Dani Does a Walkabout

As things loosen up just a tad, Sue and I got a bagel and coffee at the drive through, and took it to the park. It seemed a bit bold, but many have been ordering out for quite awhile already. We ate in the car before walking through the park. Sorry: not a funny selfie today.

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We also had a surprise little porch visit with Danica yesterday. She was out on a long walk and dropped in to see us. She had walked 18k on the previous day in 3 different outings and did more than 10k in a little over 2 hours yesterday.

Good for her, but I wish she wouldn't do it in flip flops.

Back in the day when we were babysitting, and I did the afternoon shift and Sue did the morning shift, she would walk home on a direct path, but Danica did the roundabout.

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Some COVID stuff to follow: some good, some not so good.

I read a relatively short blog post here which cites a which cites another longer post here. Ostensibly, the original post was about How to Reopen a Business Safely. What is of interest to me were two things that are not specifically about the topic of the title.

The first is not terribly optimistic. The author doesn't seem to hold high hopes that a vaccine will be coming anytime soon. In fact, we don't know if one will come at all or how well it will work if and when it does arrive.

Some have been thinking that we can’t fully reopen the economy until we have a vaccine. But how soon might that happen? We don’t know. We might never. We still don’t have one for hepatitis C or HIV. But even if we do develop one (and many are currently in the works), proving it both to be safe and effective will take time.
... 

We still don’t have a vaccine or know when or even if we will have one. We also don’t know if infection produces immunity, for how long that immunity might last, or if infection predisposes to a more severe course from re-infection. 

We all pretty well knew about the vaccine issue, but I was very surprised about what he had to say about the likelihood of infection based on different amounts of exposure. This is more positive.

Thus, it seems even when people ignore current social distancing guidelines, the risk of transmission is, in fact, low, and—given the much higher rate among household contacts—largely determined by amount of contact time a person has with an infected patient ... all the studies suggest that when you have close contact with an infected person, the risk of becoming infected is, in fact, relatively low. 

...

Research suggests that if you do have the kind of sustained close contact with asymptomatic cases that occurs in households (a reasonable surrogate for a workplace), the risk of catching COVID-19 is only 0.33 percent (compared to a risk of 3.3 percent for sustained close contact with mildly symptomatic cases, a risk of 6.2 percent for sustained close contact with severely symptomatic cases, and a risk of 13.6 percent for sustained close contact with someone who’s coughing and expectorating, meaning bringing up phlegm.

What I take from this, perhaps incorrectly, is that if  both we and others exercise restraint and take precautions, that we should be able to minimize risk. This is better than what I had thought and leaves me with some optimism going forward.