Daily coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - April 11

Relatively stable, getting about 4k cases/day in Germany. I expect that to drop slightly because the current infections probably stem in part from the few days when we had 6k+/d infections. Not sure what easter will bring because I'm seeing a tad too much activity out there for my liking so far. Lots of talk about relaxation of measures but I'm not convinced it's time just yet.

There's also been a lot of talk about app-based disease control: The RKI(our cdc) has solicited "data donations" from users with fitness tracking devices. They're looking to infer a fever from resting heart rate, to get a large-scale temperature reading. 100k users on the first day, they're hoping for a total of 1m users. Beyond that, we're talking about a contact tracing app: It tracks possible contacts anonymously by bluetooth (if they use the app too), if you are a suspected case, these contacts can be told to stay home with trivial effort. The Chaos Computer Club, the german associations of hackers and ITSec folks, has released 10 criteria to judge whether a privacy impact is worth the effect, mostly focused on making it skinny and trustable. I doubt we'll get that right on the first go, the CCC has (justifiably) very high standards.

All voting in November should be done by mail, Monterey election officials recommend

The push for postal voting is coming from the ground up: “Many of our polling places and poll workers have indicated that they will not serve in November due to the virus and the state of emergency,” the report says, noting that poll workers tend to be older and belong to the vulnerable populations.

The resistance by poll workers has been building since before the March 3 primary election, which took place about two weeks before the county issued its shelter-in-place order; 190 poll workers quit rather than potentially risk exposure to Covid-19.

Feeling a bit shit since two days, tired and a bit hot/cold. If I'm lucky it's an low symptoms covid but it's probably nothing, or just cabin fever. On the bright side of things my sourdough starter is looking pretty good.

My Grandma may be mentally degrading in assisted living due to being shut in a room all day with only mild stimulation from however long Mom's at her window every day, and Mom is considering either staying in with her if that is even possible, or bringing her back home, which probably isn't a great idea, but there are no great ideas here.

Edit: Assuming that my Grandma stays in assisted living, they do have wireless setup, so we might be able to run a simple video conferencing setup. Wrapping my mind around setting one of those up beats the alternative.

New Brunswick, Canada. No new cases today for the second time (though not consecutively). Seventy people recovered in my province and around forty active cases. No local deaths throughout the pandemic so far, but two in ICU and one on a ventilator... they are looking to see if any recovered people will donate blood for antibodies for the ICU cases.

This... has actually gone better than I assumed it would. The hospitals are not overwhelmed here and we are trending down. We may be able to start opening things up again soon (relative to other places), as long as we remain prudent and do it slowly.

My ideal would be to keep the provincial and national border restrictions in place even after we've had no new cases for a while, but open things up internally. This would allow us to function as a province in a self-contained way, and I think that would be good for not just us but also our neighbours. Once our own "oxygen mask" is on we can focus effort outward.

One thing I am slightly concerned about is that the restriction of provincial borders is definitely not supported by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I have the right, as a Canadian citizen, to travel freely within my country per section 6 of the Charter. I don't really know how to feel about this... maybe I would feel better about it if we invoked the Emergencies Act or had SOME kind of official national declaration so at least it doesn't feel like we're just ignoring the Charter willy-nilly, but this is like, the one incredibly specific circumstance when it makes sense to suspend free inter-provincial movement.

This is something worth looking into... probably soon, but also not right this second. I hope some clever lawyers and politicians can figure it out.