Monday, July 27, 2020

Journal of a Plague Year, Sunday, July 26

Two more deaths reported, one yesterday, one today. Our total is now three.

We have the highest level yet of known cases: 134 in the past 14 days.

And, we have no idea what’s really going on. Thursday, July 23, the governor had to limit tests to those with obvious symptoms, because of the delays in getting test supplies and results.

Sources:
Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated daily.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Journal of a Plague Year, Wednesday, July 22

It’s only going to get worse. Yesterday 46 new cases of Coronavirus were reported in Rio Arriba County; today it was 5. The total for the last 14 days is 132. That’s more than our accumulated total on July 9. [1]

Wikipedia has added demographic information for the state since I last scrolled to the bottom of its web page. It indicates the largest groups getting positive test results are in their 20s and 30s.

When I was out Monday, the consequences already were obvious. The governor had closed restaurants again on 13 July, and only the drive ins had cars in their lots.

If that’s not bad enough, the president has intervened in one of our political disputes [2] and has announced he’s sending federal troops to Albuquerque to restore order.

These aren’t just any police. They’re from immigration control. Probably most don’t understand the difference between someone whose family was here before the Mexican War and refugees from Central America. They all look alike and speak Spanish.

The first result will be a greater spread of the virus as people move about in Bernalillo County and those leery of the police move north. Wikipedia indicated problems in Bernalillo County are now as bad as in Rio Arriba on a per capital basis (the total number of cases divided by the population is greater than 500 per 100,000 people). We reached that status on July 19.

The secondary result may be fewer individuals from Albuquerque driving north to make deliveries to our stores. People who are sick can’t work.

A trivial consequence is my car has missed its annual service. I bought it in Albuquerque and generally take it in sometime in April. Since I’m driving less, things dependent on use aren’t aging. Still, I’d had been thinking about scheduling maintenance, but no more.

I’d rather live with faulty windshield wipers than Coronavirus.

Sources:
1. Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated 22 July 2020.

2. I have no idea who Manny Gonzalez is, and zero knowledge about family feuds in Bernalillo County, but if they’re anything like the ones here they run deep and are hidden from public view

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Journal of a Plague Year, Monday, July 20

We are now firmly in the second phase of the pandemic, the one people are calling "It Didn’t Have To Be This Way."

We have more people getting sick in Rio Arriba County, and know less about them than we did in March. We passed a milestone today when more than 200 cases were diagnosed since the Coronavirus first appeared in the county on March 25. [1]

Our numbers of cases reported within 14 days had been creeping up from 45 on July 10 to 51 on July 16. Then, exactly two weeks after the Fourth of July, 37 new cases were reported on July 17, making the two-week total 87. Today, it was 99.

It’s easy to say "Aha, the Fourth" but, until recently, the two-week period was the extreme end of the period when people became sick. Symptom usually appear after about four days.

However, testing is no longer a useful measure. Numbers of cases have been increasing in so many states, including neighboring Texas and Arizona, that commercial laboratories that process the swabs can’t keep up, and results are taking a week to produce.

Colorado’s governor said Sunday that "every test we send out to private lab partners nationally, Quest, Labcorp, seven days, eight days, nine days — maybe six days if we're lucky. Almost useless from an epidemiological or even diagnostic perspective." [2]

The problem was the expectation this particular virus would disappear like the seasonal flu, so corporations didn’t invest in increasing their capacity. It made no sense to build new facilities and train new people on a tight schedule, when everything would be redundant in a few months. They only would have acted if they had had some government guarantees for financing, or if they believed their competitors would also act so no one would be at a competitive disadvantage for investing capital funds.

The same problem is happening in other areas of manufacturing. When I went to the grocery today, I noticed more empty shelves, especially in canned soup, canned tomato sauces and salsas, and canned entrees like ravioli.

I no longer can get the type of pizza I’ve been eating. It, and every other type from the one company, has been gone for more than two weeks. The company has exhausted its inventory. Some of the last ones I bought had ice crystals or odd packages that indicated they were the last items in storage.

Pizza, and many of the other foods I mentioned, contain tomatoes. They may not be able to be produced until tomatoes grown in this country are available. Shipments of produce from other countries probably have decreased with various types of international quarantines, and our domestic output may not be able to compensate in quantity within one growing season.

Tomato products may be another casualty of the agricultural cycles that made brown rice scarce this spring.

However, not every type of soup uses tomatoes. Chicken soups have been randomly available since spring: gone, then back, and now gone again.

