Christmas Card Preamble

Every year I really think "this is going to be the year that we send Christmas cards". Of course every year we don't actually send them, but I've heard many times that "it's the thought that counts"; and so, I guess that's pretty impressive because I've thought a lot about it.

But since there's no actual physical Christmas card, and I might not even get around to writing a virtual one (even if I do I could never top the Californication-themed Christmas card of 2013), here is the preamble to a potential but by no means guaranteed virtual Christmas card 2020... [update: it is now New Years Eve so this will actually be the Christmas Card / Year-end Card].

2020 was a fun year for the Pemulis Family. For the first time ever we started the year off as a family of four and we were lucky enough to wake up that morning of January 1st safely in Canadian farmland with zero knowledge that a pandemic that was already getting underway in the Far East would upend all of our lives in just a few short months.

I had recently returned from a successful business trip to California where my colleague and I spent half the time working and half the time discovering the whiskey joints of the Mission district in San Francisco. We attended a San Jose Sharks game, took the commuter jet up to Seattle as all the cool tech bros do, and ate fried chicken at Patricia's Green with sparkling rosé that cost $25 a glass (paid for by the company, natch, as they will never run out of money... haha kind of a foreshadow for all you readers out there -- and to be honest the company only paid for part of it). How were we to know that not long from those times my colleague would be laid off along with half of the rest of the office and there would be zero more flights to California (or anywhere) for a long time to come...

Before the pandemic got underway, however, we spent a wonderful week at the Hotel Fuente de la Higuera in the Ronda region of Spain in February. You might have read about this very trip in some greater detail on this blog. In March Heinrich had his first birthday and we secured a place for him at his future Krippe. These are very exciting and important breakthroughs for parents with kids in the 21st century, by the way.

Observing my calendar we basically did nothing from March to July but at the very start of July we managed to escape our confinement and "unwound" (not really due to kids, but overall it was still nice) at a cottage in the Austrian mountains. Our ultra trail race at the Zugspitz was cancelled but in early July we used our "rain check" to sign up to hopefully try again next year.

In August, even though somehow it's not on our calendar (what an oversight), we spent a week in Italy again to "unwind" (not really due to kids) and celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary. Twelve years!? Can you believe it? Insane how the time goes by. And because 12 is such an obvious connection to the dial of a watch, Joelle got me a very nice watch to commemorate such a momentous occasion that I wear with pride.

The rest of the year somehow just kind of burned right by and here I am finishing this up on the evening of December 30th (ok so it's not quite NYE but we're super close) dreaming of the arrival of the great vaccine. It's been hard not being in Canada for Christmas time but some parts of being here have of course been nice too. We look forward to a hopefully different outcome next year and for sure I will write a Christmas Card about it.

Christmas in Quarantine

2020. Four syllables (or five, depending on how you say it, but no sane person would not say twenty-twenty, right?) that will surely for all time produce a deep visceral reaction in those that have lived through these 126 years 12 months. What a funny year. In February we were staying near Ronda in Spain on holiday and had heard something vague in a news article or two about a mystery respiratory illness in China. Shortly before flying home we heard news about the outbreak in northern Italy, which still seemed like a problem a million miles away both physically and mentally. Quickly it felt a little more real as we passed through the airport in Munich but it was still something very "out there" as opposed to, say, "next door". The day that schools finally shut down and my office was closed in mid-March had an obviously surreal feeling, and the days that followed were not as difficult as they would eventually become because there was not only a tinge of novelty, but a sense of togetherness in that we were all living through this crazy thing and we would survive together and it was kind of mysterious and different and strange having to venture to the grocery store. We discussed seeing people with masks which was so odd at the time, especially in contrast to now where if you see someone without one then you immediately know something about their politics and self-centredness. The summer brought about a calm before the storm where guards were let down and things actually weren't that bad -- at least in many places such as here in Germany -- with a bad day in virus news meaning a few hundred new infections instead of several dozen thousand like we have today. We were fortunate enough to spend some time at a mountain-top cottage in Austria and later in the summer we spent a week in Italy. On both trips the virus was never too far from our minds but it only passively affected us in that, for example, we wore masks in the hotel hallways and -- while the weather was thankfully beautiful -- made sure we ate all of our meals outside.

