Being a Statistic-- Or Not?

I've remarked various times in recent weeks that Covid statistics are becoming less accurate because fewer and fewer cases are being reported. With the rise of at-home testing months ago, many people who test positive at home but have mild symptoms don't pursue clinical care, or even clinical testing, and thus aren't included in the statistics reported up through county health departments.

This issue became personal for us yesterday after Hawk tested positive for Covid at home Tuesday night. Among our many next steps I urged her to press her doctor for a PCR test. She did manage to get an appointment on Wednesday. It was a telemedicine appointment, though. And the doctor told her that a PCR test was "unnecessary". Since she had a positive at-home test and had Covid symptoms, the doctor explained, that was enough for the doctor to prescribe her Paxlovid, the antiviral drug developed to treat Covid infection.

On the one hand, the personal hand, this is good news. Hawk is getting the best treatment available, fast— no need for extra testing.

On the other hand, the policy hand, this is not such good news. Hawk's case will not be reported for statistical purposes. I state that as a fact, not a notion, because I looked up actual government policy. Our county, Santa Clara County, California, defines official cases as "A case is someone who tests positive for COVID-19 using viral testing performed in a lab" (emphasis mine). Source: Covid-19 Cases and Deaths, sccgov.org. Presumably this is a typical policy in the US.

This is an example, BTW, the discrepancy I noted in a recent blog post about how official records indicate 26% of US population have had Covid-19 while the CDC estimates it's 60%. Hawk is now part of that 34% undocumented gap, and I might be soon, as well.

No AC on Memory Lane

Writing about Covid-19 has saturated my blogging bandwidth the past two days. Now it's time to get back to something I was writing about before that: hot weather. The heat wave here continues. It's no longer the 103° we had Tuesday but it's still hot. The high today was 91°, as is the forecast for tomorrow.

The heat reminds me of the hot summers where I grew up outside of Washington, DC. It's not the same, though. For one, sweltering heat is unusual here; it lasts months straight there. And two, it's a dry heat here. There, heat and humidity combined to make it awful. Oh, and three, here I have AC and I use it.

Too Expensive to Use AC?

My parents actually had an air conditioner in their house where I grew up. It was a single, large wall unit in the upstairs living room— not the most effective thing overall, but it actually got the job done when run regularly. And therein lay the problem. They largely refused to use it.

"It's too expensive," they always said.

I don't know that they ever measured the cost for real, though. Sure, they could have. They moved to that house when I was young and could very well have tried an A-B test the first summer, watching the electric bill as they ran the AC one month and left it switched off the next. It would've been an easy proposition to test. But I don't think they ever did.

My parents are/were never the kind to actually test something that is objectively measurable. Instead they fix it in their minds that something is true, based on a dogmatic belief about what they think ought to be true, and insist thereafter that it's objectively true. Challenging their fiction provokes an angry response. An adult you'd find the subject changed abruptly. As a kid, I'd get hit if I said it twice.

Another part of the reason I doubt my parents' assertion that AC was too expensive is that they were cost un-conscious in other aspects of their lives. For example, they never planned a budget. They spent what they spent, making decisions by the seat of their pants (in a fashion similar to how they decided what's true, BTW), and charged the rest to an ever-increasing mountain of debt. They also were inveterate smokers, a habit that was way more expensive than running the AC a few months a year. Why sweat (heh) the difference of an extra $10 a month to the power company not to sleep in pools of sweat when they literally lit afire $100 a month?