This morning I woke up too early again and was unable to get back to sleep. At some point I'll get one of those days when I sleep eleven or twelve hours and make up for the loss, but for now all I do is feel the exhaustion. To sort of compensate I took a longer than usual shower this afternoon. It didn't help much, though. I'm still pretty tense, and being cooped up is undoubtedly part of that. Also I totally forgot to try the egg-balancing thing at the moment of the equinox. Ah, well, next year, if there is one, and I'm still around for it.
As of today there still were no confirmed cases of the C-virus in Butte County, but given the scarcity of testing equipment and the fact that the mini-metropolis is a college town with a lot of kids likely to have minimal or no symptoms, it's far from a certainty that there are none at all. Still, the news had me tempted to make a quick run to Trader Joe's. Not only would I really like to have some lettuce, but the last of my milk has gone sour, and I'm running low on chocolate. I opened a package of cookies to substitute for my donut today.
Then this afternoon Governor Newsom issued an order effective tonight for everyone to stay home as much as possible. Workers providing essential goods and services are excepted, of course, but everybody else can go out only to go to grocery stores or drug stores. The statistical projections based on the trajectory of the virus so far predict that 56% of California's population would become infected over the next eight weeks unless strong measures to curb transmission were taken. That's close to 25,000,000 people, and even if only five percent of those needed hospitalization, which would be conservative, the state's hospital facilities and medical personnel would be completely overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, Governor
There's still an awful lot of traffic on that freeway. It makes things seem inappropriately normal.
Read. Sleep.