A proper work day today, my first for ages. That feels pretty good. I also had my best first lesson with a student for a while. Let’s hope he sticks around after that. (Sometimes I’ve had what feels like a great initial lesson with someone, then they don’t come back. Other times my first lesson has felt like a shocker, and we’re still going six months or a year later. There’s basically no correlation.) Tomorrow I can look forward to more Serbian.
After my last lesson I gave my brother a call. My sister-in-law is still doing emergency foot procedures and now finds herself in the firing line. Fortunately where they live, the rate of cases is one of the lowest in the country. In the latest UK figures, more than 900 deaths were reported in one day. We’re seeing shocking numbers there now, and the death toll could easily surpass Italy and Spain.
Tonight I had a quick, see-if-you-like-it session with Gabi, who surprised me by popping up on the screen as a bloke. We’d only exchanged messages, no phone call, and I totally forgot that Gabi was one of those short-version either-or names. We’ll have our first proper lesson tomorrow. Four lessons scheduled for tomorrow – yippee! Last week Dad told me about a game show that appeared on their black-and-white Grundig when he was a boy. It’s very simple – the host asks questions, and the contestant is eliminated from the game as soon as he says ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Trying this game on my younger students has been a lot of fun.
I’m back to learning Serbian, now that I have a good book to study from. Every time I pick it up again, I’ve (at best) half-forgotten everything I’ve done previously. I’m getting more comfortable with the lower-frequency letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, and today I started on hand-written Cyrillic, in which some letters look very different from their printed counterparts.
I’m lucky to live in a city centre and still have so much green space – and a river – around me. We’ve had glorious weather these last few days, and at least I can get out for a quick walk or a bike ride in the sunshine without bumping into people.
Every Sunday and Monday, we see less awful figures from the US, UK and elsewhere, and suddenly everyone says we’re peaking or plateauing (that’s such an awkward word), we’ve turned the corner, we’re flattening the curve. And then Tuesday happens. It’s clear that the numbers from Sunday and Monday reflect cases and deaths reported at weekends, and this reporting is an admin task that sometimes only gets done on weekdays. Still, there is evidence that parts of the US, especially New York, might be nearing their peak.
Wisconsin is holding an in-person election today. That’s so fucked up it beggars belief. I mean, just how? They have far fewer polling stations than usual, so people will have to queue for even longer than they would normally. From the president down, the US is full of very powerful people who are happy for citizens to die as long as they get what they want. It makes me extremely angry.
Romania has sadly just recorded its first death among medical personnel, an ambulance driver from the disaster zone that is Suceava. To give you some idea how awful the situation in Suceava is, I’ve posted the latest chart of Romanian cases by county. The figure of 191 in the west is Timiș, where I am. The 697 is Bucharest – it’s hardly surprising that the capital would have a large number of cases. But the 1322 in the north-east is Suceava, where the main population centre has barely 100,000 people.
As for Romania as a whole, two weeks ago I sketched optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for where we might be today. We’ve followed the optimistic path almost exactly, so let’s celebrate! Umm, no. First, around 200 Romanians have died so far, probably more if people who die at home are n’t being counted. That is already tragic, and the numbers will only go up. Second, testing isn’t keeping up with the spread of the virus, so the number of cases is greatly underestimated, probably by a larger multiple than a fortnight ago. Third, my pessimistic scenario was almost apocalyptically awful. And finally, life isn’t snapping back to normal any time soon. This will be a long, hard slog.
I just got a message on my phone in Romanian, saying that Boris Johnson has been taken into intensive care. I don’t agree with his politics or his style or that he came from such a privileged background, but I sincerely hope he pulls through. (I’ve now just read that of those taken to intensive care for coronavirus so far in the UK, only half survived.)
Being half Kiwi, and having lived there for 13 years, I’m extremely proud of how New Zealand has handled this whole business. They had huge advantages of time and space, for sure, but other countries had similar advantages and squandered them.
It’s been another beautiful day here. Here’s the latest chart from Romania:
I’m writing this at my desk, watching the sunset out of my window which faces due west. It’s 8pm on a beautiful Sunday, and that’s only made the quietness and emptiness feel even weirder. Mostly empty antique trams are still clattering by, often crossing each other, but there is very little foot traffic, and any cars are pulled over by the visored, gloved policemen from cars 30433 and 30434. Most drivers are quickly waved on, but the woman in the red Dacia looks like she’s in some hot water.
I’m now doing eight trips up and down the stairs each day. Today I met a very old lady on my second trip down, and I slipped up. I was in a world of my own, forgetting all about physical distancing protocol. I’ve chatted to plenty of lovely older people since I moved to Romania, including several of my students’ grandparents, and I can’t get used to them being potentially dangerous. I managed to get out for a quick bike ride and it was very strange to see the children’s park, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with no children.
