Life with Rona – Days 46, 47, and 48
It is clear that weekends away from a computer are good weekends. It is funny because this is not normally something I do normally, but I think I am working a lot harder during these fun times (timezones really are what gets to me).
Saturday was eating up yesterday’s chicken rice. Did a workout with Psycle London instead (when I burn my SoulCycle London credits, I may actually be a convert to Psycle, since it is nearer to where I stay, and their community output is amazing during this lockdown). Sunday was puttu for brunch, and yong tau foo for dinner. Ping did an amazing workout, and it was from her new studio, and they had a limited edition mat for sale, which I naturally purchased (maybe 6 minutes after launch). Needless to say, it sold out. Today, I did a workout with Lye at FlyProject, which was a killer. Breakfast was roti telur, and dinner was a burger.
Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Saturday: 6,176 (+105) total cases, 4,326 (+116) recoveries, 103 dead. To note, 94 are local transmissions, which continues to indicate community spread.
Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Sunday: 6,298 (+122) total cases, 4,413 (+87) recoveries, 105 (+2) dead. Local transmission at 70, the rest being imported. 27 in ICU bends, 13 on ventilators.
Malaysia’s Covid-19 situation on Monday: 6,353 (+55) total cases, 4,484 (+71) recoveries, 105 dead. 48 cases today were local transmissions! 28 in ICU beds, 13 on ventilators.
Gyms can’t reopen, but long before, there was already a good open letter in Sarawak. We need to see this happen in the Klang Valley (and elsewhere, I guess, but clearly, I am being selfish).
They said the reopening is not rushed, and a little more on border controls. The fact that we are using less than 30% of our capacity is good news (I should think the MCO time was to also build out capacity). We’re only using 1% of our ventilators (OK, capacity clearly built out there). Today’s CMCO should have seen more people move about, but TomTom traffic data suggests not really. After all, 9 states disagreed with the federal ruling, so I presume a lot stayed at home today. Interesting to see that the threat is lawsuits if the shutdowns aren’t lifted, and the laws have been gazetted so we should travel without fear.
I’m still staying home until the MCO is lifted (so it will end on May 12).
I know nothing about pawnbrokers and today was somewhat of a busy day so I did retweet pictures of queues outside pawnbrokers. We see this from Malay Mail: As MCO continues, Malaysians seen lining up at pawn shops for much-needed cash and we see this from The Malaysian Insight: CMCO first day sees big rush for the pawnbrokers. One suggests problems with people’s finances, the other suggests it is just people paying interest, kind of like on a bank loan. Then there are Google Trends, which shows a steady interest over time in the term “pajak gadai” (look at the subregions, Perlis, Terengganu, Kedah, Kelantan, and Negeri Sembilan tend to prefer this term), whereas “pawn” seems to be in most use in Sarawak, Sabah, Penang, Selangor, then Perak, and “kedai pajak” has use in Malacca, Johor and so on. Again, if you look at the numbers in the last 30 days, things don’t seem to be all that different (similar in 90 days). But the graph for the past 7 days suggests bad things are happening with a major spike… but it doesn’t really reflect reality! So trends matter, and you want to be aware of short term spikes. And pay for your news…
