by 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.