The view from the stairs of my block, 7½ floors upA kid-free kids’ park
I’ve been working my way through the second book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. Was Naples in the early sixties really like this? If so, I wonder what it’s like now. (I wanted to visit southern Italy this summer, but that will have to wait.) The acceptance and even praise (!) of domestic violence is quite shocking. Almost as hard to grasp is the normality and virtual expectation that a girl will be married at sixteen and pregnant at seventeen. Then there’s the conceit, the backstabbing, the constant game-playing, the pleasure people take from others’ misfortune, the hyper-sensitivity to every little thing anyone says or does. I’ve met several autistic people, and have some traits myself, but in this world people’s brains function in a diametrically opposite way from an autistic person’s. For me it would be an utterly terrifying place to live. These books are extremely character-driven rather than plot-driven, and I really appreciate the “who’s who” of the characters at the front of each volume.
Yesterday I talked about Benford’s law, which is coming into play during the coronavirus pandemic. Now I’ll talk about another useful rule for these scary times: the rule of 72. It’s a rule of thumb that tells you how long it takes for something (money, bacteria, coronavirus cases, basically anything) to double. Simply put, you divide 72 by the percentage increase per time period, and that tells you how many of those time periods it’ll take to double. For example, say you deposit a sum at the bank at an 8% annual interest rate (maybe you’re old enough to remember when you could do that!), then because 72/8 = 9, your money will double in approximately nine years if you just let it sit there. (The rule isn’t exact, but it’s close.) Turning to coronavirus, if the daily increase in cases is 12%, then cases will double in roughly six days. One nice thing about this rule is that 72 has lots of factors. At very high daily rates of increase, which we’ve seen at times in this pandemic in countries like Turkey, the rule does break down slightly, so if cases go up by 36% a day, it’ll take a little over two days before you have twice as many cases.
First thing tomorrow morning I’ll make my weekly trip to the supermarket. Back in 2000, this was the biggest supermarket in the city, but then came the malls and hypermarkets. I’ll be masked and gloved, as will the cashier, who is paid very little for her job but all of a sudden is putting her life on the line. Last week the cashier was struggling to press the keys with her gloves.
Some tentative good news, at last. Daily fatalities in Italy, though still shocking, are on a clear downward trend. Spain too seems to have peaked. France appears to be nearing the apex. Australia’s cases haven’t accelerated as, honestly, I expected them too. New Zealand, remarkably, still has only a single fatality. In Romania, it’s still too early to tell, but on Monday I would have expected the current death toll to be 250 or more; it currently stands at 151. I’ve noticed around the world that fewer deaths are reported at weekends and there is a catch-up early the next week, so I do expect that number to rise quickly.
I’m going to start tonight’s post with a simple game. If you can guess how many Romanian lei are in my bank account, I’ll give you all of it. (In reality I won’t. I can’t. But just imagine for a second.) Actually, to make it easier, you don’t have to guess the full amount, but just the first digit. Given that there is some money in there, i.e. it’s not zero, what digit (from 1 to 9) do you choose? Maybe you’ll choose 5, because it’s in the middle. Perhaps you’ll pick 7, your favourite number. It really doesn’t matter, because they’re all just as likely as each other, right?
Wrong. With absolutely no other knowledge, you should absolutely pick 1. Always. I can guarantee that around the world, there are currently more bank balances with 1 as their first digit than any other. There are quite a few 2s too, but certainly not as many as 1s. A little further behind are 3s, and so on. Comparatively few begin with an 8, and even fewer with a 9.
You see this pattern over and over again. Population sizes (or areas) of towns, cities, or whole countries, lengths of rivers, volumes of lakes, market caps of companies, speakers of languages, vote counts, and so on. Anything that can exhibit a large range of values will show a very similar distribution of leading digits, skewed heavily towards the lower digits. (Not everything works this way, for instance the ages or heights of the people you work with.)
There’s a name for this phenomenon—it’s called Benford’s law—and it has even been used in forensic accounting. People have completely fabricated figures and come unstuck because what they thought were random-looking numbers started with unnaturally many 7s, 8s and 9s. The coronavirus pandemic—where cases increase exponentially—is a perfect example of Benford’s law in action. Look at the case figures for countries or regions and you’ll see a definite bias towards lower initial digits. Heck, you can even see it on my chart below.
