I, an ‘essential worker’

My patience is now officially blown with the lockdown.

I have the misfortune of being an “essential worker.” Because I drive for Lyft and Uber. Because I haven’t been able to find a real job in over nineteen years.[1]

I normally cut orders off about twenty minutes before sunset largely because I don’t want to be caught out traversing or picking up or dropping off in neighborhoods where the gun and knife club comes to order shortly after sunset.

But tonight, my last ride ran a bit long with multiple stops. Fine, I thought. Giant Eagle is open until ten pm.

Being vegan, there aren’t a lot of places I can eat in Pittsburgh and they’re all hurting with the lockdown. I’d really like for them to survive. And it happened, the way home from that last ride took me right past D’s Six Pax and Dogz on South Braddock in the Regent Square area of Edgewood. So I stopped, picked up their veggie hot dog and wished them all well, ate it and some fries on the way to my next stop.

I’d also noticed some bird shit (it’s that time of year) on my car earlier, so I stopped at a drive through car wash and wiped down the interior while it did its thing on the exterior.

I pulled up to the Giant Eagle about two minutes before nine pm. Guess what? They’re closed.

My patience is blown. I suffer a lot of indignities as an “essential worker.” The pay really sucks and, although I handle more of my own costs directly, I’m really on the same level as a cab driver, even with my Ph.D. The least the powers that be could do is let me buy some fucking groceries.


Israel

At this point, I’m very strongly tempted to ignore the political crisis in Israel. It hasn’t seemed to be moving toward resolution. Except, that the president there, Reuven Rivlin, is losing patience. And it seems that, in this, one of the few occasions where he actually matters, he has a few tricks of his own.[2] I’m mostly archiving this because I suspect that however all this turns out, Rivlin’s moves just might prove pivotal.

Haviv Rettig Gur, “Israel’s frustrated president threatens new elections – in a bid to avoid them,” Times of Israel, April 13, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-frustrated-rivlin-threatens-new-elections-in-a-bid-to-avoid-them/


  1. [1]David Benfell, “About my job hunt,” Not Housebroken, n.d., https://disunitedstates.org/about-my-job-hunt/
  2. [2]Haviv Rettig Gur, “Israel’s frustrated president threatens new elections – in a bid to avoid them,” Times of Israel, April 13, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-frustrated-rivlin-threatens-new-elections-in-a-bid-to-avoid-them/

Easter grumpiness

Somebody really needs to explain this closing for Easter thing.

I mean, really. Especially when you’re a Jewish family running a vegan restaurant out in the middle of fucking nowhere (okay, I exaggerate a bit here) that I have to drive a long ways to get to (40 minutes, usually, from my apartment). How does that even remotely make sense?

I buy my coffee there. I have enough for today (Monday). I’m not so sure about tomorrow. And they’re closed on Mondays anyway.


Pandemic

In the following screenshot, taken early this morning, I’m looking at the Johns Hopkins map a bit differently. Here, while the U.S. continues to have eye-popping numbers in cumulative confirmed cases, we’re starting to see a global flattening of the curve on daily cases (figure 1).[1] In evaluating hospital capacity, this is what matters.
FireShot Capture 127 - COVID-19 Map - Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center_ - coronavirus.jhu.edu
Fig. 1. Screenshot, taken at 2:10 am Eastern on April 13, of Johns Hopkins global map of COVID-19 cases.[2]

They’ve added a U.S. map, but it only shows cumulative confirmed cases, and of course there’s no flattening of the curve here. Still, it remedies some defects of the global map, in that you can actually see how many, over 20,000, have died in the U.S. from COVID-19. They really don’t have that broken out that way in the global map. And you can drill down to see the county of your choice.

There are two always very good questions that, as a human scientist, I ask:

  1. Epistemology: How do we know what we claim to know?
  2. Critical Theory: Among other things (like—this is the biggie—about power relationships), what’s missing? And why is it missing?

When the Wall Street Journal prints that “[t]he actual number of cases is likely higher, experts say, due to lack of widespread testing, false negatives and differences in reporting standards,”[3] I can see that this is correct.

I can see also that there have been nearly 100,000 more cases in the U.S. and well over 1,000 more deaths in New York City, just since I wrote my last blog post on the topic on April 9th.[4]

It’s a very scary time.


  1. [1]Center for Systems Science and Engineering, “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases,” April 13, 2020, Johns Hopkins Universityhttps://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
  2. [2]Center for Systems Science and Engineering, “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases,” April 11, 2020, Johns Hopkins Universityhttps://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
  3. [3]Jennifer Levitz, Mike Cherney, and Daniel Michaels, “U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll Passes Italy, Becoming World’s Highest,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/health-officials-plead-for-public-to-observe-a-locked-down-easter-11586592822
  4. [4]Center for Systems Science and Engineering, “Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases,” April 13, 2020, Johns Hopkins Universityhttps://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html