According to the table below(published by the New York Times [1] today on March 20), New York has almost 7 times the amount of registered infected Corona patients compared to Washington but "only" about 0.5% of them have died so far.Let's get more curious and read the full article. We find valuable information by reading the details and then very quickly understand what happened. It is noted that 2900 of the reported cases in New York were all registered at the day of publishing the numbers. Interesting, probably it is too early for those new cases to "die". If we ignore these new cases (7102-2900), we still have a quite good quote of 0.8%. Better than in many countries worldwide. But further reading the article reveals “At least 35 of the deaths were connected to a single nursing center in Washington" and "...many of those cases involved older people with other health problems that made them especially vulnerable to coronavirus”.
- The New Yorkers are doing something extremly right and those in Washington are doing something extremely wrong
- The dirty air in New York is poison for the virus. The more CO2, the better for human beings. Bad news for Greta Thunberg.
- New York may not be a typical state for eldery people to relax...,probably more young and healthy people live there while in Washington may be a pan of sick or eldery people spend the rest of their lives there (again, this isn't meant seriously, okay?)
- New York was better prepared for this predictable disaster
- or...the measures may have been taken inconsistently and/or the numbers are simply wrong
Basel carnival cancelled, soccer games cancelled, business trips
cancelled, Swiss Testing Day conference cancelled, borders closed and
today it was announced that all flights from Europe to the States are going to be stopped by end of this week. WTF. My friends just managed to catch a plane to New Zealand...probably one of the last ones. Will they be able to catch a plane back home to manage their big farm in the Engadina? Everyday another employee is missing in our offices because he/she either feels sick or is afraid to feel sick soon. It's a weird silence. Those who dare to cough are potential suspects. Even worse if you fetch a handkerchief.
If you had predicated all this 2 weeks before, I had sent you to the psychiatrist to help you return to reality. Well, this has now become the new reality and that's why I feel baffled...where does all this end? Either, the whole racket goes up in smoke very soon or...yes, or what? Can't really think of any alternatives. It's a situation we never experienced before, hence whatever is decided probably can't be so wrong. It's all new, we are learning. We are learning to deal with a worst case scenario and we are likely to pay a high price. Can I go on a summer holiday and have a
Dear readers,
When developers want to quickly demonstrate that in principle it works, they tend to hard-code things with the intention to replace that piece of code later. But, once it works, the focus is shifted to other tasks. It is likely that one forgets about these rotten code pieces.
When Switzerland changed their tax rate from 7.6 per cent to 8 per cent, we were quite surprised that 7.6 was hard coded rather than read from a configuration file. As a result, we had to redeploy a new fix. In another example we found a code statement that made the program wait for 200 seconds. No wonder the application was slow. The developer had a good explanation why he added a wait-statement, but he mixed seconds with milliseconds.
The term "false positives" has its roots in medical testing. A false positive is an error in which a test result improperly indicates the presence of a disease (the result is positive), when - in reality - it is not present, while a false negative is an error in which a test result improperly indicates no presence of the disease when in reality it is present.
Simply said, never trust any success messages. If the program claims it worked, the program may be wrong. Vice versa is also true. When the system throws an exception, the operation may still have worked correctly, regardless of the error.
