jsburbidge | Entries tagged with pandemic

It is worth noting that the decisions to drop vaccination requirements and mask mandates are, insofar as they are data-driven at all, are based, not on an evaluation of how many people may contract COVID-19, but on an evaluation of how many people will end up in hospital, and, in particular, in ICUs.

Put more bluntly, the government doesn't care about people getting sick, they care about hospital overcrowding. (This has been visible and explicit since the start of the pandemic.) They also badly want the whole thing to be "over" by the time of the June election.

It is also important to recognize that the primary benefit of masks - except at the high end, which involves respirators proper - is (1) at a population level and (2) that they protect other people from the mask-wearer more than vice-versa. So saying that people can still choose to wear masks misses the point; the people who choose not to wear masks are likely to skew less cautious in other ways and therefore as higher risk.

Masking is a low-cost high-benefit practice if generally adopted in public places. Dropping a general mask mandate does not just verge on the irresponsible but goes well into that territory.

At an individual level the obvious strategy to take is to limit going to places where there is a significant number of Individuals one does not know and to wear a respirator, not just a cloth mask, when inside public places. Shopping online is still a better option in most cases; if one chooses to shop in brick and mortar locations, relatively smaller locations with better ventilation are better choices. Voting against the government in June is also a good idea - assuming that the opposition parties are willing to back continued restrictions. (I hold no real hope of this.)

1) On checking my spam folder, I see that I have received two invitations to join the Illuminati, one in Italian.

If the AISB is going to contact anyone it will not be by cleartext e-mails. They will use proper tradecraft.

2) It is remarkable just how awful protesters' historical education is. The position of the Prime Minister has always, since the time of Walpole, been determined by the House of Commons. The Crown has no power to dismiss the PM and only very limited powers to prorogue Parliament (essentially, when the PM has lost the confidence of the house, or at the request of the PM). This was firmly established in 1649 and 1688, with tweaks in the 18th Century as the office of the Prime Minister developed.

3) I am getting tired of public health officials who are reported in the media as talking about masks and vaccines as though they were purely about individual risk rather than looking at the impact in populations of general adoption/dropping of particular activities. A 30 year old with two doses of vaccine who goes out without a mask is at a low risk of contracting symptomatic Covid and at very low risk of serious disease. But if 30-year olds in general do that, there will be a calculable increase in the spread of COVID to other parts of the population. Wearing a mask or being vaccinated is not principally about personal risk, in many cases; it is about being a responsible member of the body politic and of society.

4) Seen in real code, names slightly adjusted:

class XKey

{

public:

XKey(const int inIdA, const int inIdB, const std::string& inName):

m_idA(inIdA), m_idB(inIdB), m_name(inName)

{ }

bool operator<(const XKey& inOther) const

{

return (m_idA < other.m_IdA) &&

(m_idB < other.m_idB) &&

(m_name < other.m_name);

}

private:

const int m_idA;

const int m_idB;

const std::string m_name;

};

Surprising things will happen when you try to use a map with that as a key.

Don't do this.

This surely does not need saying: the provincial plan for removing Covid restrictions is both insane and driven by politics. It is no coincidence that on this fanciful roadmap of the Ontario PCs everyone becomes entirely free to do as they will a couple of months before the provincial election.

In what fit of absence of mind they concluded that Covid would be so completely gone in another six months that they can plan on pulling back vaccine mandates, it is hard to imagine. The opening stages - allowing more density in places with vaccine mandates - is not prudent, but it is somewhat understandible. To assume that magically Covid will go away by March is pure wishful thinking. (Even if by some miracle Ontario could wrestle it to the ground, there would still be extensive reservoirs elsewhere.)

This is the extreme form of the government's complete failure to take the one critical step that is necessary: to say, clearly, that there will be no "return", no ability to resume the life of 2019. Even if the government were to drop its vaccine mandates entirely, all the employers and other fora will continue to worry about insurance and liability and are unlikely to drop their restrictions. Many people will, rationally, continue to avoid places where they are crowded together; although evidence from other jurisdictions suggests that fewer people are rational than one might hope. Masks will continue to be an important public health tool. Many people will continue to work from home, affecting the life in urban centres.

The one genuinely bright spot on the horizon is the (likely) very near approval of Covid vaccines for children and the (equally likely) of such vaccines being made mandatory (as many other vaccines are) for attendance at school.