We know the problem here: chicken producers have had the same problems as meat producers. They didn’t take the Coronavirus serious, and didn’t rethink their manufacturing processes. They had to close down to sanitize their sites. I’m not sure how many actually spent money on safety measures like installing plexiglass shields between work stations.

Not all companies have been passively waiting for things to get better. Amazon’s head, Jeff Bezos, responded to overwhelming demand in the spring by spending money to increase capacity. He saw possibilities in a permanent increase in business as people who wouldn’t buy things online had to change, and once over their qualms would become permanent customers.

In his case, it was a combination of entrepreneurial vision and cash resources. Unlike many companies that have come under the control of hedge funds, debt didn’t prevent him from acting.

Another industry that seems to have risen to the occasion is plexiglass. Natalia Broda said, that in Michigan, companies have been working full-time since March to meet demands. In one small company, the heads of Service Glass Company met two weeks after everything shut down, because they saw the possibility they would be inundated with orders.

Plaskolite, who makes the resin that is processed into sheets, has been running at near full capacity at ten plants seven days a week. This is the kind of operation that is so automated, few people are needed on the plant floor. It could increase production with fewer worries about contagion than a poultry plant. Its only worry is maintenance to keep machinery running.

Apart from wistful thinking, the biggest problem with economists in Washington is they only understand the stock market, which is driven by those hedge funds. I don’t know anyone in this, or previous administrations, who actually understands how an assembly line works. That expertise has been driven overseas by companies outsourcing their manufacturing operations. It’s a more serious loss than the resulting extended supply chains.

People in Detroit in the 1970s began warning these kinds of problems would occur sooner or later. The crises in the food supply did not have to be.

Fortunately, the knowledge and managerial skills survive in some places, like Detroit, and in some industries. The article I mentioned on plexiglass was written for a suburban newspaper outside Detroit by a female reporter who’d been around long enough to know the questions to ask for readers who still understood manufacturing from the plant floor up.

Sources:
1. Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated daily.

2. Jared Polis. Meet the Press. 19 July 2020. Reported by David Cohen. "Colorado Governor: ‘National testing scene is a complete disgrace’." Politico website. 19 July 2020.

3. Natalie Broda. "Local Manufacturers Working 24/7 To Supply Plastic Protective Barriers." The Oakland [County, Michigan] Press website. 6 July 2020.

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Journal of a Plague Year, Thursday, July 9

I gave in today and made my own mask. It wasn’t to wear into town to protect me against Coronavirus. It was to put on in the house to filter out the pollution coming from fires like the one near Mountaineer.

The Chinese masks I bought are not comfortable: the material is scratchy and it traps heat. They’re OK for the short times I’m out of the car in town, but not good for several hours.

I have said I thought it should be relatively simple, and it was.

I took an old, all-cotton sheet and put it through the wash. Then I cut a section along the edge wide enough to make ties, and long enough to fall to my chest.

As I said the sheet was old, and when it was made the salvage edge was somehow separate. When I went to cut along it, it tore along the line. No cutting needed. All I needed to do was cut down from the ends of the ties.

It looks more like a strange false beard or a long bib than a mask, but that’s OK. No one’s going to see me.

In the same way our luck with fires may have run out, our luck with Coronavirus may not have changed. We had 13 new cases reported on July 7, the Tuesday after the Fourth of July weekend. The virus wasn’t contacted over the holiday, but a small backlog in tests must have developed.

Since then, our 14-day total has inched up by one a day to reach 39 today. Tomorrow may be when we begin to see the effects of the holiday, if any.

Sources:
Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated July 9.

Journal of a Plague Year, Monday, July 6

Today I made by bravest venture yet into the world of Coronavirus. I went to my doctor’s office for my annual physical.

The entry ritual was the same as last week when I got the blood work done. As then, all the women were wearing short-sleeved tops. When I asked one why she wasn’t wearing long sleeves, she said she took a shower before she went home, so was OK.

These exams are predictable. The only differences I noticed was the doctor didn’t stick a tongue depressor in my mouth and ask me to say "ah."

He also didn’t have me change into one of those loose gowns to check my lungs. He stood to my side, and used his stethoscope through my clothes.

As always, he wanted me to get a shingles shot. I finally said OK, after he told me he probably has one case a month in Española, and most of the people hadn’t had chicken pox.

Then came the surprise. After promoting the importance of the vaccine, he said Medicare wouldn’t cover it. I hope my supplemental insurance will.

