Flattening the Curve Too Much

There's been a lot of talk, during the 2020 virus pandemic, of the need to flatten the curve. The reasoning, which is valid up to a point, is that hospitals don't have enough equipment (e.g., ventilators; Galion hospital for instance has two of them) to treat as many people at once, as would need to be treated if the virus ran its natural course. This is true up to a point, as you can see in places like Italy, which didn't flatten the curve nearly enough and have consequently seen a disturbingly high mortality rate. The American medical care system would be more difficult to overwhelm than that of most other countries. American culture is obsessed with medical care; on an average day, something like 10% of the population receives medical care of some kind, and that's if you don't count prescription drugs as medical care; if you do, it's more than 50%; so our medical care industry is pretty substantial. It's expensive (and Americans spend a disturbingly large amount of money on medical care), but it's substantial. Nonetheless, we don't want to be in the boat Italy is in. We want to flatten the curve —up to a point.

But there is such a thing as flattening the curve too much.

I live in Crawford County. It's difficult to get an exact population figure, because population changes over time, but the 2018 estimate is around 41 and a half thousand. (This is down from almost 44 thousand in 2010. The population is on a long-term decline since the mid twentieth century, because most of the graduating students who go away to college, never come back. There are very few jobs suitable for college graduates here, and an employer would be mad to locate here if they need that kind of workforce, which creates a vicious cycle. What, if anything, we could be or should be doing about that, is an interesting question, which I will not attempt to address today.) It's now 2020 and we're due for a new census, but meanwhile I will be conservative and estimate that we have at least 40 thousand people in Crawford county.

We've had, according to the latest figures, which are about a day old at the time of this writing, 37 known cases of the virus. Being generous and assuming that only one case in twenty is confirmed and known (bearing in mind that some people never show symptoms), we could guess that perhaps as many as 750 people in the county have been exposed to the virus and are no longer in danger of catching it, either because they already have it, or because they are immune. (The difference between already having it and being immune may be of great personal importance, but for the calculation we are about to do, it actually doesn't change the figures, so it's something we don't need to distinguish in our estimates.) The true figure is probably markedly less than 750, but I'm being conservative here.

We started canceling stuff back on March 6th, and at that time we had 0 cases in Crawford county. (Some people were already being tested; but those early tests ended up coming back negative.) Our number-of-cases figure is from April 20th, a difference of more than six weeks. If the curve were linear, this would mean we'd need to stay home for about six more years. The curve is, as the word "curve" suggests, not linear. Technically, it's still an exponential growth curve. But we've flattened it so much, that the difference from linear is not nearly as dramatic as you'd normally expect. For the last month, the only time the statewide increase in reported cases has been noticeably different from linear, was in the last few days, when comprehensive testing in the prison system confirmed a large number of already-suspected cases. Prisons are a particularly problematic environment, for a variety of reasons (nursing homes aren't much better), so you expect a higher curve there. For most of the state, and especially for smaller communities, the curve is effectively so close to linear as makes no practical difference. Maybe we won't have to stay home for six years, but if something major doesn't change, it's going to be months and months and months. Which is really not ok.

We have flattened the curve too much.

We cannot, realistically, all remain cooped up at home for even one year. Inevitably, at some point, we are going to have to start going out again. And then the curve will be less flat, possibly a lot less flat. The natural shape of this curve, when people aren't all staying home, is very steep. I propose that we would have been better of with a curve somewhere in between these two extremes. Flattened, but not so completely flattened.

Vacation Observations: on Currency

I just got back last night from a nine-day vacation trip with my sister. Yes, yes, photos will be forthcoming at some point. Meanwhile, a few observations. Tonight I'm going to focus on the currency.