It is, frankly, the task of the government, the parens patriae, to tell everyone the truth: life has changed, irreversibly (like one of those catastrophe theory transitions on a folded manifold).

The surprising thing, on first glance, is not that the province is back in (semi-)lockdown, but that it took so much time to get here, and that so many feathers were unnecessarily ruffled along the way.

I will bypass (for the moment) the issues around vaccine strategy, or the curious absence of strong measures targetted at warehouses, meat-packing plants, and other large areas of potential and actual spread, and pick up another thread from the tapestry.

Why did this come as a surprise?

The papers were filled with complaints from restauranteurs who were, essentially, pulled into a false position by the government encouraging them to open patios a week or two before shutting them down. The government went from talking about allowing barbers to open to imposing a new grey zone on all of Ontario within about 48 hours. The follow-up of a stay-at-home order has taken less than a week.

But none of this was, in fact, sudden. The numbers have been speaking for weeks to anyone who can do any sort of extrapolation.

There is, in fact, a really straightforward, obvious, and more effective way of doing all this. It's to sit down with epidemiologists and work out a model where this sort of R1 factor generates that protective reaction as an immediate response, and then publish the schedule in the Ont. Regs. as actual law.

The rules might need tweaking occasionally as new evidence came to light (e.g. of specific activities being more or less risky). But essentially, they wouldn't suffer from the sort of foot-dragging we've just seen (which translates into lives) or whiplash-inducing reversals, which are bad politics and cost money to people (sometimes, to the government itself).

So why don't we see it? It's not just Ontario; the same sort of see-sawing back and forth is visible elsewhere.

Part of it, no doubt, is classic politics, in the sense of being the product of reacting to varying pressures and trying to find compromise. But I think that far more of it is leaders trying to preserve the illusion, to themselves as much as to anyone else, that they have power. By reserving decisions, by making the changes on rules those of sudden emergency orders-in-council, it draws a veil over the fact that their leeway for decision is very small.

That doesn't mean that they don't have power. The continuing refusal of the provincial government to enact paid sick leave has shortened many peoples' lives. (It had shortened lives before the pandemic as well, but less visibly.) It is always possible to affect the course of events by doing a bad job, or an exceptionally good one. But within the way this has been framed, even though they may delay or fudge, the final decisions are being driven by the virus, and, particularly, by the capacity of the hospitals. (The new status, I am convinced, derives not from the number of people who are ill, but by the ICUs approaching capacity.)

This morning being the first day of the "stay at home" regime in Ontario, I noted that that at 6:45 this morning the radio was reporting worse than usual congestion in the 401.

This is representative of why and how thus government's response to rising cases is missing its target. The highways are not full of people at 6:45 in the morning gallivanting about or indeed going anywhere entirely voluntarily; they are full of people going to work early because they have to.

All of which implies that workplaces, or at least many workplaces, have not been much affected by the rules -- which indeed mainly restrict some retail workplaces' hours and make little difference to any other places of work. Certainly the highways were not emptied of commuters now working from home or working more sparsely.

Although it's hard to tell, as public numbers are not as detailed as one would like, and there's some doubt as to whether even the government has clear information due to the weakness of their tracking and testing - it looks as though a major driver of Covid transmission is workplace exposure. Certainly the distribution of cases suggests that. Rates are highest in the areas more likely to house the poor who are likely to have worse and more crowded work conditions; this is only exacerbated by the relative density of their living conditions.

So a state of emergency and a stay at home "order" (more like a suggestion) already looks as though it will have little impact. Regulations strictly constraining risky conditions in all workplaces with vigilant enforcement, and not on an emergency basis (two to four weeks) but on an extended basis (the next six months or so) would be more to the point than what we have.

When I started working, back in the mid-1980s, it was in a building dating from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The general arrangement was that there were offices surrounding the outside with windows, a smaller block of offices towards the inside, and a space between with a mix of carrels (junior editors, many of whom would expect to get an office someday with enough seniority) and open space with no barriers between desks (secretarial pool).

The building I was working in recently until the workplace was overtaken by work from home has no real offices on the floor at all, aside from some rooms in which visitors from other locations could work. There is a row of rooms against the central core of the building (surrounding the elevator block) but they are meeting rooms, kitchenettes, washrooms, printer rooms, and the like. The only people who could expect, someday, to get an office would be those who rise to the level of VP.