The second wave in the Fall is something that experts basically told us was a certainty but it seems everyone is still surprised by the seriousness of how bad things have gotten. It has perhaps never been so different from now but there is indeed a pervasive feeling in society that if something sounds contrary to what we want then we can just imagine a different reality and that will be the one that comes to pass. Unfortunately people's resolve have further crumbled with the length of this "thing", the amplification of ridiculous conspiracy theories through social media, and the in-vogue societal distrust of governments, experts of any kind, and international organizations. It feels so useless to even mention but the hypocrisy of populist right wing elected officials has helped a huge amount in bringing us to this point. Wearing a mask is tyranny but banning abortion is pro-life. Not being able to go to a bar is an unjust oppression but killing innocent black people is just a mistake by otherwise upstanding police officers. What can you expect when you have elected officials like these?

On the one hand, modern technology and modern society will perhaps help to make this pandemic short(ish) lived with up to 3 or more vaccines having recently been shown to be highly effective in preventing Covid-19 and being developed, tested, and brought to market in a timeframe that is near unheard of (while most vaccines require between 10 and 15 years to develop and become available, the fastest until now was the Mumps vaccine which required a little over four years). There is also the speed at which we learned about the disease, other technologies such as mobile-phone-based contact tracing, and newly-developed treatments that have kept death rates much lower than they surely would have been years ago. On the other hand, however, people are basically stupider than ever and (well, it's not totally their faults, it's the platforms themselves which are a huge part of the problem) will believe almost anything. If something is repeated to you over and over again in a Facebook echo chamber, evolution has given you no ability to overcome the inundation. Seeing conmen in movies sometimes might lead you to think "no way someone would believe this in real life" but there are literally millions of people -- including people dying at that very moment of Covid-19 -- who believe that it's a hoax. W. T. F. This is not a fringe really anymore; there are millions of people in the United States who believe Trump won the election and that it was stolen from him by fraud. Many of those same people believe that every single world leader (well, except Trump and Bolsonaro, I guess), every single corporation, every single doctor, nurse, public official, scientist, whatever, has somehow got together in a huge secret club to collude to invent a disease that they are suffering from at that very minute. And why would they do such a thing? Of course there's no single answer, but one of my very favourite conspiracy theories is that the hoax was created to force the world to accept taking a vaccine with an embedded microchip so people can be tracked. Imagine! The guy writing this conspiracy theory just logged into his smartphone using a fingerprint sensor, where he connects to a mobile phone network using a device with sub-metre accuracy GPS, has given all of his photos and social connections to Facebook, and all of his purchase history to Amazon, and he's worried about a tracking chip that could not possibly exist in a vaccine to help bring the world back to whatever normal sort of existed before. Un-fucking-believable.

But, there is some good news. Despite Trump's and unbelievably, yet sadly believably and I suppose inevitably, senior republicans' protestations to the contrary, Joe Biden, who by any measure and all accounts seems to be an honest-to-goodness Good Man who holds ideals of living in and supporting an actual civil society and trusts scientists and loves more than just himself will be the next president of the United States [in-line footnote: my very favourite outcome of the Hunter Biden "Laptop Scandal" that the Republican Party and Fox News, et al. tried desperately to push during the waning days of the US election and that led to somehow having some of Biden's son's e-mails released is that Joe Biden is basically a good dad]. While I thankfully do not live there, the direction of the US has some (obviously) pretty important ramifications on the directions of the rest of the world. As mentioned above, there are at least 3 vaccines that early data seems to suggest will help put this crazy 2020 behind us. Germany may start vaccinating people as early as December 15th. Biden will put the US back into the Paris Climate Agreement as of his first day in office. Maybe the world will survive at least a little longer. Thanks to the announced vaccines Lyft stock is way up and so maybe one day we'll be able to buy a cottage. So really, good news all around.

**********

Until we all start getting vaccinated, there is still a life to live. For only the second time in 8 years, and the first time in 5 years, we will not be able to make the long trip to Canada this December/January to celebrate Christmas. That sucks. Especially with small children who provide zero breaks to try to restore your sanity and not many options for distractions with limited social engagements and pretty cold temperatures outside, things can feel pretty difficult, frustrating, and generally draining a lot of the time (however we won't have to fly with Heinrich at this stage of his life so thank God for that). Don't get me wrong, I know that we're extremely privileged and lucky in almost all aspects of life, but this year has presented a lot of unique challenges that are especially felt (INTER ALIA) by those with small children and who do not have family close by. We do, however, have something different to look forward to: Christmas in Quarantine!

