Life Under Lockdown (IV)

The horror of life in a gilded cage continues unabated. There are board games. There are telecons. There is small fluffy doggy galore. All remains well.

Small fluffy doggy remains blissfully oblivious.

The weather has been mostly lovely. It's been generally mild but with the odd cold snap. We even had the largest snowfall of the season, which was admittedly pathetic compared to previous winters. Right now it's warmed up again. Indeed, as I write this, Shirley is sat outside on the decking watching the TV, which remains firmly inside. Civilisation is truly a wonderful thing and I'd quite like to keep it.

In work, things remain much as before, except now I've got some remote Arecibo observing to do so my screen looks like this :

Which would normally be something of a small burden, but is currently providing a welcome change in routine, especially since it's at 10am. As for outreach, my interactive Virgo cluster got noticed by a New Jersey planetarium, so I'm pretty excited about that. Still waiting impatiently for the Oculus Quest to be on-sale again so I can see it in glorious 3D.

If life in this new normal isn't so bad, when, though, can we expect it to return to normal normal ?

Last time we went on a shopping trip, we ventured about 50 m further than strictly necessary so we could have a look down Wenceslas Square. Although we live right in the centre of Prague, we live well off the main tourist route, so it's hard to get a feel for whether social distancing measures are really working. Some nights our dog-walking route feels emptier than usual, other times not so much - but we're firmly in the realm of small number statistics. On the Square we saw very clearly for ourselves that the tourist traps are all but deserted - essentially, the population density hasn't altered much in the emptiest areas (it couldn't fall much there anyway), but in the normally heaving centres, it's crashed.

It would be awfully tempted to go and look at the other tourist areas. Ironically it would
now be perfectly safe to do so because there's no-one there, but we've got more sense
than that.

This confirms a rather fun study by Google, who have released anonymised data on personal movement based on phone locations. So let's compare Prague and Cardiff, because why not :

Prague seems to have dropped off more rapidly and earlier than in Cardiff, but by a slightly lower percentage. Then again, Prague is far more of a tourist trap, so this doesn't account for the huge drop in absolute numbers. Being able to see the pavement down the whole of Wenceslas Square is simply unprecedented.

That said, last week I saw a florist was still open. I thought only essential services were still open for business, and in no Arnie movie does anyone yell, "Quick, this is an emergency ! GET TO THE FLORIST !". On the other hand, we finally had a takeout order that actually did the contactless process properly. It's like finding a baby on your doorstep except a lot tastier.

So is all this actually working ? Last week there were hints, but this week I feel much more confident : yes, it is. The reproduction number is definitely falling, and by some accounts it may fall below 1.0 very soon indeed. We'll see. But one of the more interesting ways to slice the data is equally encouraging. Rather than simply plotting the number of cases against time, which will only show a very gradual flattening if the infection rate drops, it seems it's better to plot number of cases in the past week as a function of total cases, with time shown via animation. In this case, when the infection stops spreading you see a very rapid fall indeed.

Cases in selected countries. The website is interactive and has a full explanation,
but note that the plots look far better when downloaded.

The Czech Republic has been slowly deviating from the pure exponential for a while, but has now very clearly flattened (while testing rates have increased substantially). It's a similar story in the Netherlands. Spain, Germany, and especially Italy all look like they're on the edge of a happy precipice. The UK isn't there yet, and is still suffering from a low testing rate, but does seem at least to moving in the right direction. Even the US is at least looking better than it was. Whether or not we'll see a sudden drop as China and South Korea did remains to be seen, but overall, things are looking positive - if only as far a stopping the infection goes, not necessarily for the handling of the existing crisis.

As for what measure has made the biggest difference, my money's on social distancing. Yet at least some Czechs are keen to point out the value of even simple masks. I dunno. While it would seem common sense that if you're being advised to cover your cough then wearing a mask should also help, I would bet that having the population density diminish by several orders of magnitude is going to make a much bigger difference. But listen to the actual experts, for crying out loud. In any case, I bet all those people who wanted to ban the burqa are feeling awfully silly right about now...


I now feel a lack of anxiety sufficient to venture a few political comments. One of the stupider stories I've seen from Britain is supermarkets banning people from buying non-essential items. This really irks me because it feels like a very British thing to do - not the cliched stiff-upper-lip stereotype, but actually knowing what real modern British people are like. If the government recommends you only only go out for essentials, you can bet that the British response will be to break down into confusion with no common sense at all. I mean, come on. By all means close down the shops which only sell non-essentials, but what the hell's the point in shops which do sell essentials dictating to customers what they can and can't buy ? That's just really dumb - nothing but a totally pointless waste of energy. British people like causing unnecessary complications. It's becoming a particularly irritating art form of bullshitting.

In happier news, Kier Starmer is the new leader of the Labour Party. On paper it would be hard to find anyone more qualified. A high-flying human rights lawyer from a thoroughly working class background, able to to command the respect of the different internal party factions (he voted against Corbyn but was able to work with him without any hint of acrimony or in-fighting), and thick-skinned enough to have campaigned strongly against Brexit in the shadow cabinet for the last few years, he may be uniquely placed to build bridges. He's very much a socialist, but quite clearly not in the hard left holier-than-thou vein of the Corbynites (and modest enough to avoid being referred to as Sir Kier despite his knighthood), and, importantly, willing to work with the government during a crisis. I liked his victory speech very much - supportive of Corbyn personally, while then immediately attacking one of his biggest failings (the failure to tackle anti-semitism). He projects infinitely more competence and authority than Corbyn ever did. It's going to be an interesting experience indeed to see him pitted against Boris.


That about wraps it up for this week. Things are generally looking up. One final point is something the British press are occasionally suspicious of : the exit strategy from the lockdown. But I would have thought this was obvious : testing, en masse. Once the virus has broken out on a large scale, as it has, a lockdown is almost inevitable. What you do during that time is get as much testing capability as humanly possible. Then, once the cases subside to a manageable number, you gradually ease the restrictions and start an incredibly liberal testing regime. The lockdown buys you time to track and test, finding and isolating every single case until the damn virus is either dead or kept at a manageable level. As for what sort of Brave New World emerges, let's not count our chickens until they've hatched.