When people talk about the lack of effect of the influenza pandemic of 1918 on the built workspace, they forget that the norm was offices, larger or smaller, brighter or darker, but still, offices, for a great many more people than now occupy them. (I had an office from 1988 to 1998, more or less; now the director to whom I report has no office and the three of us who are associate directors have no offices, though sometimes larger carrels.) It was also the period when the telephone, which was being introduced, allowed a massive change in the way business was done, which swamped any effect of post-pandemic reactions.

A built structure to accomodate Covid-19 looks a lot like an older office building: partitions between workers, access to outside air, minimization of open spaces.

Once there is an effective vaccine, there will be less pressure to provide barriers and distance, but the pressure for more closed workspaces won't just go away. It will be years, even barring there being another intervening epidemic (remember, we're still waiting for the next global flu pandemic), before people once again feel at ease in full open offices.

It was shooting fish in a barrel to point out that Doug Ford's closing of strip clubs and shutting bars at 11 would have a minimal effect on the growth of coronavirus cases. There are, however, a couple of interesting things to say about it.

First, it's classic morality theatre, blaming the ills of the age on a limited number of bad actors. There are some advantages to this, usually: most people hearing it are not only not called on to do anything difficult but can actually get warm fuzzy feelings that they are not the ones who are at fault. This is much more politically palatable than telling people that the moderate-sized social gatherings they're having, or chained smaller ones, need to be curtailed.

Secondly, it paves the way for stricter measures by allowing leaders to say: "See, we did try less objectionable measures, but they didn't work; now everybody has to suffer a little." Pity the time wasted performing this gambit translates into more sick people.

Like the comments by several Canadian political figures I heard last week, Trudeau among them, that by hunkering down and avoiding social gatherings over Thanksgiving they may get a reprieve at Christmas, this shows limited thought. There's no reasonable way in which the conditions at Christmas (Dec 25) will be in any way better than those at Canadian Thanksgiving (or Hallowe'en, Oct 31, not that far off and also sure to be shut down, to invoke an old programmers' joke in passing). Likewise, the need to impose even more stringent restrictions because of slow reactions is more costly in every way, including politically, in the long run, than acting early and firmly but with less draconian measures.

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping for groceries in my local Loblaws, which is formally quite serious about COVID-19 protocols - no personal shopping bags, aisles marked one way, disinfectant at the door, etc. - and I noticed something emblematic of what I see far more generally around me. The customers were, in general, following most of the rules (except being rather poor at one-way lane observation), but I passed a cluster of employees - one restocking, two involved in filling online orders - who were interacting at far less than a two-metre distance. It would have been fair to call them a clump.

I see this more generally - co-workers standing or sitting together as though there were no pandemic to be worried about. That one stuck in my mind as particularly egregious (especially as they were blocking the aisle).

It seems to be a specific case of our primate brains kicking in with a basic rule that "friends won't hurt you, strangers might". We're built to let down our guard around people whom we see as being part of our immediate tribe.

The rule is reversed in the case of a pathogen like the SARS-Cov2 virus. Leaving aside venues like barbers, nail salons, dentists, tattoo parlours, and crowded bars, you're less likely to get the disease from a stranger - typically, short exposure, more of a distance, unlikely to be repeated, at more than arm's length - than you are from someone you know.

(That isn't no risk, just less risk: "community transmission" is how the virus jumps between social groups.)

Unless you know that co-workers have just had negative tests for COVID-19, you should actually be more cautious about them rather than less so, including procedures such as wiping down shared tools and assigning one person to tasks where two might have been assigned jointly in the past

The same goes for friends. Even if you have a "closed" social circle, almost everyone in such a circle will have some potential sources of outside exposure - work, travel, shopping. (A few exceptions do exist. My 86-year-old mother just spent over 100 days with no face-to-face contact with anyone but my father.) If you live in the same place, you're basically by definition in the same boat, but in an "enlarged" social circle, where two or more households are involved, you still need to be cautious: unless you meet only for barbecues, you're probably interacting (a) inside, (b) for more than 15 minutes, and (c) in reasonably close proximity.

Humans are malleable. We can learn to behave differently from how we did in the past. It's time to start overlaying the old instinctive reaction with learned revisions.

Consider, if you will, five areas: airlines, restaurants, petroleum, commercial real estate, and teiephone companies. For each of them the majority of the news and opinion coverage officially and implicitly assumes relative conrinuity with some changes, but there are reasons for doubting it for all of those domains.