It reminded me again that the reasons people over 65 are more vulnerable to disease is many types of medical care aren’t available to them. The shingles vaccination cost $275, and a second is required. That’s a lot of money to pay out of a social security check.

Congress is particularly short-sighted, and as we’ve seen this year, has no idea of what constitutes the public good.

There are certain tests that should be required, and be free, for older people like refractions, which test for bad vision, and hearing loss. This isn’t simply for them. No one wants someone driving a car who has problems seeing or hearing.

It’s too soon to know if there’s a spike in positive tests for Coronavirus from the holiday. Most things were closed or on slow schedules until today. I calculate the total new cases for the past two weeks is 29, down from 40 on July 1.

Sources:
Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated July 6.

Thursday, July 02, 2020

Journal of a Plague Year, Wednesday, July 1

We reached a milestone today: Rio Arriba County now has had more than a 100 cases of Coronavirus reported in the county, 101 to be exact. By my calculation, we’ve had 40 reported in the past two weeks.

It no longer matters where or why. All that matters is how one avoids getting infected.

The medical establishment is coming out of hibernation. Last week Eye Associates called to reschedule my examination. Of course, I had seen someone else a couple weeks earlier.

Yesterday, I got blood work done for my annual physical, which now is planned for next week. The receptionist told me they never closed, but did most of their work by telephone. They’re only now resuming routine appointments.

The ritual was the same yesterday and at the ophthalmologist’s office. The door is locked. At the eye doctor’s the office manager came out; at the physician’s, someone talked to me through a window. In both cases they asked me the standard screening questions.

Yesterday, smoke filled the upper atmosphere, and I was having breathing problems. I probably had half the symptoms I was asked about: shortness of breath, fatigue, headaches, runny nose. I answered each my either saying no, or only because of the air.

Then we got to the question no one can answer truthfully: have you had contact with anyone who’s had the virus. I went to the grocery store and post office on Monday. All I could say was, "not that I know of."

The women weren’t particularly concerned, because their next step was to use an external thermometer on me. I apparently had a slightly elevated temperature in Santa Fé, but again she assumed it wasn’t a problem.

We were participating in a ritual whose purpose was mutual reassurance. My physical demeanor probably was more important. The woman who worked for a physician probably had developed an acute awareness of how people stand and talk when they are sick. That unconscious knowledge was the most important screening mechanism.

I later asked someone in the doctor’s office what she did if someone was sick. She said, she didn’t let him or her in.

I rephrased the question. What did you, meaning a doctor’s office, do when someone showed up who was sick, but probably not from Coronavirus? That is, after all, one reason we ask to see a doctor. To that she said, it depended.

The screening has put some changes in medical practice in dramatic relief. Doctors don’t treat immediate illnesses; their schedules are too filled to get a time slot. One is expected to go to an urgent care center or emergency room. We hear from insurance companies what that costs them, and then all of us in our increased premiums.

The change, in part, can be attributed to the development of antibiotics that control the spread of infectious diseases. When people lived longer, because they no longer died in an epidemic, new medical problems arose like heart attacks and cancer. Doctors now administer tests for those problems, and most of their time is working with people who are not sick, but who have serious medical conditions. (Notice how we’ve changed the language to match the situation.)

Similarly, we’ve been discovering hospitals cut back their capacity after they no longer needed beds for people who were sick. Instead, they were supported by elective surgeries that required little or no hospital time.

One doesn’t want to go back to the time when cholera, yellow fever, or polio spread through communities killing many, including doctors.

But, with the passing of the threat of infectious diseases, the institutions we used to rely on - the doctors and hospitals - changed their functions, and have been having to relearn their skills as we watch them.

Perhaps more important, we’ve shed our fears. When I was a child, polio was rampant in my hometown. After a boy in the neighborhood died, I was no longer allowed to play with a friend. Her mother was a nurse and wouldn’t let her outside.

No one knew then polio was a virus that spread through contaminated water, although, I think, people had a healthy suspicion of certain lakes. As a result, people like my friend’s mother took precautions.

We’ve forgotten how to handle fear. As a consequence, some overreact, like the ones who bought up all the cleaning supplies during the first weeks when the pandemic was only in Washington and New York states. Others treat fear with bravado and refuse to surrender to masks and other precautions,because they never had to when they were children.

Sources:
Wikipedia. "2020 Coronavirus Pandemic in New Mexico." Updated 1 July 2020.