Boris Johnson is out of hospital, and I’ve just watched his video address where you could see he’d been through the mill. He especially thanked one of his nurses who was from New Zealand. Invercargill, in fact. It’s great that he made it, but I’ve seen all sorts of crap in the British press like “The health of Boris Johnson is the health of Britain itself.” Nauseating stuff. In fact the British press as a whole during this pandemic, with the exception perhaps of Channel 4 News, has been bizarre.
John Campbell’s Youtube videos have been a mine of information for me. It helps that Mr Campbell is clearly a good egg. I’ve learnt all about the benefits of vitamin D to the immune system, and hence why black people might come off worse from the virus because the extra melanin in their skin reduces their production of vitamin D from sunlight (as well as significant socioeconomic factors and increased comorbidities, of course). Although I’m white, I am now taking vitamin D tablets every morning. He’s also adamant about what we should be taking whenever we get a fever. Nothing. Anything such as paracetamol or ibuprofen will certainly reduce the fever and make us feel better, but the fever is our body’s natural response and helps us fight the virus. Cold-blooded creatures like lizards, when they contract a virus, will move to the sunlight if they can, to raise their body temperature. The other negative knock-on effect of medicating to lower a fever, is that because we artificially feel better, we do more, expending vital energy.
I had a surprise text today from Cosmin, an ex-student of mine I last saw in 2017. He wished me a happy Easter. I think he was a bit surprised to learn I was still in Romania. He had plans to move to Australia – I wonder what happened.
The wonderful weather continues. Here’s the chart and my latest picture of the cathedral. I must have posted so many on here.
I called my aunt this morning. She told me that her dog had been put down yesterday. She couldn’t even be there while it was put to sleep. All very sad. She’s been on her own since my uncle died in 2002, and her dogs have always been a lifeline.
This morning, after hearing that Anak Krakatoa had erupted, I read about the Year Without a Summer. That was 1816, the year after Tambora erupted, the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history. This year looks like being summerless for completely different reasons.
Last night my UK-based Skype student predicted increasing casualty rates in Britain and even more draconian measures, just as people might want them to be relaxed. He said too many people were ignoring the rules. For some unknown reason we ended up talking about crumpets, as in the food item. He told me he picked up a packet of these mysterious floppy cakey things after arriving in the UK, but he wasn’t a fan. Apparently he ate them untoasted, unbuttered, un-anything, so no wonder they didn’t quite do it for him. To be fair, how would you know? (It’s always amused me that spectrum has crumpets as its anagram.)
The official death toll in Romania is approaching 300. Here is the latest graph, followed by some pictures of Timișoara in spring under lockdown:
A helpline for over-65s without supportThe shoes have walkedThe half-attached sign warns people over 65 not to leave their homeThis is a lovely notice on a nearby perfume shop. “Take care of each other, stay healthy, and we’ll meet again when this craziness is over.”
It’s been a hopelessly unproductive day. In fact it’s been pretty shitty all round. I felt an enormous (and familiar) sense of inferiority when I met very briefly with the Romanian teacher. I couldn’t figure out how Zoom, this new thing, worked, and I could sense her exasperation when we resorted to using Skype instead. “Skype?! That’s fifteen years out of date.” Well, bugger you. I don’t live in your world of giving lectures and presentations to hundreds of people at a time, and going to Prague and Milan and wherever the hell else. I lead a basic life. She was very tired and I was glad when we ended the conversation. All those hours I’d spent working on that book had pretty much been a waste of time.
The UK death toll increased by nearly a thousand today, but the headlines were Boris, Boris and more Boris. Countries with very advanced healthcare systems all over Europe have been floored by this. Mass graves are being dug in New York. Worldwide, deaths are now officially in six figures, although in reality they have been there for some time. There is grimness almost everywhere you look.
We’re still getting amazing weather and the trees have burst into life with vivid green foliage. It’s Good Friday, or Big Friday as they call it here, except that Orthodox Easter, the one most people celebrate in Romania, is next weekend. No Easter market of course this year. Hopefully there will be a Christmas market. Will this be over in eight months? Today is also my parents’ 44th wedding anniversary. Just imagine being stuck with someone for that length of time. It sounds impossible. And now they really are stuck with each other.
I spoke to Mum and Dad again this morning. They’re in New Zealand, one of the few shining beacons in a dark world, where (amazingly) new recoveries outnumbered new infections in the latest figures. They live in a pretty isolated part of an even more isolated country, and they’re coping well with the lockdown. But they’re scared shitless about me.
After talking to my sister-in-law last night, I felt sorry for her. She has to attend two hospitals (in Poole and Bournemouth) and see private patients. Lots of old people, who she could be infecting without knowing it. She can’t get tested unless either she or my brother shows symptoms. For the second day running, around 900 new deaths were recorded in the UK.
Today has been Romania’s deadliest day so far. The numbers have been surprisingly stable to this point, but the coming weeks are scary, in spite of the lockdown which must be helping greatly. I also wonder how many people these official figures might be excluding – Romanians have a habit of avoiding hospital if at all possible, and I imagine many have died at home. One bright spot is a jump in the number of recoveries.
The highlight of today was perhaps the chat I had with the lady who lives next door but one from me. She said my Romanian was “admirable”, then the next minute I said I had barrels of water in my bag. I forgot that big water bottles are bidoane, and said butoaie instead. Too many B-words, in both languages. She expressed a love of British culture, “but I don’t like the French”.
Plenty of political news amid all of this. There’s a new Labour leader in the UK (good), the Democratic nominee has been decided (good, but they all need to get behind him), and in more good news, it looks like Boris Johnson will be one of the lucky 50% who survive their stint in ICU with coronavirus.
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.
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