by 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.
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.
