Staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Day 0

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The year 2020 certainly started off with a bang. Val and I were chatting the other day about how challenging this year's first quarter has been so far—with the fires in the U.S. and in Australia, the sudden and accidental deaths of Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and their companions, and the eruption of Taal Volcano—when the next crisis arrived: the coronavirus dubbed as SARS-CoV-2 is causing an outbreak of pandemic (yes, pandemic!) proportions. The  coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic began in November or December 2019 in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. Just three or four months later, 148 countries and territories reported over 160,000 confirmed cases of the disease. It has gained a foothold in Africa in February, with over 400 confirmed cases and 10 deaths in a span of four weeks. 
 
Source: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd
 
As I read reports and pored through prediction models (I haven't yet tried making my own because I'm working on a totally different project as of this writing), I got reminded of the exhibit on epidemics at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. It said that hunting for Patient Zero—the first confirmed case—is difficult in a connected world, such as what we have now. The rapid spread of COVID-19 can be attributed to the ease of travel, with many country-level epidemics beginning with infected persons entering via airports or seaports. 
The typical response to epidemics, according to the World Health Organisation, consists of five stages:
  1. Anticipation before the illness begins
  2. Early detection during disease emergence
  3. Containment at the early stages of transmission (i.e., local spread)
  4. Impact mitigation when the number of cases grow exponentially 
  5. Elimination and/or eradication
Obviously, because COVID-19 is now declared a pandemic, efforts are focused on containment (e.g., keeping cases within borders or keeping more imported cases from entering a region) and mitigation (e.g., how to soften the blow to political, social, and economic systems). 

In the San Francisco Bay Area, six counties have decided to require residents to "shelter-in-place" from March 17 to April 7; we should stay home (social distancing) and observe proper hygiene as much as possible. This means that our time outside the house are limited to the conduct of essential activities. It's just a matter of time to see if this approach (which will surely irritate and frustrate a lot of people) is effective in slowing down the disease transmission. Note that there are over 300 cases in the Bay Area before the isolation period starts.
 
The public health announcement about "shelter-in-place", issued the day before it's implemented.

Good thing is that there are a lot of shows to choose from on Netflix and on Amazon Prime, I've got a project deliverable to finish before I give birth, and my computer is hooked up to WiFi. Boredom potentially managed. Let's see how three weeks stuck at home will work out (there's no barre class during the shelter-in-place period).

As an aside, during the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic (2002–2004), I was placed in home isolation for about a week because I was potentially exposed to someone who just came from an affected country (we were in the same flight to a conference). I had a pretty good idea about the boring experience of staying indoors at length... before the time of WiFi, laptops, and smart cellphones... and no tv in my room (because my family only has one tv set at home and it's in the living room). So when it was Val's turn to go into social distancing mode in February (because he flew out of Rome just a week before COVID-19's geographic spread reached the city), I was able to support him through it, somewhat, albeit long-distance (he's in Los Baños). He was also able to finish a lot of work while he was at home.

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