The Unplanned Shutdown of Jan 2022 Continues to Spread

Two weeks ago I wrote Shutdowns Are Here, Planned Or Not. Contrary to public officials and talking heads assuring us "This is not like March 2020" and thus no shutdown measures are necessary, unplanned shutdowns have continued to spread. The huge number of recent Covid cases means a lot of people are sick and unable to work. In addition there's a knock-on effect of people who've been exposed needing to quarantine and thus being unable to work in-person jobs.

There's an old saying, "A failure to plan is a plan to fail." The impact of the failure here is a cascade of unplanned last-minute cancellations upending people's schedules and causing chaos. We've seen the impact in everything from the flight-cancellation mess around the holidays, to the 1000s of motorists stranded on I-95 in Virginia (too many snow plow operators were out sick to keep even this #1 most important artery in the region cleared), to the chaos in school systems across the country as they try to resume after winter break.

I've minimized my personal level of chaos the past few weeks by taking a "We're in a shutdown" stance myself. That's also minimized my risk of exposure to disease. Practicing voluntary shutdown is frustrating, though. It feels like April 2020 all over again— except it shouldn't have to be like this.

Trouble Seeing My Doctor

Recently, though, I have gotten hit by one of the unplanned emergency shutdowns: my doctor's office! I've been trying to schedule an ordinary followup appointment. (I have a prescription drug that's not producing the desired result, and I want to discuss a better treatment plan.) Last week my appointment got rescheduled three times due to doctors suddenly becoming unavailable for the whole day. Early this morning I got a note that my appointment today was canceled because the whole office is closed. And apparently will be closed for a few days now. Can you say, "Covid-19 cases?" Nobody there admits to that, but it's pretty obvious from what's happening.

At the moment I've rescheduled to a telemedicine appointment Wednesday. The doctor is only taking telemedicine appointments for the next 2 weeks. That sure sounds like she's having to quarantine! Again, though, nobody's admitting that. I'll see on Wednesday if she's able to help me adequately or if she's way less than 100% because of "Covid Brain". 😨

New Coronavirus Cases Spike to Over 1.4 Million in One Day

One week ago the US hit a new record in the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic: over 1 million new cases reported in a single day. I noted at the time that the Jan. 3 tally of 1,018,935 (it's been adjusted upwards a tad since I published my Jan 4. blog) was a bit of a statistical anomaly; it was on a Monday following a holiday weekend. Some states don't report data on Sundays or holidays, so Monday counts almost always show an artificial spike.

Well, today's Monday, and there's another spike. And this one dwarfs last Monday's spike. Today's tally is 1,417,493 per the New York Times' Covid in the U.S. page (retrieved 10 Jan 2022). Here's a graph of recent case numbers:



Along with this extreme new high in daily new case numbers the rolling 7-day average has continued to increase. As of today it stands at 737,415. Suddenly last week's spike isn't so anomalous.