Staying home during the COVID-19 pandemic: Day 7

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Now that Mommy is used to her work-at-home routine, she requires less help from me. She's getting a hang of accessing her office desktop remotely (through the wonders of VPN technology and the remote desktop app in her computer). Val's been able to catch up on a lot of backlog. Anna has been helping Biboy take care of Gabriel while he's working from home (it's tough to do so with a toddler). Her school hasn't scheduled her final exam just yet. Daddy's still reporting for duty but he's not working overtime. A lot of changes have been going on but everyone's adjusting fast. It helps that the hoarding for basic needs (like tissue paper) has stopped; the stores have started replenishing them and anyone can buy these whenever our reserves are going low.

I'm still the taong bahay, not allowed to go out of the house. But that's okay because this is the week that I'm entering the 34th week of my pregnancy. From this point forward, I can deliver the wee one safely and with minimal pre-term issues; which is another sigh of relief for my part. So while he is busily growing heavier (I can feel it, as well as the random contraction here and there), I just concentrate on data analyses... and scouring the web for job opportunities too. It's always good to scan around, after all.

Speaking of data analyses, one of the most important steps is data munging. It is the process of cleaning the raw data, finding missing values, and standardisation... which I have to do before the data is stored in a database (in a process referred to as "Extract, Transform, Load", ETL). For a lot of my classmates in data science, this is one of the most loathed tasks because it's highly manual and it's not exciting. But because I believe that garbage in is garbage out, I always ended up with this job in group work. I'm happy that I've been doing this in class a lot because it's a habit I've been applying on each dataset given to me by my teammates these days. All the spreadsheets given to me, thus far, require further cleaning... a LOT of cleaning. 

In other news, the number of COVID-19 positive cases is still surging in California. This is expected as the reporting becomes more efficient and more people are getting tested. Also, anyone who was sick prior to the shelter-in-place order has probably started showing symptoms by now; further increasing the number of positive cases. It may take up to two weeks to be symptomatic, though, so the number of cases will just continue to rise. Hopefully, things will soon calm down, as we start the second week of the shelter-in-place order. 

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