeout, but we haven’t gotten any takeout yet. The last meal I ate that I didn’t cook myself was a burrito at the Tucson airport on March 9.
“School” has begun. It seems they won’t be doing very much real-time instruction, which I think is for the best; mostly short meetings where teachers give and explain assignments for kids to do in their own time.
I now have two friends who’ve had COVID; both have recovered. I don’t know anyone who’s died.
AB and I have been playing frisbee in the backyard, trying to learn how to throw a forehand reliably. We’re getting sort of OK. Two houses down from us, two guys were working on the roof; one of them coughed at least three times, and wasn’t wearing a mask. Wear a mask! For the sake of your fellow roofer!
When you plot the number of reported deaths from COVID on a log scale you get pictures that look like this one, by John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times:
A straight line represents exponential growth, which is what one might expect to see in the early days of a pandemic according to baby models. You’ll note that the straight line doesn’t last very long, thank goodness; in just about every country the line starts to bend. Why are COVID deaths concave? There are quite a few possible reasons.
Suppression is working. When pandemic breaks out, countries take measures to suppress transmission, and people take their own measures over and above what their governments do. (An analysis by Song Gao of our geography department of cellphone location data shows that Wisconsinites median distance traveled from home decreased by 50% even before the governor issued a stay-at-home order.) That should slow the rate of exponential growth — hopefully, flip it to exponential decay.
Change in reporting. Maybe we’re getting better at detecting COVID deaths; if on day 1, only half of COVID deaths were reported as same, while now we’re accurately reporting them all, we’d see a spuriously high slope at the beginning of the outbreak. (The same reasoning applies to the curve for number of confirmed cases; at the beginning, the curve grows faster than the true number of infections as testing ramps up.)
COVID is getting less lethal. This is the whole point of “flattening the curve” — with each week that passes, hospitals are more ready, we have more treatment options and fuller knowledge of which of the existing treatments best suits which cases.
Infection has saturated the population. This is the most controversial one. The baby model (where by baby I mean SIR) tells you that the curve bends as the number of still-susceptible people starts to really drop. The consensus seems to be we’re nowhere near that yet, and almost everyone (in the United States, at least) is still susceptible. But I guess one should be open to the possibility that there are way more asymptomatic people than we think and half the population is already infected; or that for some reason a large proportion of the population carries natural immunity so 1% of population infected is half the susceptible population.
Heterogeneous growth rate. I came across this idea in a post by a physicist (yeah, I know, but it was a good post!) which I can’t find now — sorry, anonymous physicist! There’s not one true exponential growth rate; different places may have different slopes. Just for the sake of argument, suppose a bunch of different locales all start with the same number of deaths, and suppose the rate of exponential growth is uniformly distributed between 0 and 1; then the total deaths at time t is which is . The log of that function has positive second derivative; that is, it tends to make the curve bend up rather than down! That makes sense; with heterogeneous rates of exponential growth, you’ll start with some sort of average of the rates but before long the highest rate will dominate.
I’m sure I’ve skipped some curve-bending factors; propose more in comments!
After thinking it over in previous posts I realized I had no rejoinder to the argument that we should all be wearing masks to go shopping, so I wore a mask to go shopping. Nothing fancy or ultra-filtering, just an elastic paper mask from a box. I worried I would feel awkward, but instead I felt cool, like a bandit. When I last went shopping, 9 days ago, almost no one was wearing a mask; now it’s up to 20 or 25 percent of the customers. Maybe people are reading my blog! I didn’t ask. None of the Trader Joe’s employees wear masks and I wonder whether they’re allowed to.
I was wondering about what the last major pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, looked like in real time, so I looked at the 25th anniversary report of the Harvard Class of 1895, published in June 1920 and written in 1919. To my surprise, the flu is barely mentioned. Henry Adsit Bull lost his oldest daughter to it. A couple of classmates worked in influenza hospitals. Morton Aldrich used it as an excuse for being late with his report. Paul Washburn reported being quite ill with it, and emphasizing that it might be his last report, demanded that the editors print his curriculum vitae with no editorial changes. (Nope — he was still alive and well and banking in the 1935 report.) I thought 1894, whose report was written more in the thick of the epidemic, might have more to say, but not really. Two men died of it, including one who made it through hideous battles of the Great War only to succumb to flu in November 1918. Another lost daughter.
