Monthly Archives: March 2020
So Did I Have It?
Doing our part in the whole self-quarantine, stay at home meme, Jan and I headed out about 10:30 to the WalMart over at Victory Lakes for some survival supplies, I.e. pork rinds, coffee creamer, and two avocados. Hey, it was Jan’s list.
We weren’t the only ones risking life and lungs because the place was pretty busy. The paper aisle and the fresh egg cooler were still completely empty, with the canned veggies row also pretty stripped. But everything else looked pretty normal.
We had thought about getting started on the new shed today, but it started out cold, in the low 60’s all day, and then became cold and rainy. So maybe tomorrow when it’s supposed to be in the high 70’s and sunny.
We spent this afternoon streaming stuff on Curiosity Stream, a great source of very well-done documentaries. I mentioned CS a while back when it was a great deal at only $20.00 a year. But now it’s even better. A 1 year subscription is only $12.99.
Started by the guy that started the Discovery Channel, the shows covered a wide range of subjects, from how medieval castles were built, to dinosaurs, and outer space, and much, much more.
Today we watched a really good documentary on Pompeii, excavating and reconstructing new areas previously buried under the lava and pumice. And besides all the great video, one new fact came out.
It’s that the date of the eruption, always thought to the August 24, 79 A.D is almost certainly wrong. It seems that our dating of the eruption comes from only one source, the writings of Pliny the Younger. He witnessed the volcano from across the bay, but he didn’t actually relate the date to anyone until about 20 years later. And those writings no longer exist. So what we’ve got are translations of transcriptions, and transcriptions of translations.
The new date is two months later, on October 24th. The August date had been questioned before, due to indications of autumn fruits being stored and the remains of recent fires in heating braziers, I.e. the fall season.
But what nailed it was an inscription written in charcoal on a wall. The writing, which was buried in the pumice, gave an October date about 7 days before the eruption.
Really interesting. Check it out.
For dinner tonight we flipped down our Ninja Foodie Digital Air Fryer
that I got Jan for Christmas. It’s really great with our limited counter space, because though it’s a full size oven, it flips up out of the way when it’s not needed.
When Jan was up at Brandi’s, she did Chicken Breasts breaded with crushed Pork Rinds to keep it Keto. So we decided to try it with Chicken Tenders, the only raw chicken I could find at WalMart the other day.
We dipped the tenders in egg whites, also the only thing egg-wise I could find, and then shook them in a plastic bag with the crushed BBQ pork rinds, and put them in the grill at 400° for 25 minutes, turning after 10 minutes.
And they came out Delicious. Crispy, crunchy, and tender. Turns out the Pork Rinds make a really great breading.
And keeping with the Keto meme, Jan served it with Cauliflower Rice.
Never having had the Cauliflower Rice before, I was surprised that it was pretty tasty. But since I like cauliflower, the vegetable, I guess it’s not that surprising.
Finishing up, Jan is more and more convinced that I actually had the Corona Virus 3 weeks ago when I was sick. And not just because I was wet-sneezed on by that Asian kid in WalMart. But in hindsight, my symptoms matched up pretty well, especially since 80% of the cases are pretty mild.
I had the the Fever, the Dry Cough, the Headache, and the Fatigue. I had a little chest congestion, but the shortness of breath that I had was at least partially because the almost non-stop coughing made my chest so sore that it actually hurt to breathe.
I even laughingly mentioned it in the blog, but dismissed it because neither Jan, nor my co-workers came down with anything. But then I read this article today.
Dr. Paul Auwaerter, the Clinical Director for the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine [finds]:
If you have a COVID-19 patient in your household, your risk of developing the infection is about 10%….If you were casually exposed to the virus in the workplace (e.g., you were not locked up in conference room for six hours with someone who was infected [like a hospital]), your chance of infection is about 0.5%
According to Dr. Auwaerter, these transmission rates are very similar to the seasonal flu.
So Jan only had about 10% chance of catching it from me, and my co-workers only about a 0.5% chance.
Switching this around, Jan had a 90% chance of not catching it from me, and my co-workers a 99.5% chance of not catching it from me.
Pretty good odds to me.
If I ever have a chance to take the antibody test for the virus, I’ll check it out.
Thought For The Day:
I love Mankind – It’s Just A Lot Of The People I Can’t Stand.
k
Do You Know Anyone . . .
I’ll get right to the point.
I think this whole mess is going to be over a lot quicker than most people think, or expect. That’s because the numbers just don’t add up.
During the Great World H1N1 (Swine Flu) Pandemic of 2009, you remember that, don’t you, when the country shut down, and everyone hid out, the numbers were much, much worse.
Oh, you don’t. Neither do I. When you listen to the national news programs during that period, ‘H1N1, blah,blah, blah”. “And then in other news, the Cubs won today 5 to 2.”
W.H.O. declared H1N1 a World Pandemic in June 2009, By October over 1000 U.S. citizens were already dead. And by the time W.H.O. declared the pandemic over in August, 60+ million Americans had been infected, 270,000+ people had been hospitalized, and 12,469 people had died in the U.S. Worldwide, the CDC says around 500,000 people died during that time. Now this all took place in about six months.
I mentioned a few blogs ago, this website: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
It gives real time tracking of the virus. So now if we look at today’s stats, we’ve got almost 20,000 total cases in the U.S., with 263 deaths as of 10pm CDT tonight.
This gives us a mortality rate of about 1.3%, about 10 times the rate of the H1N1. Now the percentage seems so low as to almost be negligible, but the ‘10 times’ catches your eye.
But I think this rate is going to drop precipitously in the next few weeks, ironically, because the number of cases is going to skyrocket as more and more people are tested.
Remember, according to the experts, between 80% and 85% of people contract the virus and have little or no symptoms. But as some of these people started showing up in the testing, the number of infected will rise, maybe to even double or triple the present number.
But I don’t think the number of deaths will come anywhere close to tracking that rise. So the mortality rate will fall.
But the real question is, as this happens, making all these panic closings, etc. seem overblown, will anyone admit it and stop talking about this all lasting another six months?
We’ll see.
Finishing up, one of the online forums I frequent put out a call to its 35,000+ members, wanting to know if anyone personally knew of anyone who had contracted the Kung Flu. That’s not somebody’s 2nd cousin’s mailman, but they actually KNOW the person.
And in the last three days, not one of the 35,000 said they did.
How about you?
Do you actually know someone?
g
c
Thought For The Day:
“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into” – Jonathan Swift
k