First: there has been much immediate coverage of the airlines' failure to refund money for cancelled flights, providing offers of flight vouchers instead. (Governments are so far backing the airlines rather than the consumers, because they want a functioning airline industry.) There is also some coverage of the reduced density which will be part of airline travel no rms for the next year or more. There is little recognition that the industry is in for a fundamental shakeup.

The reason that airlines are not returning money where they can avoid it (contractual terms) is that they do not have the money, and are currently bleeding red ink like blood; but those same terms require them to offer credit for the future rather than simply walking away from the contracts. (Even then, they're vulnerable to clawbacks from credit card companies if they, and not the passenger, initiated the cancellation.) But pushing all that obligation into the future is not good for them either, as it means that on returning to fuller operation their revenues will be impacted by loads of customers flying on the vouchers. And they won't have as many customers - between less density, individuals who decide that flying is now too risky, and businesses which are more comfortable now with meetings over WebEx relative to face to face, passenger numbers are going to be down. The price of flying will also go up, but it is unlikely to make up the difference.

They have been, at present and broadly, refusing bailouts to retain independence. Some, at least, will have no choice, and governments who in some sense need a passenger airline system, will probably provide assistance - but it will have to be ongoing, and (outside, perhaps, the US, which has an allergy to this sort of thing) probably will involve governments taking over some measure of direct control.

Secondly: there's a steady drip of news stories about individual restaurants closing, and the odd story of one which has made a success of a delivery/pickup business.

Cities are encouraging reopenings with patios and widely spread tables, but a typical restaurant runs on narrow margins and part of that has been packed Thursday and Friday evenings, or midweek lunches for the business district. (A few very high-end restaurants work with exclusivity and high prices instead; in principle, that will continue to work.) Some, even a significant cluster, of restaurants will probably make a successful transition to a model where pick up/delivery plus off-licence sales makes up for fewer dine-in customers; the premium for dining at a restaurant will go up. But that sector us going to look very different in a short while in both numbers and what are s offered.

Thirdly: demand for petroleum is down, and there were already intrinsic pressures driving towards a collapse of the petroleum industry. There are indications that the stresses of the pandemic may push it across that threshold. If that happens, a lot of other dominoes will fall as a massive amount of capital value evaporates very quickly, including financial institutions and governments which have become too entangled in their petroleum-extracting corporate citizens.

Fourth: you don't have to assume that everybody will continue to work from home to anticipate a collapse in commercial real estate demand in the downtown cores. Even a drop in the number of people working on-site on a daily basis will shrink the footprint of larger lessors, and the idea that there will be a flood of smaller ones to make up the gap seems to me to assume that the desirability of being physically downtown will be much higher than it really will.

My previous employer had a pilot project well before the pandemic aimed at pushing its technical employees into a model where they would have notebooks and lockers and no dedicated desk space on-site and would have to work off-site a couple of days a week; the rhetoric was about increasing flexibility but the real aim was to reduce the real estate footprint. And prudent employers who have had the experience of transitioning a workforce to off-site work may very well require workers to work from home a day or so every couple of week just to ensure continued Disaster Recovery capability.

If many employees don't want to take transit and live in the suburbs, that may result in more, smaller-footprint, satellite sites where suburban workers can be "on-site" with a local commute for more of them. This may take a while as the ability to move commuters around in any directionvand not just from suburbs to the centre and back, gets put in place. It's not much good putting an office in for the block of your employees who live in Oakville if most of the rest live in Richmond Hill.

All this may have some counterbalance in the need to lower the density of workspaces - fewer employees may be in the office, but there will be bigger air gaps between them. However, my guess is that this won't be enough to make up for a centrifugal movement of workers out of the centre.

A smaller number of downtown workers means a smaller market for goods and services, and many people are developing patterns of ordering things online that they used to shop for in person. So commercial retail real estate will also be affected.

So will the tax bases of cities, already stressed with the need to provide more services.

This will be a slow-motion, gradual change, like the proverbial frog in heating water.

Fifth, and slightly different, consider major phone companies, which happen to be the major internet providers. They're doing relatively well out of the pandemic, but the extreme reliance it has revealed that everyone has on internet access now is already calling for internet access to be a "right". The Ontario government has just announced funds for subsidizing building out rural internet access.

It is not unlikely that internet access will be regulated -- federally, telecommunications being a federal responsibility - in much the same way that POTS was when I was young: an enforced low flat rate for access at least at certain times (say, from 9 to 6), but with supports for it being universal (rural areas, poverty, etc.), with cross-subsidization from other sources. (Telcos stop being growth-oriented companies and go back to a regular-dividend-stream model that they used to have.)

