Just found out this morning that someone in our neighborhood in Woodburn, Oregon died from coronavirus…it’s hitting close to home now…

Oregon Coronavirus Journal – 3-21-2020

What a difference a week makes. On March 12, Governor Kate Brown announced closure of K-12 schools in Oregon through March 31st. On March 17th, this was extended through April 28th. Governor Brown also issued restrictions on restaurants to only serve food by takeout, and that gatherings over 25 people were not allowed, resulting in multiple churches suspending worship services. Grocery stores were already being hit hard by anxious shoppers (toilet paper is still in short supply, but other food items are available).

Last weekend, I drove around my town (Woodburn, Oregon) to do some errands, and it seemed like everything was normal. By the end of the weekend, my wife and I decided to work from home. It has been a quiet week at home, but the progress of the coronavirus across the state and the world is continuing.

When I walk my dog, I see other people out doing the same. In the morning, I see construction trucks go by, see landscape trucks in my neighborhood, see cars driving on the street. Still, I haven’t gone shopping in a weekend. Other neighbors are pretty much doing the same. It’s a “wait and see” game here, even though in Washington state and New York, it’s “ground zero”. We are keeping an eye on it…

I did a little looking around to find a chart with Oregon’s coronavirus case counts, but couldn’t find one, so I created my own (Google sheet link) from press releases from the Oregon Health Authority. Here are two charts (daily cases reported and total cases):

Bookmarked We need an immediate five-week national lockdown to defeat coronavirus in America (USA TODAY)

Locking down the country would reduce infections and allow time for massive testing. There will be staggering human and economic costs if we delay.

With five states already on lockdown, I think we are heading in this direction.

Bookmarked

This list of writing strategies was designed to help all writers figure out how to make hard facts easy reading. We are sharing them again because we think they apply to reporting, writing, and editing about the current public health crisis. pic.twitter.com/qPcByb3Zjm

— Roy Peter Clark (@RoyPeterClark) March 16, 2020

A good set of writing principles for all writing.

Bookmarked Identifying Critical Infrastructure During COVID-19 | CISA (cisa.gov)

If you were wondering what qualifies as critical infrastructure or essential functions, this is it.

Bookmarked Fraidy Cat, a New RSS Reader by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)

A few weeks ago Kicks Condor released a major update of his Fraidycat feed reader. Like Kick Consor’s blog itself, Fraidycat has a distinct personality.
Key with Fraidycat is that it aims to break the ‘never ending timeline’ type of reading content that the silos so favour to keep you scrollin…

Ton Zylstra reviews the Fraidy Cat RSS reader from Kicks Condor.

Bookmarked Guide to Internal Communication, the Basecamp Way (basecamp.com)

Terrific ideas for how to work remotely

Bookmarked Exposing the Invisible – The Kit — The Kit 1.0 documentation (kit.exposingtheinvisible.org)

Extensive site with tools/processes on building skills of investigation.

Bookmarked Former CDC director: There’s a long war ahead and our Covid-19 response must adapt (CNN)

Different times call for different measures. When Covid-19 hit China, I was concerned, as were many public health professionals, about what could happen and urged rapid action to understand more and prepare. But few of us anticipated the catastrophic impact the new virus has had in Wuhan, in Italy and may soon have in many other places.

The adaptive response chart in this article is excellent – we have a long way to go…

Episode 3 of Convocast is here – check it out! I talk about ways to help collect and share information, and ways to automatically post to other sites and social media.