The #171 instinct-log item is no longer a footnote. The Wuhan cluster has a name (a novel coronavirus, “2019-nCoV” provisionally), confirmed human-to-human transmission, a first US case (a traveler in Washington State, confirmed Tuesday), and — as of yesterday — the unprecedented sight of China LOCKING DOWN Wuhan, a city of eleven million, plus neighboring cities. Airports are screening; the WHO is convening; the epidemiology Twitter accounts I started following two weeks ago (the archive’s instinct pays for itself again) are doing R0 estimation with error bars that should alarm more people than they’re alarming. I’m not a doomer by temperament — seven years of this blog is mostly me telling people the sky ISN’T falling — but I know what exponential growth looks like on a dashboard before the on-call believes it, and I know that “contained” is a claim that requires INSTRUMENTATION the world visibly lacks. Filed with maximum uncertainty and minimum comfort: watch this one like it’s a sev-2 that hasn’t paged yet.
Ordinary January continued regardless, as it does: platform team week three shipped our first paved road (standardized service scaffolding — new service bootstrap time from three days to forty minutes, the #106 canary lesson industrialized); Davos discussed “stakeholder capitalism” with a straight face; and the Champions League draw sets up a Real Madrid vs Manchester City Round of 16 clash — Pep’s passing machine versus Zidane’s knockout-stage magic, the kind of matchup the group chat’s win-probability discipline (#100’s injury-time miracle) was built for.
TIL: R0 and dispersion (k) — average spread rate matters less than VARIANCE in spread (superspreading events dominate outcomes). Epidemics are hot-partition problems (#086). I wish I found that less clarifying than I do.