SPRING FORWARD 2ND WEEK: Here are the second week's pictures. The starting point, as usual, is the view from the deck. No change from last week, except it was cloudy when I took the picture this week. The scrub brush, which I am assidously attacking with the brush cutter, is beginning to poke through the leaves, but the trees have yet to show signs of budding out.

This is the Road from Nowhere (our house) with the driveway bottom right. During the summer it's typically a tunnel. Right now it looks like a freeway.

The third picture is the house taken from out beyond the fire pit. Our 'yard', in which I've assiduously attacked with the brush cutter, is clear for now. Hopefully it'll remain clear as summer returns, but I have my doubts.

And the final picture is the pond again, showing the walking path that goes around the perimeter. I've avoided cutting the brush along the pond side in past years, but this year I think I'll get the heavy boots, a safety rope, and attack it. It's a good 3-4 feet to the water, and very steep, but needs a good cleaning.

Till next week, then. Last week's pictures are here.

WUHAN FLU [CORONAVIRUS] UPDATE: Here's today's data, updated around 6 pm.

Note I've changed the scale again on the Cases Reported graph. Reported cases are still growing, a little more steeply for U.S. cases. I was probably a little overoptimistic yesterday is describing the data plotted on a log scale. Globally, the cases are still growing exponentially, though the rate does appear to be slowing over the past three days or so. For the U.S. data, cases are still growing marginally exponentially, though the rate has been slowing consistently faster than the global data and for a longer period of time.

Death rates are still trending higher, more so in the U.S. Still, both are below (far below for the U.S.) the 1% rate of a normal annual flu season. The apparent increase in death rate for the U.S. is a bit puzzling, in that I would expect increased testing would find a larger percentage of people who are ill, but not in serious danger of death. Unless all -- or the majority of -- the testing is performed on people who have been or are going to be hospitalized. This one is worth watching....

Reminder: today 99.79% of the U.S. population are (still) virus-free. That number has been dropping slightly for over a week now, which suggests that the increased testing is having the effect of generating real, useful data.

I FUCKED UP. So I'm going to sue you for responding to my fuckup. NY Gov. Cuomo threatens to sue Rhode Island for crackdown on New York visitors.