Today I developed a sore throat. That’s three days after my last trip into town.
I have no idea if I picked up the Coronavirus. It’s probably too soon to tell. I know I don’t have a temperature, because I checked.
I woke in the night feeling sweaty, but didn’t think much of it. The snow probably had started to fall, and I’m always restless at night when the weather is changing. My lungs seem to become more sensitive every year.
They probably didn’t develop normally when I was a child because both my parents smoked, and never aired out the house. I’ve just assumed I was the victim of second hand smoke. I’ve never smoked, and since I was able to control my destiny I’ve lived in non-urban areas with little smoke pollution. I curse every time the forest service sets a controlled burn and sends smoke my way.
Since I hadn’t slept well, I took several naps. As I’ve gotten older I’ve tended to take a nap around noon, especially if I’ve worked outside in the morning. It’s the best way to relax my muscles.
The more I read about Coronavirus, the more I’ve become aware of how little we know. The disease only appeared in China five months ago, and the reports we’ve had from there have been fragmentary. Part of that may be geopolitics, but it’s also the consequence of living through something that is unknown.
The Chinese quarantined every known infected person into a single residential area, and enforced the isolation. That very physical situation may have directed the way the virus developed there.
Most of our guidelines for social distancing are based on best practices in general. If it’s like influenza and other Coronaviruses, then covering one’s mouth and staying some distance from people is what has worked in the past.
And, as near as we can tell, it’s what is working now. All they mean when they say "flattening the curve" is the percentage of people getting infected each day is lower than the previous day. New Mexico peaked at 23% on April 3, but has seen 10% increases every day since. An average of 98 people still have been testing positive every day since April 7. [1]
The more people who are infected, the greater chance someone who catch it, regardless of the percentage calculated against an ever increasing base number. New Mexico’s 1174 twice more than the 496 when the percentage peaked.
Some facts began to emerge this month, when some Germans published a chronology of the virus in nine people with mild cases. They studied them every day, and found the virus lodged in the throat, not the lungs. That meant it was easily expelled into the air in the early phase before people suspect they were infected. [2]
I’ve also read that, in a Chinese hospital area where many people were inflected, the virus simply remained in the air, fell to the floor, and was tracked on the soles of shoes. [3] When people are separated from each other, that doesn’t happen and the air isn’t as contaminated. Again, these are facts that are beginning to be distilled from experiences.
The more people infected, the greater the chance. Rio Arriba County has 7 reported cases, and who knows how many unreported ones.
None is particularly reassuring. That woman who sneezed in the doorway of the post office, may have left an aura of the virus, even though she wore a mask. That meant, I could have picked something up simply by walking in an area where she had been in the time before the viruses in the air had become inactive.
Similarly, when I stood in the marked locations in lines in the grocery store and garden center, I may have been in areas where the virus concentrated because people were sent to those specific locations by the floor tapes that kept people six feet apart.
The other place where people were concentrated sequentially was the credit card reader. In both stores, plexiglass barriers kept bad air from the cashiers but guaranteed it couldn’t disperse on one side.
My loose fitting mask was no protection against a temporarily saturated environment.
Sources:
1. Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated 11 April 2020. It calculates the percentage change which was 23% on April 4 when the total cases jumped from 40 to 92. I calculated the number of new cases a day from the total cases Wikipedia provided.
4/11 83
4/10 102
4/09 124
4/08 71
4/07 108
4/06 62
2. Roman Wölfel, Christian Drosten, et alia. "Virological Assessment of Hospitalized Patients with COVID-2019." Nature website. 1 April 2020. Summarized by "Coronavirus: Virological Findings from Patients Treated in a Munich Hospital." Science Daily Website. 3 April 2020. "This is an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. Nature Research are providing this early version of the manuscript as a service to our authors and readers. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting and a proof review before it is published in its final form." It’s remarkable the 18 authors were able to prepare a draft as quickly as they did.
3. Barbie Latza Nadeau. "CDC Study Shows Coronavirus Can Live on Floors, Shoes." The Daily Beast website. 12 April 2020. Those who dispute these observations are in different milieus. Our knowledge of the virus is at the stage of the three blind men who reported on the elephant’s form; each swore what they know was the whole truth.
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