Month: April 2020

Coronavirus - Writing a book

It’s awful everywhere

April 3, 2020 by 0 Comments

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.)

Here is the latest chart:

Romania coronavirus 2-4-20
Coronavirus - Life :)

One-chart wonder

April 2, 2020 by 0 Comments

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.

Romania coronavirus 1-4-20

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.

Books - Coronavirus - Language teaching

In like a lamb, out like a lion

April 1, 2020 by 0 Comments

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.

Coronavirus cases in Romania 31-3-20