Don's Home Blog Christmas Letter

Anyway Happy New year. We Survived the weather and COVID in 2023.

The highlight was fun with Arthur, my grandson who turned 4 in November. I'm still working on going thru the 100s of pictures.

The weather was the issue this year in Davis (atmospheric rivers), and Tahoe (snow). Tom and Brooke survived the recent Pacific surf with 30-40 foot and higher waves at Half Moon Bay just south of their home near the ocean in Moss Beach.

Tahoe Snow We Survived the second snowiest year in the Sierra Nevada mountains since 1946 when UC Berkeley's snow lab was established at Donner Summit. At one point we had 10 feet on the back bedroom roof of our cabin in Homewood with a combination of snow and ice which I calculated exceeded the capacity per the building codes code by 3 pounds per square foot. We had 3 feet of soft snow on top of 6 ft. of icy snow the day before a rain which would have soaked into the soft snow and probably done us in like several neighbors. We got it removed down the icy stuff where the water would run off. image.png That's the roof of my bedroom behind, Arthur who turned 4 in November, and me 2 weeks after we removed the snow from the roof. It was up to 10' in the yard.

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Atmospheric Rivers in Davis Back home in Davis we had the first atmospheric rivers I can remember in the Sacramento valley; Over an inch of rain in 1 hour. I had a 5" deep river running down the narrow path between my front and back yard which came within an inch of coming in the dining room door. The roof downspouts went into path and the backyard and the backyard sloped toward the front yard. I guess contractors forgot their high school physics; Gravity makes water go downhill.

I got some help to dig a 8-18" deep 40 foot long french drain.

Web notes: My retirement hobby. You can stop reading here unless you're a data geek like me. I was a math major at UC Davis, like Keith, and was a statistician at Pac Telephone for 5 years before getting sucked into computers.

COVID: 15 years ago in my Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training we had a session on pandemics. We might have to go around with hazmat suits knocking on doors to see how people were doing. What pandemics? We have modern medicine and ways of controlling these things in the 21st century. Enter COVID. I was tired of the media saying there were 1,000 new COVID deaths somewhere. 1,000 is nothing in California but significant in Nevada. I just wanted to know how many infected people I would encounter in Safeway, so I started computing infections per 100,000 people. The media eventually started doing that also. I was able to avoid COVID until the day after Christmas, which delayed this.

I stopped updating COVID stats regularly when the counts hit a low of 1 new hospitalization per 100,000 per day this summer, but started going up again in the Fall when the annual winter surge started. As of today the number of hospitalizations and wastewater testing are 70%-75% of where we were a year ago. It peaked in the first week of January last year. The CDC stopped counting infections and deaths and are using hospitalizations as their primary statistic.

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image.png 1/3 of Davis' population is undergrads at UC Davis. The weeks after Thanksgiving usually have a spike in cases as they return. image.png Wastewater testing is the best measure we have at the city/county level now. I don't know what's going on with Davis and Sacramento now.

I couldn't find current data for Placer Co. See https://donsnotes.com/health/corona.html Sacramento and Bay area wastewater charts at: https://soe-wbe-pilot.wl.r.appspot.com/charts#page=overview

Here is the bottom line for COVID.

As of December, 20 2023 the officially reported world death count from COVID-19 is 7 million. Cases and deaths were significantly undercounted, but here is an estimate of the real bottom line. As of January 2023, taking into account likely COVID induced deaths via excess death counts compared to pre COVID years suggests the pandemic had caused between 16 and 28 million deaths (0.2% - 0.4% of the population). But it is much lower than the 1918 flu with somewhere between 17 and 50 million deaths (0.9% - 2.8% of the population then).

Happy New Year, Don PS: I don't know how many of you know, but the Scouts rebuilt the wall around the McBride plot at the Cemetery. We just had to pay for the blocks. image.png