ANOTHER CORONA FOR THE ROAD, PERHAPS? THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS

Maryland has been in a state of loosy-goosey lockdown from the COVID-19 novel coronavirus for over a month now. According to Governor Larry Hogan and the medical experts, we dodged a viral bomb. It was touch and go there for awhile, but we “flattened the curve”. Yes, a lot of people got killed or maimed by shrapnel, but most of us came through unscathed health wise. Economically, not so much.

My wife Inna and I have been keeping journals during our self-isolation and every morning at ten we go onto the WBAL website to get the latest Maryland coronavirus numbers. And with this being the first day of May, I decided to go back over the numbers for the last ten days of April, looking for any underlying patterns. The first thing that jumped out at me was: there was no method to the madness. Between April 20th and the 30th, we went from a high of 1,150 confirmed new cases on Friday April 24th, to a low of 509 on Monday the 20th. On the other eight days the number of newly infected people hovered in the 800 range.

My wife used to be a medical doctor in Russia and she kept saying, “There are more confirmed cases because we have been doing more testing. The increase is to be expected. It’s the deaths we need to pay attention to.”

Okay, so the death number on Monday the 20th was 516, up thirty from the previous day. The next day it doubled and 68 Marylanders died. Then it dropped back into the forties for a few days before jumping back and forth between the thirties and the seventies, like a deadly viral jumping bean.

On the last day of April we had 21,742 cases, an increase of 893 from the previous day, and the death count stood at 1,047, a loss of 62 more people. Sadly, we have never had more than two consecutive days when the numbers went down. So much for victory.

While all of these numbers can be very confusing, several conclusions can be drawn from all this depressing shit?

• The numbers are not going down.
• Governor Hogan said we aren’t re-opening the state until we test 500,000 people and have fourteen days of decreasing numbers in a row; which means, we aren’t going anywhere until the end of May at the earliest.

Inna and I have adopted the Chinese model and shop every two weeks.  Essentially, we now live on 14-day cycles.  Inna does all the shopping.  She says she needs to “protect her old geezer.” We set up a gym in the basement, and on nice days we ride our bikes on the back roads of the Eastern Shore. But other than that, we don’t come in contact with anyone.

The trails and parks around Annapolis are crazy crowded and are not, in my humble opinion, safe.  It’s impossible to keep the recommended six feet distance.  But people are dying to get outside — perhaps literally.  

My sense is that most folks are suffering from the little bit pregnant syndrome when it comes down to the self-isolation protocol.  They follow the rules about 90% of the day.  ‘Corse, it’s that other 10% that’ll get your ass. 

Absent a draconian lockdown like the Chinese implemented, I think we freedom-loving, tyranny-hating Muricans are incapable of staying away from each other for more than a couple of days at a time. I mean, we’ll steer clear of strangers, but not friends and family. It’s just “those” people who have the virus, right? Not us.

And the biggest kick in the ass about all this is the fact that shutting down the economy and trying to flatten the curve was all a bunch of bullshit; but not because it wasn’t the right thing to do or because it wouldn’t work. It just turns out that we are so spoiled and self-absorbed that we can’t do without church, or extended family, or a party, or shopping, or the beach, or especially getting a haircut. Which means that if this was Ebola, we’d all be dead.