Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Sunday, April 19th, 2020

Pain

Woke up this morning to muscle aches in my thighs and arms. Clearly, I am not cut for physical labor. Planted some 50 Lily of the Valley and 25 Gladys bulbs yesterday and put out seeds for my kitchen garden (dill, cress and chives) so spent a few hours squatting. I also find I have a bruise in the palm of my hand form the shovel – argh.

However, this did not stop me from doing more of the same today given we actually were on time to pick up some 100 bulbs of Iris somebody had pulled out of their garden and announced to the Listserv as free for the taking. It looks like the voles have moved on after I repeatedly flooded their home with a mixture of water, castor oil and dish washing liquid. This makes me hopeful that the Iris I planted today will actually survive.

It is a shady spot under three trees. I have for the third year in a row now tried to seed new grass and it never survives more than the spring. Once summer has arrived and the trees have their canopy it dies. So, might just converted into a flower bed, starting with the Iris and then adding other bulbs which bloom in spring. I found some which, unlike Iris, vole apparently do not like just in case they have not moved on. Let’s see when they will arrive, seeing none of the herbs and flowers I had ordered three weeks ago have as yet made it and neither has the patio furniture cover, which really annoys me. I have however established that it is made when ordered and it is coming from Kentucky; maybe this is a non-essential business and haven’t even made it because of #stayhome orders, which would be okay, it would just have been nice if WorldMarket had told me so rather than claiming my order was in their warehouse and they were having delivery backlogs. Happy to see that the recues have taken and are in almost full bloom!

SDTV made by BCC students for students has made headline news on Friday. Very proud to be a parent of one of the contributors. EM does not contribute to every series though. Her segment is staying positive. The last one was on rainbows as a symbol of hope. The next one will be on the importance of staying active as a way to stay positive and will feature impressions form our daily walks. If you want to binge-watch the shows, you can do so on youtube.

I found a lovely story from Cape Town. While residents are in lock down the African Penguins are going for a stroll around Simonstown; very orderly.  They stay on the side walk and seem to be observing traffic rules when crossing the roads. The African Penguins are a highly endangered species, and the organization has called on people to adopt a penguin egg and help save the penguin species. We love them and never miss to visit Boulder beach for a picnic and a swim with the penguins when we are in Cape Town.

For those missing international travel there is now an opportunity to visit Egypt while #stayhome. 

FT reports a total of 2.34 million registered cases today. That is 140k more than yesterday, so the virus is still spreading. It appears that the USA and the UK are doing particularly badly in containing the spread and testing. Both countries were late to take action and both countries seem to be unable to get testing organized at the scale needed. This does not bode well, especially in combination with some States, like Florida and Texas, pushing towards reopening even though new infections in these States continue to be reported daily and testing continues to be a problem nationwide, with currently 150k conducted per day when scientists believe there need to be at least 500k if not 1 million test conducted a day for the country to safely reopen.

It has me terrified that there will be another spike; unknown and thus uncontrolled in reopening States. If residents, then leave those States and travel to States who have been far more cautious and hence might be infection free, like say New York once it reopens, they may inadvertently bring spread the virus across States again and the whole process we are seeing now will need to start over. I much prefer for this closure to last for as long as it takes and then slowly return to a semblance of normal, then living through six weeks or so of lock downs every few months. I am also pretty sure the economic consequences of repeated lock downs are likely worse then biting the bullet now.

Generally, news from the US has me baffled, if not angry as in the case with Florida beaches reopening this weekend. It appears that most of the funds meant for small businesses have gone towards the likes of Marriot and funds have now been depleted with 30 million small businesses unable to access much needed bridge capital to tie them over for a few months. Worst of all is the president of the United States is calling for protests.