21-Mar-2020 JW's COVID-19 Blog Entry #2

See the entry below with links for data from various sources. As I become aware of more I'll try to update that if anyone is watching ... no promises.

I'm located in Oakland California. I've been working from home (WFH) now since a week ago yesterday, Friday. My wife is a respiratory therapist at a local 200 bed hospital & trauma center. We have adult children living with us so we are tripping over each other at this point, yeah. We are in Alameda county, one of the first six counties nationally to issue a stay at home order.

Today's status, my version:

Well ... as of today as you may know:

• Italy & EU are still seeing a lot of new cases
• UK is beginning to ramp pretty seriously
• New York city and by extension the surrounding area has become the epicenter of the U.S.; replacing Washington state, notably on the polar opposite end of the country
• Florida has finally begun to shut down the beaches
• California, New York, and Illinois have issued state wide stay at home orders
• Production in China is said to have returned to 50% - 60% of normal & trucking is returning, albeit slowly it sounds like, as local & regional travel restrictions begin to lift
• Shipping world wide is a bottle neck as passenger flights that normally also carry a lot of cargo have virtually stopped
• Agility indicates that flights are being chartered now to compensate for the lack of regularly scheduled commercial flights
• All of the data indicates people are recovering from this at a far greater pace then some are unfortunately dying
• A LOT of people are getting seriously ill and dying
• Masks and other PPE are running out, every functional ventilator is existence seems to be coming out of the wood work, industry is being asked to engage in making products they don't normally make, like vents and regulations are being eased to allow that to happen.
• The financial markets are completely screwed up. A lot of people think they are oversold. It's hard to buy in right now because every technical support point has been blown right by. 
• Hopes for a "V shaped recovery" are starting to fade. Consumers are running out of money fast. The text book "marginal producers" are starting to fall off the margin into BK or worse. 

Holy crap that's a lot going one at once! No wonder people are freaking out.

How long is this going to go on? (Hell if I know but here's a shot at it ... )

So what's this telling us non-science people about how long this is going to take? Let's talk about China because that's the only model we have right now.

It been about five, going on six weeks since China locked it down and it's not over. I believe the lock down began after the Chinese New Year which was on Feb 12, feel free to call me on that. Hubei province is still pretty much locked down. 

China started relaxing the controls about a week ago, maybe two. 

The incubation period on COVID-19 is believed to have a median I'll say of two weeks, right? So if they are going to see a second wave, it'll start end of next week or the week after. 

If you look at the WHO & Johns Hopkins data they are showing a very slight increase in cases in the Western Pacific and China over the past few days. That could be noise right now. 

If the cases stay flat in China for another three weeks (two weeks + another two weeks to be safe), they start to open up Hubei over the next two to three weeks after that, and they still stay flat, then, maybe we begin to have a model for the time for an entire region to recover. My little model there says that duration from shutdown to re-open would be 10 - 12 weeks. 

So in the U.S. maybe we are back open for business by June 15th? Let's say July 4th for the sake of American romanticism. 

Whadya think folks. July 4th?

Now then, who's got enough toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and bleach wipes to last until July 4th? 

More importantly what are folks going to do who work paycheck to paycheck?