From TPM Reader RT …
I can’t really say I had a COVID moment. It was a series of COVID moments. The first was when I sat around playing with MATLAB a year ago to understand the implications of what an R0 value of three means. Like many other folks I’d seen the movie Contagion and thought I knew about reproduction numbers. But I really didn’t. I hadn’t really internalized what the mathematics implied. Staring at the numbers in disbelief. Texting my friend who is biostatistician at a major medical college hoping I was wrong. His reply was simply “Do you have enough food to last for three weeks?”. Then the long days of isolation and encounters with the maskless while trying to just simply shop for groceries. Constantly fretting if I got to close. Did I touch anything? What’s that sniffle mean? The slow decent over summer and fall into the illusion that these precautions would keep my family safe.
Then came the phone call the day after Christmas. “I don’t think your father is feeling good, can you put a mask on and come see?”