Blog Archives

Save the World! Watch Netflex.

3/21/2020

Kim Bellware
March 20, 2020 at 8:42 p.m. EDT in the Washington Post
As daily life undergoes rapid changes in response to the coronavirus outbreak and the death and infection total climb, a Chicago epidemiologist is drawing praise for her comments at a Friday news conference that outlined with clarity and urgency how seemingly small sacrifices today will prevent deaths of loved ones and strangers next week.

Emily Landon, the chief infectious disease epidemiologist at University of Chicago Medicine, took the lectern after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), who on Friday afternoon announced that the state would undergo a stay-at-home order for 2½ weeks starting Saturday evening.

“The healthy and optimistic among us will doom the vulnerable,” Landon said. She acknowledged that restrictions like a shelter-in-place may end up feeling “extreme” and “anticlimactic” — and that’s the point.

“It’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world when you’re watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right, nothing happens,” Landon said. “A successful shelter-in-place means you’re going to feel like it was all for nothing, and you’d be right: Because nothing means that nothing happened to your family. And that’s what we’re going for here.”

What's Next

3/15/2020

I do not know.
My gut tells me that three weeks is not going to be enough time.
I am not a doctor of contagious diseases. My brother's (Director of Out-patient Nursing Care) sister-in-law is a Contagious Disease RN trainer. She is one of 80 (Only 80? Well sadly, there is long /short story about that.) certified by the CDC in the United States. He shared some information that she learned via a teleconference on 3/12/20. Combine that with what I am reading and here are my thoughts.
I remain of the opinion that we were safe this past weekend in northern Indiana. Probably even another week. Closing schools, church, and other gatherings was likely a wasted week off for those of us living in rural Indiana. It appears that by the end of March and early April that we will need that time. I guess I am agreeing with what the British (I did not even know I was agreeing with the British until last night) are doing and the why.
Their assumption is can the economy handle six to eight weeks off? Can we , as a society, handle the cabin fever that is associated with the most sever forms of social isolation for a month and a half? Two months? The British are attempting to hold off strict social isolation for another couple of weeks.
The necessity of social isolation medically in high stress (a Washington Post term) environments starts now. For the weekend of 3/15, that means urban, coastal environments. Maybe Chicago? The clock is running. Three weeks started already. Approximately two weeks incubation followed by a week of illness.
  Meanwhile, for most of the rural Corn Belt, The Great Plains, the Inter-mountain West and the Upper South, fly-over land, the balance of economic/social losses vrs. medical benefits is marginal with isolating now. Our three weeks starts in two to four weeks. A New York Times article reports that the traveling involved with spring breaks will accelerate the introduction/spread of the virus into middle America. Fine, the end of March is when things get ugly here in Corn Country, Indiana. That is when our three weeks should be starting. Not on March 13.
(please click on the "Read More" for club specific news)

End of Rant

3/13/2020

The following quote is from a USA Today story about a coronarvirus survivor. Yes, survivor.

"I think the big takeaway I want to tell everyone is: Please don't panic," Schneider said. "If you are healthy, if you are younger, if you take good care of yourself when you're sick, you will recover, I believe. And I'm living proof of that."

The Sky is Falling!

3/13/2020

I think I better just stay in bed. After all, it is a nasty world out there. The following is from an article by the American Institute of Economic Research.

"More and more, the containment response is looking like global panic. What’s interesting, Psychology Today points out, is that your doctor is not panicking:

COVID-19 is a new virus in a well-known class of viruses. The coronaviruses are cold viruses. I’ve treated countless patients with coronaviruses over the years. In fact, we’ve been able to test for them on our respiratory panels for the entirety of my career.
We know how cold viruses work: They cause runny noses, sneezing, cough, and fever, and make us feel tired and achy. For almost all of us, they run their course without medication. And in the vulnerable, they can trigger a more severe illness like asthma or pneumonia.
Yes, this virus is different and worse than other coronaviruses, but it still looks very familiar. We know more about it than we don’t know.
Doctors know what to do with respiratory viruses. As a pediatrician, I take care of patients with hundreds of different viruses that behave similarly to this one. We take care of the kids at home and see them if the fever is prolonged, if they get dehydrated, or if they develop breathing difficulty. Then we treat those problems and support the child until they get better.

Meanwhile, the New England Journal of Medicine reports as follows:
On the basis of a case definition requiring a diagnosis of pneumonia, the currently reported case fatality rate is approximately 2%. In another article in the Journal, Guan et al. report mortality of 1.4% among 1,099 patients with laboratory-confirmed Covid-19; these patients had a wide spectrum of disease severity. If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases, the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1%. This suggests that the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.