On top of that, there are obvious public-sector issues in healthcare, long-term care, policing, transit, and social work which have been popping up like gophers.

Locally, we don't see a lot of this yet for political reasons. The Ontario PCs, although they get reasonable grades for initial action to shut things down - Doug Ford gets credit for empathic reactions when concrete examples of certain sorts of difficulties are presented to him - has largely squandered the breathing space they got by shutting things down. Ideologically, they have no appetite for sustained changes in government involvement in the economy, or for raising taxes to provide the revenue stream to support a more activist role, and deep down they're still at a Keystone Kops level of competency for actually getting things done. They have put their problems on hold but not actually solved them. The federal Liberals have a minority government, limited jurisdictional powers in many of the areas under mist stress (except airlines and telecommunications) and a recent track record of promising much and delivering little, slowly. But that doesn't mean that change is not going to happen.

Governments have already discovered that where they had a policy of "flattening the curve" for the pandemic, the population has generally not followed them. A minority don't seem to care and are possibly the core of the reason that cases of Covid-19 stubbornly refuse to drop below a certain level (plus, probably, not shutting down enough activity); the majority, though, missed the message about getting Covid-19 in a spread-out and manageable fashion and take the shutdown as "not getting Covid-19 at all", particularly themselves, and don't want to go out and restart the economy if it means risk to themselves. And with that level of pushback, governments are scrambling to respond and frequently making things up on the fly.

These are specific changes, even if, all together, they amount to an economic upheaval. The question of systemic change is more obscure. Certainly one of the secondary effects of the pandemic has been to show more of the implicit inequities generated by class, racial, and economic distinctions, and government responses, especially in the USA, have tended to show more of the iron fist than the velvet glove, and we're seeing responses to that at a relatively broad level. But whether the current set of disruptions are enough to push enough people off their pre-existent local maxima into a place where there is a gut realization that the alternatives to systemic change are all worse - that's another question.

I'm dead certain that, economically, the landscape will look very different two years or so from now. I am not sure, in general (aside from the US where the election is guaranteed to deliver change no matter what happens), whether we will see significantly different social and political landscapes.

I have seen this attributed to Augustine[1], but verified it only in Liguori: "Nothing is more certain than death, but nothing is more uncertain than the hour of death".

I've seen many, many recriminations recently over the timings of various governments' decisions to take steps regarding the Covid-19 outbreak. I've seen fewer recriminations over poorly-executed "pandemic preparedness", such as the Ontario government investing in protective equipment after the SARS scare but failing to invest in maintenance.

I've seen almost nothing about what is, from a rational point of view, the most culpable failure of all: the systemic failure to govern for a world where pandemics - and other medical disasters - exist.

Although it was poor policy, politics interfering with what expert advice said to do, the failure of governments to gear up at the earliest possible time is understandable. Unlike classic "medicine", which runs on evidence, double-blind tests, and the like, epidemiology and public health is about probabilities and risk assessment. And although standard risk rules say that you should spend a hundred million dollars to forestall a crisis which will cost you ten billion dollars if the probability of the crisis is over 1%, it's difficult to persuade a politician to do something expensive - like the imposition of moderate restrictions on economic activity - to avoid later extensive damage to health and economic outcomes if the probabilities are low.

But the probability of an eventual pandemic is unity. Not even approaching unity, unity. There are no questions of probability: the only question is when, not if. And it is far more serious that the health care system has been not only allowed to bump along at a level which can be swamped by an slightly heavy flu season, but has actually been gradually bled of resources. Beds in hospitals were consistently not ramped up to match population growth and changing age profiles. Staffing levels have been reduced to minimize costs.

And this didn't just mean that hospitals were poorly equipped to handle a pandemic; they were barely equipped to handle anything more than an average load. There were continual reports of emergency rooms with patients stashed in hallways, ambulances which had to be rerouted because the closest emergency room was at capacity, and overstressed staff in other wards because staffing levels had been cut in the name of efficiency.

(For all of Doug Ford's promises to end "hallway healthcare", the changes they were putting in place were designed to reduce the costs of the system, not to add large numbers of beds and staff in a sustainable way. And the Liberals before them were little better.)