As I was writing all of that, I got a phone call from the elderly lady who lives with her husband on the sixth floor. It was a pleasure to talk to her. She was replying to the note I’d sent her, asking if they needed any help with food or other essentials. She said they have people staying from outside the city (breaking the lockdown rules, but hey). Her prediction for the end of lockdown—1st May—is unfortunately wishful thinking. She asked me what my religion was, because it affects what version of Easter I celebrate. I get that question quite often and I always say that I’m a Catholic.
My aunt called me earlier today. She seemed extremely concerned, as if Romania had 4300 coronavirus deaths and the UK 150, instead of the other way round. It’s never that easy talking to her, because she doesn’t really listen. Still, she was thinking about me, and I appreciated that. She also lives on her own, so I’d better call her next weekend.
The Romanian teacher from the university phoned me a little earlier. She’d been so busy with lessons, she said. Lucky bugger. She’d skimmed the first few pages of chapter one, and I got a slight inkling that she was unimpressed. I’ve been trying to write directly in Romanian, and I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of spontaneity that way. Maybe I should be writing my explanations, anecdotes, what have you, in English and then translating.
Dad is worried about me getting coronavirus. According to him, if my brother gets it, he’s guaranteed to spring back in no time, but if I get it, what with my history of pneumonia, I’ll be hooked up to a ventilator if I’m lucky. And I’m in Romania so I’d obviously be screwed. (As for Dad, he has risk factors out the wazoo. Or up the ying-yang, if you prefer.)
The list of Romania’s coronavirus deaths makes for sobering reading. Amongst today’s victims is a 27-year-old man from Sibiu county who died at home. At least here, the tallies are (for now) small enough that the deceased are listed individually, each one leaving behind friends and family, in some cases parents. In the UK, the latest daily figure of nearly 700 deaths just feels like a statistic, a data point.
No lessons at all today, so I made some headway with my book. I really need a check-up with the Romanian teacher before I plough on too much further. I got a frustrated text from one of my students, who said she is putting herself in danger by showing up to work at her Italian-headquartered (!) coffee machine company. The more privileged employees are able to work from home, but for some reason they still have to deliver machines to Guatemala and Mexico. That’s bloody stupid. “C’est la fucking vie,” she texted me.
Everywhere you look on the map, coronavirus is various levels of awful. Things continue to look absolutely terrible in the US, with outbreaks springing up seemingly all over the country amid frankly dangerous leadership. The UK saw 569 new deaths in the latest daily update, a similarly tragic figure to yesterday. Italy might finally be getting on top of their unbelievably dreadful situation, and hopefully Spain won’t be far behind, although their numbers today were shocking. Globally, confirmed cases are at one million, a meaningless number really, while deaths (a much more meaningful figure, sadly) have passed 50,000.
Heaven help Africa when it spreads there. I read today that the Central African Republic, a country I know next to nothing about, has three ventilators for the entire population, which is similar to that of New Zealand. (As for the CAR’s area, it is about the size of France.)
Of the 23 deaths announced today in Romania (so far), 16 were men, including a 34-year-old man who was hospitalised in Suceava. Just awful. The fatality rate from COVID-19 is something like twice as high in men as in women. Perhaps it’s due to all the comorbidities like hypertension and diabetes that are more prevalent in men. (Originally they thought it was to do with smoking – about half of Chinese men smoke but very few women do, but the same gender imbalance has been seen in Italy and the UK too, even though smoking rates are much more even in both those countries.)
This morning I read an article about Doc Martens on the 60th anniversary of their launch. I own two pairs, both of them bog-standard boots with eight pairs of eyelets. My cherry-red pair from the nineties made it to Timișoara, and in winter they go pretty much everywhere I do. My navy pair, which I bought in 2002 just before they shifted production from England to Asia (booo!), are sadly still in New Zealand. I’d never dream of buying a made-in-China pair. I really can’t stand brands, but for some reason DMs are an exception. They’ve always just been happiness to me. And they last. Best of all were women who wore DMs. They were that little bit (or sometimes a lot) out there. Now they’re probably all depressingly normal – I really have no idea.
What a muppet I was to present Romania’s coronavirus figures on three separate graphs. A real silly billy. So now I’ve got cases, recoveries and deaths, all on one graph. On the separate chart I had a deaths starting at 10, but at such low levels there is considerable volatility, so I’m OK with including deaths only from 25, as with cases and recoveries.
A few words about the chart. It’s a log (logarithmic) chart, which means numbers on the y-axis (vertical axis) don’t go up at equal intervals (100, 200, 300, and so on); they go up exponentially instead. You can see that the distance between 100 and 200 is identical to the distance between 500 and 1000, because you’re doubling in both cases. On a linear (normal) chart, exponential growth is harder to determine, because you bump along the bottom for a while before you quickly skyrocket, giving a J-shaped curve. On this chart, exponential growth would instead be represented by a straight line. If you start to see the line bend downwards, that’s good news because growth is then less than exponential, indicating that all the social distancing and hand washing is starting to make a difference.
