To be a bit more upbeat than my last post… What will happen is the transmission rates of all communicable diseases will drop. We’ll have less colds, less flus. We’ve put the brakes on the spread of germs in general — at least until we go back to normal, and they go back to normal.

• The SARS-2 (COVID) virus will burn out.

SARS-2 has demonstrated its ability to linger in populations, so even if the SFBA manages to rid itself of SARS-2, carriers entering the area will restart the local spread.

• There will be effective prophylaxis available.

Vaccines take much, much longer than that to develop, so we’re not going to see one that quickly. If we had a vaccine to SARS-1, there’d be a slim chance that it’d also immunize against SARS-2, but we’re out of luck there.

• Treatment will be substantially better.

Same as above. Treatments tailored specifically to a disease take time to develop and improve. The potential exceptions would be already existing SARS, coronavirus-general, or broad-spectrum antivirals. But if any of those showed significant efficacy against SARS-2, we’d already know about it. So we’re not buying revolutionary improvements in treatment, but incremental ones.

• The shelter-in-place order will be honored.

People are going to get fed up as the days, then weeks, drag by, and even today I saw kids practicing soccer on the Eastshore field.

Don’t get me wrong — there are good odds that a vaccine will be developed or that better treatments will arrive, and combining those with natural resistance means there’s a very good chance that the disease will be stopped. But the new treatments and prophylaxis will take longer than three weeks to happen. And sadly, that means this disease is unlikely to be stopped before it sweeps through our population, and a three-week shelter-in-place won’t change that.

Having learned from my experience on Monday, I didn’t take my bike out shopping as usual, despite it being 48°F / 9°C (so probably warmer) and midday instead of evening. Then, in due course, ting-ting-ting-ting on my car’s body. I guess I need to save my biking in the rain for warmer parts of the year, even though it’s not at present cold per se.

I biked home from work this day, as usual.
The bicycle has been my preferred mode of
personal transportation almost all my life.
It was raining.
I learned to bike in Portland.
I’m used to biking in the rain.
It was raining hard.
I was drenched. But one quickly learns that
once soaked, you can’t get any more wet.
The air was cool. High 40’s, I think.
That’s a good temperature to bike in. Not
uncomfortably cold, but cold enough to
pull your body heat away without sweating.
The rain was cold.
I’m from Portland. I can handle cold rain.
Suddenly, the rain stang!
What is this sorcery?
The rain beat a tattoo on my helmet.
Augh! Never mind the wet, this is sleet!
The weather forecast said nothing about sleet!
I have yet to enjoy being outdoors with sleet or hail.

Some really large tides occurred today and at the shore I saw the ocean coming to re-take some small slices of the real estate we had taken from it:

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I recently took a walk around the gardens in Oakland’s Lake Merrit Park, and found the bonsai garden there to be especially nice.

Which means you get to enjoy some photos!

Do you enjoy long, complicated analyses of city policy? Here’s an excellent one on San Francisco’s distress from TechCrunch.

I just got home from biking to the Berkeley Central Library, to find the police and fire department there, the library closed off. The BFD was non-urgently sweeping water out the doors, while the evacuated library building had its fire alarm still going. So, it looks like there was a fire there, extinguished by the sprinklers. It didn’t look like there were any injuries, but I worry about the damage to the books, hopefully it won’t be significant.