There are interim benefits to running a system which is generally pandemic-ready, even if we discount the costs of a rushed ramp-up when a pandemic dies arrive: general care is better.

The same applies, doubled, redoubled, and in spades to seniors' residences, with the additional factor that because many if not most are private the allocation of resources is made worse by the extraction of profits. (Much of the growth rate locally, at least, has been in seniors' residences which, if better designed with an eventual pandemic in mind, would have a much lower transmission rate.)

This is not a public policy decision made juggling probabilities and timing. This is a straightforward decision regarding inevitable threats on a large scale to the population. And even economically, the costs of inaction outweigh the benefits: an epidemiologically robust health-care system would require far less in the way of suppression of economic activity to reduce growth rates to a level the system will handle, and would be in a position to protect front-line staff, without mad panic buying of supplies of protective equipment and ventilators.

It is this failure to respond to an inevitable need simply because the response is expensive and possibly mildly disruptive in transition (higher taxes, different allocation of resources) which displays the real failure of governments here, and unlike the failures around communications and timing which are heavily affected by personalities this failure is long-term and systemic. It is here that a real reassessment of how our society operates has to begin.

[1] By Donald Howard, in his biography of Chaucer, but with no citation given. Liguori quotes it in the context of a different Augustinian saying: "All other goods and evils are uncertain; death only is certain." Either way, it has a history.

I noted that no place I had been in had implemented one-way aisles. That is now no longer true; the Loblaws I was shopping in this afternoon had put down arrows in tape on the floors of the aisles. Except... nobody, as far as I could see, was paying them any attention. Or not enough to make the necessary number of people going in the way indicated significantly larger than I would expect at random.

Working From Home

This has brought back why I generally dislike working from home.

I did so from time to time back in the 1990s, and my experience then is being borne out now: I'm tireder at the end of the day and have less leisure. If I'm at the office the "work day" involves little breaks; at home I feel like I'm cheating during work hours if I'm not actually at work. Plus, as I work downtown, I usually have errands I can do which are just not available at home. (Nor, to be fair, would many of them be available at the office right now, except for food: the St. Lawrence Market is still open.)

The large banks have had plans for various disasters based on extensive work-from-home for years. That meant that I acquired, a few years ago, a notebook with reasonable capacity and a good-sized screen precisely to support that option, though I never used it for anything other than tests while I worked for TD. The model both there and at RBC is based on Citrix remote desktop/PC capability. In general, it works well, though sometimes glitches occur which require coordinating with tech support staff on site.

So it's not as big a contrast as it might be. I frequently spend days at the office where the only real contact I have is via WebEx meetings (some of our "team" is in London; there's a daily meeting, but it's by phone and shared screen in any case) and Skype (soon to be replaced by WebEx Groups, I understand) and Symphony. That's life in software development. (At TD, I sometimes had days with no conversations other than saying hello and goodbye; I feel a bit like the xkcd figure on self-isolation - "I've been studying for this all my life.")

Still, I was in the cadre of the last people on my floor to be going in to the office. This was because the default model of the banks was based on the idea of a primary site and a backup site - there really is a backup site for IT infrastructure and trading floors following general practice in the financial industry. (The TSX's primary site for servers is in Markham; the downtown location is actually a backup site. In the US some sectors have to have their backup site at least 500 miles from their primary site, a regulation left over from the days when nuclear war was seen as the primary threat.) These plans are not purely trying to protect their staff, but to stagger the impact of potential disruptions by avoiding all the workers at a given site being exposed at once. In our case the "backup site" was WFH, and staff was split between locations. So for a couple of weeks I was in the office group until policy changed to have everyone (in our reporting chain, at least going up to our VP) work from home. You now need special, exceptional permission to go into the office.

There were no risks at the office - it was echoingily empty, with nobody within thirty metres except for one other person who had been relocated from another floor and irritatingly placed at an empty desk relatively nearby. The only risks were taking transit to get there and back, and since transit vehicles were also broadly empty, the main concern there was to minimize touching surfaces. It is still true that reducing risk is reducing risk, and transit to a chair in the living room is safer than transit on the subway.

Two Metres

Social distancing rules repeat the mantra of separation by two metres. There are several wrinkles to this.

I've seen discussions about passing on the sidewalk, with the opinion being given that people should move off the sidewalk (if necessary - this doesn't apply to King and Bay) to provide adequate distance. This shows a suburban bias: there are many places in the city where the sidewalks are standard width and off-sidewalk means "in a traffic lane".