Words of Wisdom from 1948

3/13/2020

It’s now clear that COVID-19 is a deadly serious global pandemic, and all necessary precautions should be taken. Still, C. S. Lewis’s words—written 72 years ago—ring with some relevance for us. Just replace “atomic bomb” with “coronavirus.”
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

Serving Numbers

3/8/2020

The ace-to-error ratio is number used to calculate the rate at which we score as compared to scoring for the other team. You will see totals which converts into the ratio using division. Our goal is 2:1 which means for every TWO aces we score we have ONE error where the other team scores.

15-8's Denny
Bowman, H. 3-8/15= (-.333) 3A 4 pts. 16 aces to 25 errors 0.64:1
Ellis, A. 13-2/34= .323 3A 19 pts. 16 to 10 1.6:1
Fisher, A. 1-5/8= (-500) 1A 1 pt. 11 to 19 0.57:1
Friedrich, H. 6-2/15= .266 3A 4 pts. 17 to 10 1.7:1
Garland, M. 19-6/34= .382 11A 21 pts. 28 to 21 1.33:1
Jackson, L. Did not serve 8 to 23 0.34:1
Lanum, R. 1-1/7= 0 0A 1 pts. 11 to 11 1:1
O'Brien, M. 3-2/10= .100 1A 5 pts. 6 to 11 0.54:1
Smith, K. Did not serve 2 to 31 0.06:1
Tate, D. Did not participate 9 to 5 1.8:1

15-8's Crum
Crabtree, C. 3 to 16 0.18:1
Evans, G. 7 to 15 0.46:1
Hansen, A. 15 to 7 2.14:1 Nice
Hileman, A. 11 to 26 0.42:1
Maroney, Nia 3 to 25 0.12:1
McQuinn, M. 15 to 12 1.25:1
Miller, H. 15 to 18 0.83:1
Pontigo, A. 6 to 19 0.31:1
Wagoner, D. 7 to 8 0.87:1

(18', 17's & 16's Meghan are behind the read more break)

Passing Numbers

3/8/2020

The goal is 1.60 to survive. 1.70 will make me smile. For Jr. High, this number drops a couple of tenths.

18's
M. Ball: 7/5= 1.40 108/100= 1.08
A. Borden: 4/5= 0.80 442/279= 1.58
B. Borden: did not pass 111/90= 1.23
C. Clapper: 19/11= 1.72 153/93= 1.64
K. Hammond: 11/5= 2.20 183/119= 1.53
P. Jones: injured 198/130= 1.52
K. Kline: 9/7= 1.28 15/14= 1.07
A. May: 18/10= 1.80 112/71= 1.57
M. McMains: 6/5= 1.20 241/160= 1.50
M. Viney: 35/20= 1.75 69/41= 1.68 injured
L. Schriner: 5/5= 1.0 288/176= 1.63

17's
C. Balough: 13/9= 1.44 49/29= 1.68
C. Clapper: 19/11= 1.72 153/93= 1.64
K. Davison: 29/12= 2.41 105/69= 1.52
J. Gomez: No numbers 11/10= 1.10
J. Herron: No numbers 13/9= 1.44
L. Kinnaman: did not pass 16/20= 0.80
K. Kline: No numbers 15/14= 1.07
S. Jones: 27/15= 1.80 91/56= 1.62
A. May: 1/2= 0.50 95/63= 1.50
M. Metzger: No numbers 14/11= 1.27
O. Newcom: No numbers
A. Robbins: No numbers
J. Seward: 27/21= 1.28 122/74= 1.64
A. Winer: No numbers 9/9= 1.0
M. Worl: 9/4= 2.22 43/29= 1.48

16's and Jr. High are behind the "Read More" break.

Hitting Numbers

3/2/2020

18's
K. Hammond: 23-9/52= .269 68-26/165= .254
M. McMains: 28-13/79= .189 71-35/200= .180 (35 freaking errors?!?.)

P. Jones: 11-2/30= .200 41-28/125= .104   (28 more errors.)
L. Schriner: 12-8/49= .081 37-27/123= .081

M. Ball: 10-9/35= .028 28-18/95= .105
B. Borden: 4-6/20= (-.100) 7-18/53= (-.207)

A. Borden: 2-0/3= .666
A. May: 0-6/10= (-.600)

Team: 104-60/309= .142 211-135/649= .117

Too many errors! We have to find that line that separates aggressiveness from stupidity, work hard to avoid being lazy and slow to transition points and the ball, and lastly develop the skill that sits between an aggressive swing and an easy roll shot.