Life in the Age of Corona

A Daily Diary

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

Darkness

It is just 17:00 and already it is almost pitch dark outside. This makes me feel as if it is the middle of the night and I should be heading to bed. I am noticing an increasing sensitivity to light changes and a connection between these and my mood.

Overall though I feel we should not complain, it has been another gloriously sunny day mostly spend with my laptop though, except for my brief outing to the pool that is. The wind that had been howling yesterday has stopped, so practice in the park should not be too cold tonight. Only six more before we head of to Germany. For someone who has spend half of her life travelling I am rather nervous about the trip; strange how one can so feel out of ones’ comfort zone with something that was normal before.

Last night we spend making the third kind of Christmas cookies. What was initially one batch turned into two batches as EM found a way to salvage the dough turned rock hard. At the end of the process and about twenty trays later her feet and my back hurt. It feels like we now have enough of the ginger cookies to feed an army! Our kitchen, in fact the entire house smelled like Christmas.

I am glad I have my sense of smell, unlike people with Corona. Scientists are however beginning to understand why some people lose their sense of smell (and taste)

"Over the summer, however, researchers from universities in the U.S., U.K. and Germany, led by Harvard University, published a series of studies in animals that indicated the ACE-2 receptor, the key protein through which the coronavirus enters the body, isn’t present in olfactory sensory neurons. Their experiments involving mice showed it is more likely that the virus damages so-called sustentacular cells, the support cells in the nasal cavity that allow the smell-detecting neurons to function. When these support cells are infected, the body generates inflammation to try to isolate and fight off the virus. If support-cell damage is minimal, a patient typically recovers their sense of smell quickly. But if enough sustentacular cells are damaged, or if there is enough inflammation, the neurons can also be killed or altered in function, leading to long-term loss of smell and parosmia. This is a first step towards finding treatment for this phenomenon."

Cases continue to increase. The USA reported 178k new cases yesterday bringing the total tally to 12.8 million with global infections reaching 59.4 million. What is very cool is the ability to track cases by zip code. The four zip codes in which we reside and move have a 1% infection rate if cases are seen in relation to population. 20814 - 554 Cases, 20815 - 471 Cases, 20816 - 193 Cases, 20817 - 578 Cases.

These very low rates provide some level of comfort about our daily activities as it is very unlikely to randomly encounter someone with COVID at the supermarket for example. None the less, we shall continue to be cautious.