It's worth noting that this doesn't really translate the idea into a dynamic model. If you're passing someone at a fast walking pace, your concern should not just be distancing from that person's current location but from where they were before that; and both concerns should be less than if you're indoors, with no wind, moving slowly or not at all. Likewise, if you're on a sidewalk behind someone, the equivalent of two metres is probably about seven metres; you're occupying the space that person was occupying a few seconds ago.

Inside, I note that nowhere I shop has yet put in place the entirely sensible suggestion that aisles should be one-way only, obviating the need to pass in the aisles. The only place I shop that has wide enough spaces to pass while allowing six feet is the St. Lawrence Market. (There are also a lot of problematic customers in supermarkets who have obviously not internalised social distancing models; these have several implications while shopping, such as not spending a long time one in any one place browsing and not touching anything unless you really intend to buy it, although disposable bags are a help in the produce section.)

Shopping Once a Week

Speaking of shopping, there has been a surge in requests that people do grocery shopping once a week. This also displays a suburban bias, the assumption that you can buy a carload of groceries.

If you rely on transit, and especially if your household is more than one person, you shop for what you can carry - and that's less than a week's supply. (If you have a well-stocked pantry, you can buy less and eat into your reserves, but this is a long-term issue right now, not just hunkering down for a couple of weeks; sooner or later you need to replenish those supplies.) I make it a requirement for a grocery run every two or three days for two people if you're restricted to what you can carry. Perhaps less if you rely on frozen concentrated juice, otherwise drink only tap water, coffee, and tea, and bake instead of buying bread and have a strong back to carry dense but comparatively compact packages of flour (if you can find it). Again, the spotty reliability of finding what you want may require extra shopping. One store I went to several days ago was entirely out of any form of dried pulses; another on another day had a full supply.

Ordering online brings its own problems: different sources of potential contamination, timelines as the services are overloaded, substitutions, risks created for delivery services merely replacing those to shoppers. In many cases (Loblaws and Longo's, at least) I suspect purchases are sourced in-store rather than from warehouses; anything you get by delivery will have passed through more hands, and more recently, than what you buy in-store. If you are in a lower-risk group and take reasonable precautions, the trade-off is probably a wash. And, of course, many people without cars cannot afford the premium of paying for delivery.

Amusements

My personal list of to-read books is 466 books (thanks, LibraryThing), counting neither possible rereads nor poetic works in foreign languages (Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, the Attic tragedians); plus I am taking the opportunity to learn a couple of new programming languages with personal projects (D and Go: I'm writing an automated breviary based on the Sarum Breviary (available easily in translation at archive.org); I plan to write the main program in D and any supplementary utilities in Go). And I'm doing more baking. I have no major need of additional amusements. However, a few general suggestions:

The Metropolitan Opera is providing a free streamed opera every day (23 hours availability, evening to evening.
There is an National Emergency Library at archive.org. As far as I can tell it doesn't make any new works available, but provides more accessible indexing to a selected subset of their records.
There has never been a better time to catch up on the roman-fleuve. Although Dance To The Music of Time is under copyright it is available for purchase online; Alms For Oblivion is not even available online; however, Proust is available on Gutenberg. (I have not read Musil, so I can neither recommend nor warn about The Man Without Qualities.) For long novels which are not in that category, there's Ulysses, The Last Chronicle of Barset, House of Leaves, and The Alexandria Quartet. For other long works, I do recommend The Divine Comedy, Pound's Cantos, and, ultimately, Finnegans Wake.
For reading in a pandemic, there are Camus' La Peste, Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (like almost all of Defoe, a forged autobiography published anonymously, retailing experiences which Defoe was too young to have had), Willis' Doomsday Book, and Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust. And maybe Earth Abides.

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jsburbidge

April 2025

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Page Summary

Changing Mandates in Ontario
Various short observations
Yet Again
The Illusion of Choice
Traffic
Built Form and COVID-19
Morality Theatre (as Distinguished from Morality Plays)
Revising Ingrained Reactions
Auguries
Allocation of Responsibility
An Addendum
Scattered Notes

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Entries tagged with pandemic

Changing Mandates in Ontario

Various short observations

Yet Again

The Illusion of Choice

Traffic

Built Form and COVID-19

Morality Theatre (as Distinguished from Morality Plays)

Revising Ingrained Reactions

Auguries

Allocation of Responsibility

An Addendum

Scattered Notes