Haircut

I had to get some files from my office so I drove to Providence today for the first time in a couple of months. The deal is you need permission to go in, you have to wear a mask in the building, one person at a time on the elevator, yadda yadda. It didn't really matter, looking the sign-in sheet there were two other people in the building. Looking through the glass into other offices, I see dead plants and of course the floor was dark and generally depressing.

But, Rhode Island is in phase 2 which means barber shops are open so I went and got my first haircut in I dunno, three months. A sign on the door said you need an appointment but there weren't any other customers so they let me in. Bob had to cut my hair while I wore a mask but he worked around it. I tipped him five bucks figuring he needed it. I told him I wasn't sure he was still in business. He's pretty old so this could have been the signal to retire.

Anyway the reason I tell you all this is because here in southern New England we've pretty much wrestled the pandemic to the ground. Even as testing increases, daily incidence keeps falling, the hospitals are emptying out, and deaths are falling accordingly. Our states are easing restrictions gradually, and thoughtfully, and people are getting with the program. Everybody wears masks in indoor public spaces and keeps their distance. The stores enforce capacity limits. Bars are still closed but beaches never closed. Our political leadership took decisive if originally unpopular action, and we are now in a much better place.

You need to understand one of the basic ideas of epidemiology, which is nothing more complicated than multiplication, really. If you can get to a low prevalence, you can keep it that way. The chance that any person I encounter if infectious is very low. If I do get infected, they can trace the people I hsd contact with (I had to sign in and leave my phone number in the barber shop, and sign in to the office) and test them and isolate them if necessary. If I'm very unlikely to be infected, I'm unlikely to infect others, but I still wear the mask. We all do, because we want to keep it that way.

Now consider Florida, Arizona, South Carolina, Texas, Alabama. Also California although it's kind of a special case because it isn't one place, transmission is up in some places and down in others so I'll steer away from those complexities for now. They decided they didn't have anything to worry about, since their Dear Leader told them it was all going to magically go away. Now they have exploding prevalence, and that is just going to multiply. 1 + 1 is only two, but 2 X 1,000 is 2,000. And now you have far too many cases to possibly do contact tracing and isolation, and the people you encounter are much more likely to be infectious, and you're more likely to be infectious, and that just keeps growing until you take drastic action to squash it. Which wouldn't have been necessary if you hadn't been a stupid fuck up in the first place.

Like I say, reality bites.