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Can you hear me now?

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The other day I had reason to call customer support for one of my credit cards. Words to strike fear in the hearts of even the strong, right?

It went about as expected, maybe a bit worse. After the customary stalling by running through the automated responses a few times, I was put on hold, and eventually the grating music was interrupted by an actual human voice.

Lucky me, I thought. The voice was clearly South Asian, probably Indian. I say clearly, but advisedly. The line kept crackling and breaking up. Whenever I mentioned that, the person at the other end apologized, did something technical, and asked if that was better.

It was. In a way. During the static-free intervals when the transmission was clear, there were constant noises in the background. The suport person obviously had the call on speaker phone. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of the poor voice quality on speaker phone; it’s as if the call were taking place in a cavern. The distraction from the backgropund noise only made matters worse; the constant clatter was occasionally punctuated by a loud bang.

The support person resolved my problem, and I thanked her whole-heartedly.

Why? Because the issues with the call reminded me of what is happening in India while much of the rest of the world is enjoying a respite from a cruel pandemic. How a nascent success at controlling Covid-19 was derailed by a misguided populist leader, who prematurely declared victory and removed all restrictions. How hospitals and other health services threw up their hands in defeat, overwhelmed beyond their capacity. How the sick and dying were housed in tents and corridors. How a moratorium was declared on cremations due to concerns about contamination of the air. How the Ganges, a river sacred to Hindus, was awash with unidentified corpses under the reign of a Hindu extremist, of all people. How working from home was a luxury not afforded to many in India but was a means of survival in the midst of catastrophe to those who could do it.

I thanked her for somehow bearing all that and still managing to survive and function at all, let alone well.

I thanked her for surviving and hoped that the children I heard in the background would grow to be as strong as she is.

And I thanked her for reminding me of what is and isn’t important.

Disease by the numbers

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Credit: tumsasedgars

Every morning I check the Covid-19 stats for the state and county I live in. Every day the numbers get bigger and the picture grimmer, even when things are improving. How can this be?

First of all, let me dispel the notion that I want to downplay the danger. Far from it; I fully support efforts to get people to wear masks in public places, to avoid large groups, and to keep a reasonable distance apart when interacting. I support those measures being made mandatory when necessary. I hear people say that they’ve “done their time” in lockdown, and that it seemed to them that the threat turned out to be much less than the government let on.  Setting aside for the moment the question of what motivation there would be for the government to impose lockdown, except to keep the pandemic under control, these people miss the obvious fact that the measures they complain about are exactly why the direst predictions never materialized.

But those issues have been dissected and debated abundantly; there’s no reason to add my 2 bits beyond what I have already written.  My interest here is in information and the extent to which it is useful.

Keeping a running total of infections doesn’t seem to be very useful. You might find it helpful if your motive is to keep the sense of crisis alive, but even that is questionable. There is no shortage of published articles on crisis fatigue. At a certain point, there’s just an overload, and the human alert system just shuts down. Eat, drink, and be merry, as the saying goes, for tomorrow we die. 

We need a way to assess how many people are actually infectious at any given time. In my county, for example, just over a thousand cases have been reported since the beginning in March. Something over sixty have died.  But I can’t easily find how many of those cases have recovered.

So, out of that thousand, you can subtract the deaths, which are statistically miniscule. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could also subtract the number of recovered, and therefore no longer infectious, cases?  I know those numbers are available, but why can’t we see a number for current cases that are actually a potential threat? Shouldn’t that number be front and center?