Plague update

[pyesetz]

Yep, there's still a plague going around.  People are continuing to die from it.  Let's check our charts once again:

Waterloo, Ontario
Italy

Well, it sure looks like a second wave for Italy, beginning around August 20 or so.  Here in Waterloo, things seem to have started getting worse on September 9th, although of course that's just a reflection of events that happened to people a week earlier.

Statistics for my township are no longer being published, it seems.  Per-town statistics are now provided, but not for my town because we've had less than six cases (total so far, out of 5,600 residents) so that info could be personally identifiable.  Over the summer, people had walked around my town without masks and talked to each other's faces like there was no disaster in progress.  For the largest town in the township, 67% larger than mine, there have been ten total COVID-19 cases.  Recently I visited a grocery store in that town; the people there seem to care more now about maintaining the 2-metre distance and the nose-to-chin coverage than previously, perhaps because the province is now recording over 300 new cases per day (previously they were happy when the number went below 200).

I dropped my car off yesterday at the auto mechanic's and am waiting for the call to go pick it up.  I came into some money recently and had thought I would buy a newer one.  But used-car prices are way up!  For $8,000 I could get a car that might not be any better than what I've got (which has over 250,000 km on it).  Last year I didn't fix the air conditioning because the cost was ¼ of what I had paid for the car — but now that repair price is only ⅛ of what a replacement car would cost.  Wifey and I had thought that we would buy a replacement car with working A/C and then go back to work.  But now that it’s fall and we don't need the A/C so much, let's just get the car fixed up a bit (replace leaking transmission pan, stuck fuel-tank release lever, wonky gear-shift lever) and go back to work with the one we have.  This is starting to seem like not such a good idea now that the second wave has started.  When we stopped working in March, there were only 5 cases per day in Waterloo Region.  Infection rates got back down to 5 over the summer, but yesterday there were 10 newly-confirmed sick people.

Meanwhile, CERB is ending on September 27th.  The Parliament will reconvene on September 23rd to announce the replacement policy, which will apparently require that people at least try to work in order to get those handouts.  So we'll have to see how next month goes.

Comments

[loganberrybunny]

Is it really a second wave, or just a resurgent first one that was temporarily suppressed over the summer? The latter is the general feeling in this country.

[pyesetz]

Is there really a difference?  I suppose you could call this "wave 1b" instead of "wave 2" if the first wave didn't seem to completely end before the next started.  Both Waterloo and Italy show curves that flatten out and then turn upward again.  (The chart for the UK shows less of a flat section, but I think it's still there — things got better in May, worse in September.)  If the pain is coming over you in waves, does it really matter whether you call it "wave 1b" or "wave 2" of the pain? 

This is still within the second SARS pandemic, which isn't expected to end until early 2022.  So this is the resurgent second wave of still-the-second pandemic, which was repressed over the summer.  Or something like that.  Just close the schools already.

[loganberrybunny]

Our glorious governments (all of them, even the non-Tory ones in Scotland, Wales and NI) seem to have decided that the way forward is to keep all the schools open* and close everything else. So a "no-fun semi-lockdown" is what we're about to get, I think. You can do your schoolwork, but that's all.

* Until enough staff are off sick that they can't run the schools anyway, but thinking that far ahead is way beyond our current idiot of a PM.