But no one weighs in on it; I have read a lot of old Harvard class reports, and if there’s one thing I can tell you about an early 20th century Harvard man, it’s that he likes to weigh in. Not sure what to make of this. Maybe the pandemic didn’t much touch the lives of the elite. Or maybe people just died of stuff more and the Spanish flu didn’t make much of an impression. Or maybe it was just too rough to talk about (but I don’t think so — people recount pretty grisly material about the war.)
Back to the present. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered all jury trials halted for two months for the safety of jurors, witnesses, and officers of the court; an extremely overwrought dissent from Justice Rebecca Bradley insists that if a right is in the constitution it can’t be put on pause, even for a couple of months, even in a pandemic, which will be news to the people in every state whose governors have suspended their right to assemble.
CJ made a blueberry bundt cake, the best thing he’s made so far, aided by the fact that at the Regent Market Co-op I found a box of pectin, an ingredient I didn’t even know existed. Powdered sugar there was not, but it turns out that powdered sugar is literally nothing but regular sugar ground fine and mixed with a little cornstarch! You can make it yourself if you have a good blender. And we do have a good blender. We love to blend.
Walked around the neighborhood a bit. Ran into the owner of a popular local restaurant and talked to him from across the street. He’s been spending days and days working to renegotiate his loan with the bank. He thinks we ought to be on the “Denmark plan” where the government straight up pays worker’s salaries rather than make businesses apply to loans so they can eventually get reimbursed for the money they’re losing right now. (I did not check whether this is actually the Denmark plan.) Also saw my kids’ pediatrician, who told me that regular pediatrics has been suspended except for babies and they’ve closed the regular clinic, everything is consolidated in 20 S. Park.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about different groups’ COVID projections, claims and counterclaims. I’ll write about it a little in the next entry to show how little I know. But I think nobody knows anything.
Tomorrow it’ll be two weeks since the last time I was more than a quarter-mile from my house. We are told to be ready for another month. It won’t be that hard for us, but it’ll be hard for a lot of people.
It’s family blogging time! Since school is out we need some kind of writing activity so we’re all blogging, not just me. I did not require any particular subject. CJ is blogging about the movies he’s watching in his friend groups’ “movie club ” — he has the Marvel bug now and is plowing through the whole collection on Disney+. AB’s blog is called “The Nasty Times: Foods that Were Never Meant To Be Eaten” and each entry is about a food she considers nasty. The first entry was about mushrooms and she is currently composing “Why Onions Do Not Belong in Sloppy Joes.” I know, I know, who doesn’t like mushrooms and onions? Well, me at AB’s age — I made my mom take them out of everything, much to her annoyance. Now I’m getting my comeuppance.
I have two big longboxes of comics in the basement, almost all from 1982-1986, and AB and I spent part of the morning starting to sort and organize them. Perfect example of a task that feels like productivity and is not important in any way and yet — satisfying. Also nice to see old friends again, covers I haven’t seen in years but are familiar to me in every detail. This one seemed fairly on point:
I am still thinking about the masks. Why so unpopular in the US? Maybe it works like this. You are told (correctly) that wearing a mask doesn’t provide strong protection. Let’s say (making up a number) it only reduces your chance of transmitting or contracting the virus by a half. To many people that is going to feel like nothing: “I’m not really protected, what’s the point?” But in the aggregate, an easy, cheap measure that reduces number of transmissions by 50% would be extremely socially valuable.
which is 
. The log of that function has positive second derivative; that is, it tends to make the curve bend up rather than down! That makes sense; with heterogeneous rates of exponential growth, you’ll start with some sort of average of the rates but before long the highest rate will dominate.