• There are some things I like about Canadian currency...
  • When you're counting it, you never worry that two bills are stuck together. That's basically impossible, because of how slick they are. I am not using the word slick for its colloquial meaning here: the bills are quite physically slippery. This feels really weird to me: they don't feel like US bills, that's for sure. But it's nice not to have to triple-check that you don't have two bills stuck together.
  • I could get used to the color coding. It looks weird at first, but it's pragmatically reasonable. You don't easily mistake a red fifty for a blue five or vice versa. Most of the colors were a bit stronger than they would really need to be, so yes, it kind of does look like Monopoly money if you're not accustomed to it (more subdued colors would still be easy to tell apart at a glance), but on the whole I think I like the coloring.
  • If you'd told me that I would like not getting pennies back (they round everything to the nearest nickel if you pay in cash), I'd have said you were crazy. But with the large pocketfuls of change that I was accumulating as it was (more on this below), I really really didn't need pennies too.
  • I didn't accumulate that many nickels and dimes either. Prices seemed to often work out to multiples of $.25. Maybe this was my imagination, but I don't think so. I think places of business deliberately set their prices so that with tax, the final price you pay comes out to a decently round number. This is in stark contrast to our American system where practially every single thing is priced to require pennies, nickels, _and_ dimes to each be involved somehow. (Our prices start at figures like $24.99, so you'd think oh, you just get one penny back, no big deal; but with tax, it doesn't work out that way.)
• There are also a couple of things I dislike about Canadian currency.
  • Canadian currency does not stack nicely. Americans can take a big stack of bills, fold the entire stack in half down the middle, and conveniently store the whole thing in a pocket or wallet. This, as near as I can tell, is fundamentally impossible to do with Canadian bills. The slickness (mentioned above) may be a contributing factor, but I think the big issue is that the bills are so stiff, you can't fold two or more of them together and get them to fold in the same place. They won't both fold down the middle. Maybe one of them will, but then the other will fold in a different place, perhaps a third or a quarter of the bill's length from the end. So even with a small stack, say, six or eight bills, you end up with a pocket full of individual bills that are each folded differently and won't stack together well, so when you pull them out you feel like you're pulling out a fistful of random scraps of differently-shaped colored plastic, each unique. It's a big fat mess.
  • Did I mention that I accumulated huge piles of coins all the time and then proceed to say that I got no pennies and few nickels or dimes? Yes, I believe I did say both of those things, and they are both true. So yeah, I tended to accumulate a lot of quarters, but also, there are all these one- and two-dollar coins. Bazillions of them. When traveling in Canada, you must discipline yourself to spend coins on practically every transaction, out of self defense, or else your pockets will be so full of heavy coins as to pull your pants down. It's crazy. If you buy something that comes to $12.50 with tax and you hand them a twenty, you may get back six coins as your change and no bills whatsoever. They don't even have one-dollar bills, and they don't always use five-dollar bills when they could, probably because their cash drawers are all brimming with huge piles of giant two-dollar coins that they need to give out in order to make space in the drawer. This happens with every transaction, so let's say you start out with a single $50 bill. When you break it, you get back maybe a twenty, a ten, and coins. When you spend the ten, you usually just get back coins. When you break the twenty, maybe you get back a bill (maybe a five, maybe a ten) and coins. And when you spend the last bill, you certainly get back nothing but coins. So from a single $50 bill you can easily end up with more than $20 in coins. About halfway through the trip I finally got myself trained to spend the coins and divested myself, one way or another, of all of my large ones. (Have you ever paid for a more-than-ten-dollar purchase entirely in coins? I have, and the cashier didn't bat an eye. I'm sure people do it all the time up there.) Then I realized I might need a couple of coins for a parking meter at some point, so for one day I stopped spending coins, not realizing how much overkill this was. One day does not sound like that long to go without spending coins, but have a look at the result:
  • Also, you need a lot more of it, because things are very much more expensive in Canada. The exchange rate may be a contributor here (At the time of this writing, one US dollar is worth somewhere between $1.20 and $1.25 Canadian), but that does not fully explain the prices we saw everywhere, at every point along the spectrum from rural (think: population 300 and at least 30 minutes' drive from the nearest gas station) to highly urban (Yonge Street, Toronto). Even taking exchange rates into account, your money does not go as far in Canada. I am not exaggerating when I say that I paid $2.50 (Canadian) for a Sprite refill. (Pop is one of the worst things. Almost nobody in Canada has fountain pop. They use bottles and cans and mark them WAY up. We did stop at a McDonald's that had fountain pop, in Orangeville. This makes McDonald's _by far_ the most affordable place we found to buy cold drinks in Canada, and it was still more than at McDonald's in the US, where they're known for charging too much. The second-cheapest, ounce for ounce, was Freshmart in Manitowaning, where I paid something like $3 for a half gallon of chocolate milk.)
• Finally, one observation is neither a like nor a dislike, just something I noticed: it pays to shop around a bit on exchange rates. The Duty Free in Sault Ste Marie offered me $1.14 Canadian for every $1 US, and ten minutes later at the Visitor's Center just across the border I got $1.17. Three cents on the dollar may not sound like much, but if you're changing a couple of thousand, it adds up. A few days later, the Scotia Bank in Fort Erie, where I changed my leftover money back, was paying $1.19 Canadian for $1 US. (The theoretically perfect rate at the time would have been something like $1.23, but of course you can't actually get that. Note that these numbers will not be useful for comparison if you take a trip some day in the future, because the exchange rate gradually drifts up and down over time. It pays to look up the going rates when you are preparing to go change your currency.)

So there you go, Canadian currency in a nutshell.