Covid Cases Double to Triple in a Month

Tier Tuesday was two days ago, so today is... non-Tier Thursday? There's a second thing I want to note about Coronavirus statistics this week that I didn't include in Tuesday's post focused on passing the 1,000,000 death mark. It's that even as we're passing that grim milestone in the US, our new case rates are on the climb again.

Oh, I've written about rising new-case rates for several weeks now. The rises on a week to week basis seem small: 24%, 26%, 21.5%, etc. Those are incremental changes, right? Wrong. Because when you stack them up on top of each other they become big changes. Just three weeks of 25% increases doubles the number. Five weeks triples it. Indeed, we're seeing case rates today that are double to triple what they were not too long ago.

Per figures at The New York Times Coronavirus in the U.S. the 7-day average new case rate in the US was 84,329. A month earlier, on April 11, it was 32,220. The latest rate is 2.6x just a month ago.

Two Weeks Later, Verizon Internet Still Works

It's been just over two weeks now since I finally got a working Verizon Home Internet device. Although it took nearly a freakin' month, including one stillborn system delivery, to get to that point, it did arrive not a day too soon. The day before, our much maligned T-Mobile Home Internet device conked out 4 times in the space of just one hour. That hour was while I was meeting with customers via Zoom!

By "conked out" I mean that Internet bandwidth suddenly went to zero, both download and upload, and stayed zero long enough (30 seconds ~ 1 minute) to break the videoconference connection. With T-Mobile that was sadly a daily occurrence. I experienced it at least 2-3 times a day when using the Internet at home a lot. We hoped the flaky connection would be fixed when T-Mobile finally replaced our gateway device— another phone company fuck-up that took way too many days to resolve— but it wasn't. The occasional disappearing Internet connection was due to their poorly implemented network. The dropouts throughout the day were embarrassing. They made me look less than fully unprofessional in front of colleagues and customers.

Anyway, all that negative stuff is in the rear view mirror now. The new system is in place and has been stable for just over two weeks. Now we just need to cancel T-Mobile and send back their gear so we don't keep paying for two ISPs.