Corona Virus

Unless you have a large home with lots of freezer space , you won't have enough storage space for a 3 month stay at home. You're going to have to venture outside occasionally - if only to get some basic exercise and / or food. Current quarantine advice allows us to venture outside, for a brief exercise period or shopping expedition , to buy necessities during lockdown. Before you leave your home, put out a large plastic bag, for storing soiled clothes. This is for carrying possibly contaminated clothes, to the laundromat. To minimise possibility of contaminating my day to day clothes, I'll keep my contaminated clothes separate. When you come back inside, following a brief expedition, immediately strip - and put possibly contaminated clothes into the bag, for proper washing. Next, take a long hot shower, using lots of cleanser, disinfectant, soap, and / or shampoo . And of course, wash your hands , thoroughly - as a final step. I'm a child of the 1960's, ...

One important task, during the next 2 or 3 months of quarantine, will be maintaining a proper diet. We need tasty dishes, using healthy ingredients, that will be available fresh - or can be purchased in quantity, then stored, during the quarantine. As quarantine continues, some foods may become hard to find in stores. Also, should one become a victim of the disease, easy to cook food will be necessary. One staple, that I depend upon when I get the seasonal flu, is white rice. Given enough vegetables to provide flavouring, white rice is economical, effective, and healthy. One of the side effects of the normal seasonal flu - which each of us will be praying that we have, as the CoronaVirus induced fever takes over - is depletion of food in the stomach. As the stomach empties, nausea develops - and nausea discourages eating, which increases the effect of the nausea. The worse the infection, the less you eat, the weaker you become - and the more susceptible to nausea. This is ...

One of the most feared effects of CoronaVirus is not how nasty it is, how long symptoms take to develop, or how easy it is to catch from an infected person . The scary thing about Corona Virus is how likely it is to overwhelm our medical infrastructure. Hospitals in Italy have been overwhelmed for weeks . Hospitals in the UK - and in the USA - are not immune to this problem. There are not enough resources - beds, equipment, and personnel - to care for all possible victims of a pandemic, such as Corona Virus, at expected volumes. Click on the time graph below, that's based on current limited medical resources (the horizontal dashed black line - "Health care system capacity"). Compare the alternative spreads of the the disease - the tan curve ("Without Protective Measures"), and the blue curve ("With Protective Measures"). See how the blue curve stays below the black line? This represents the disease spreading slowly, and with medical resour...