A massive problem here is the accuracy of all the figures. If you aren’t testing, you’re massively underestimating the number of cases. What counts as a recovery isn’t obvious, and probably varies from one country or region to another. You’d think deaths from coronavirus would be fairly clear cut, but in Romania dozens of people have (incredibly) been undiagnosed at the time of death. In other countries, some people who have died with the virus have been counted as pneumonia deaths (say) instead of COVID-19 deaths, to keep the numbers down.
The latest report from the UK showed 563 additional deaths in 24 hours. It’s tragic. No other word. The latest one-day tally from the US saw around 900 deaths, and soon they could be facing a 9/11 every day.
I followed Wimbledon quite intensely last year. Today they announced that it wouldn’t be happening at all in 2020, and that hardly even felt like news.
March. What a month. Waaay back on the 4th (it feels a lifetime ago now) I had a lesson with those two teenage boys. When I asked them what they felt about the virus, the older one said that everyone will have forgotten about it in about the time it takes to say “coronavirus”. A week later their mum was clearly scared shitless by the whole virus thing, judging by the texts she sent me, and lessons were off until further notice. On the 6th, I had a lesson with two younger boys. Their mum was in the background, and when we’d finished she told me that the virus was being massively hyped up by the media. I said that the media were in fact understating the risks posed by the virus. The following week she told me to stay away.
Two lessons today, one of them with a ten-year-old boy on FaceTime instead of the usual Skype. That was a really awkward lesson. On a small phone screen and with no way of sharing documents or text, it was like teaching with both arms tied behind my back. At one point I introduced a simple word game, a bit like Countdown on British TV, but with seven letters. This kid knows his alphabet in English (most don’t) so I thought this would work. R for rabbit, E for elephant, G for gold, another E for elephant, and so on. After two minutes I asked him what words he’d made from the letters. “Rabbit,” he told me.
People are dying of this virus in shocking numbers. Nearly 400 additional deaths were reported in the UK today. In Romania we’re still at the point where age, sex, location and any comorbidities are given every time a death is reported. I’m just reading that the 81st recorded death in Romania (out of 82 so far) was a 70-year-old man. Her wife had died of the virus only yesterday. Three weeks ago they travelled to Turkey to get some medical procedure done. For now, the Romanian victims are still people rather than cold statistics, but for how long? There is clearly a desperate lack of testing here, because so many of those dying from the virus are being diagnosed on the day of death or in the post-mortem. I’d dread to think what the genuine case figures are. By the way, the whole city of Suceava, where the virus ripped through that hospital, killing at least 28 people, has been quarantined along with surrounding towns.
I’ve just received half a dozen books that Mum ordered for me online. The delivery man was alarmingly unprotected. She got me all three of the remaining books in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life,Complete Serbian and Border – A Journey to the Edge of Europe. That lot will keep me going for ages, even under our reading-friendly lockdown.
It’s also a good opportunity to listen to music. A couple of great coronavirus tunes I didn’t know about until today: John Lennon’s Isolation and Fleetwood Mac’s Behind the Mask.
Some Brits just don’t get it. Not only are they buying more stuff every time they visit the supermarket (which makes sense), they’re also making more trips, which is bloody stupid. Everybody needs to be making fewer trips. As well as the increased risk in packed supermarkets, there’s also a greater chance of food being wasted, which we can ill afford.
Three charts now: cases, deaths and recoveries. Sometimes new figures are reported after I post them on this blog, but before midnight, in which case I have to apply some Tipp-ex.
That I could come to Romania 3½ years ago – a country I’d never set foot in before – and create a totally new life for myself was wonderfully mad, and only possible thanks to long-haul travel and supranational organisations. A month ago it was still possible, just. Now you can hardly go out your front door. The speed at which everything has shut down still feels extraordinary.
This morning I had a chat with my brother. They don’t want him anywhere near his workplace, and fair enough. Close contact with other people is just about unavoidable in his job. We talked about Brits who struggling to cope because they can no longer buy unnecessary crap.
Nothing to report, except to say that news coming out of the hospital in Suceava, which has now closed, is horrendous. Twenty-two people died there. Romania’s death total has soared to 65. I now have plotted the deaths on a separate chart from the confirmed cases, which are now close to 2000. (The real number of cases is surely several times that.) The chart of recoveries will be coming tomorrow, I hope.
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