n & Delta, and I've never been to Milan

You know how Mark Twain said "Speak when you are angry and you will give the best speech you will ever regret?"

I just wrote an angry, resentful, pissed off blog post and didn't publish it. To those who were the target of my ire, you are welcome for my restraint. In my recovery group, I am learning about patience and compassion. You are supposed to be patient and have compassion for people who are pissing you off, I guess.

Yeah. Right. I am not there yet, my favorite phrase to describe a state of transcendence I one day aspire to but am far from the goal. I've been imprisoned locked isolated socially distancing in my condo for three weeks now and it sucks. Tonight, Jack sent me a horrific article* about the suffering in Bergamo in northern Italy and then I think "I can take one for the team by staying in." Bergamo is in Lombardy, which is also the home to Lake Como where George Clooney has a vacation house. Thirty miles from Bergamo is Milan, the men's fashion capital of the west. I wish I would have visited Milan before. It sounds amazing. (Side note: The Ferragamo factory is now making hospital masks instead of shoes.) If this wealthy, educated, cultured and sophisticated region has turned into a hell hole, what luck do less fortunate areas have?

Trigger warning: The shit in the NYT article is bad. If you believe in corona virus, then you can skip it. If you are a covidiot, then please take a look at the horror. Jack is an ICU doc here in Seattle. In Bergamo, they had a seven bed ICU which they expanded to ninety, which brings me to tonight's theme.

n

This in statistical terms means number, like the number of a sample size.

My next favorite term is delta, which is the difference between two numbers.

Starting ICU beds n = 7

Current ICU beds n = 90

Delta = 83. 

They needed more than ten times the number of beds than they had.

Another interesting tidbit about the Italian case: They didn't notice corona virus first. What they first noticed was an uptick in deaths, which begged the question, what the fuck?

Italy has about 60M people and an annual death rate of 1%. The death rate fluctuates by season. More people probably die during flu season than they do in the summer. Adjusted for this rate, Italian health officials noticed an 80% increase in deaths in a short period of time. So if a hundred people die in a week in a town, and all of a sudden 180 die, people will in the town will notice. Right now, Italy's death rate from corona exceeds ten percent of known cases.

Twelve Sixteen hundred people in the US have died so far of corona. While I don't know anyone personally who has died of it, I know three people who know someone who died. One of the people was 61 and in generally good health, like a walking around, able bodied person which went from fine to dead in two weeks.

We can watch the number infected and the number died, but they doesn't tell us the whole story. There are people not tested who live and people not tested who die. It is the number of beds that are needed in hospitals and the increasing death rate tell us a better story.

Other n's I wonder about:

• Are there more or fewer 911 calls during COVID? I bet calls have gone down as fewer people are out and there are likely fewer accidents.
• Domestic violence -- up or down? I think up. People are stuck at home all day with their families. Tempers can flare, and regular abusers might be on a roll.
• Alcoholism: Are more or fewer people drinking? Are more people sobering up because the bars are closed? Are more people now unable to deny their spouse's/significant other's/parent's drinking problem because of proximity?
• Pot smokers: Up or down? Are people in legal weed states getting high as a result of boredom? If so, that is a bad idea because pot makes people even more bored. They crave novelty, and then everything mundane seems exceptionally dull.
• Drug use: How are drug users getting their fix? Are these people who broke drugs laws willing to violate social distancing? I don't know.
• Common colds and flus: Are we in general a little bit less cruddy because we are also isolating ourselves from rhinovirus and influenza?
• Vaccines: Come on! Vaccinate your kids. If there were a corona virus vaccine would you get it? I would only if the highest risk groups got it before me. Yes, there should be an order and I am not on the top of the list.
• Car accidents: How many fewer car accidents are there? Did that death rate drop?
• Violent Crime: How many fewer murders and assaults occurred since social distancing?

Sorry for the downer post. Tomorrow I will try to be less morose. I promise. Here is a picture of flowers to make you me us feel better.