Christmas in Quantine, Munich, 2020/2021 was a period consisting of approximately four to six weeks during the Covid-19 Pandemic that ravaged much of the world towards the beginning of the third decade of the third millennium where a series of Christmas celebrations took place without the participants actually going anywhere, seeing anyone, or doing much of anything (note that in parallel there were multiple more traditional Christmas celebrations held predominantly by Republicans, conspiracy theorists, and other people who only care about themselves and/or are very divorced from reality). It was a strange period in history to say the least, but people made do often with the help of alcohol, modern technology, and self delusion.

Our Christmas in Quarantine started just this past weekend when Helga and I put up our new outdoor Christmas lights in the backyard. Helga and her mother then built this year's Adventskrantz which is currently burning one candle strong, and I broke out for the first time this year Tramp Records' Santa's Funk & Soul Christmas Party Volume 1 on vinyl as we enjoyed the remnants of what one can find on the first Sunday of Advent at the local bakery when you show up 3 minutes before it closes.

Christmas in Quarantine 2020 continued today, December 1st, with, appropriately enough, our first snowfall of the season. Later today we will open the first entry on our coffees of the world Advent Calendar and sit back and relax for perhaps up to 7 seconds before Heinrich tries to throw my stereo to the ground or Helga tries to strangle her little brother to death.

I hope to report back with additional happenings as they happen from this very special, very unique, and very original Christmas in Quarantine 2020. Until then, stay healthy friends!

Helga's Back

 Hello!  It is I, Helga.  I have not for a long time added to the blog of my father, so I would like to do this.  I am, of course, fluent in French and German (I also have a smattering of Italian), but my English is a little, how you say it, “rusty,” so I will use this opportunity to practice my English.

What is new in my family?  Well, the most vexing question of today is this: Does my dad look like a famous professor at Harvard, where students go to become incredibly wealthy internet entrepreneurs (this means in English “people who start their own business and then buy up everyone else’s business”), or does he look like a graduate of the University of Guelph, where students go to become knowledgeable about fertilizers and husbandry?  Many of our relatives have “weighed in” (metaphysically speaking) to this debate.  I don’t really care because in my future career as dancer/supermodel/Jeopardy contestant, it will only be important for my dad to look like me.  You be the judge: 

Looks like my dad?  I don’t think so.

My dad looks as good as me?  For sure!

 

Heinrich, stop biting!  It is not seemly for future dancers/supermodels/Jeopardy contestants to have bite marks on their otherwise flawless skin.  And get a haircut!  I have had my hair cut several times and it just keeps growing back.  You will not lose your hair like our father did because he did not get the right genes, which were mistakenly given to our Uncle Tom.

What else is new?  Well, I used to want to be a princess but since my grandmère Lisa has been reading to me about the Princess in Black, I have decided that being a princess is way too much work.  Always with the monsters that eat the goats!  Why does she not move to a safer neighborhood, like my cousin Zoe and my cousin Maya, who are moving to Oakridge?  There are very few monsters in Oakridge, outside of the ones who attend Oakridge Secondary School.  And the Princess in Black has to ride on a horse.  In Germany we have Audis and Mercedes and BMWs (not Volkswagens—those are for the serfs); we do not ride on horses.

In my class at school, I am often mistaken for American.  This is more horrible than being on a horse.  Everyone knows that Americans are crazy and virus-ridden.  (This does not mean that they ride on the viruses like on the horses.  English is a weird language.)  Every night I am made to promise my parents not to move to America when I am a famous dancer/supermodel/Jeopardy contestant.  There are monsters in America.  Who would ever move there?  Better that Heinrich bites me than that I move to America.  Perhaps I will move to Oakridge, where my cousin Zoe and my cousin Maya are going.  I would have a lot to teach them about being a dancer or supermodel, but not a Jeopardy contestant because I don’t need that kind of competition.

Grandpère Mike says that I should not be a “smart aleck” because then people will not like me so much.  However, being a smart aleck will be useful when I am bantering with Ken Jennings after he replaces Alex.  Also, it will make me a very good host of Der Schwächste fliegt!  I can use my smart aleck look and say, “Da wollen wir doch mal sehen, wer unsere kostbare Studioluft lang genug weggeatmet hat!”  I will wear the Princess in Black outfit and instead of chasing monsters I will chase the Schwächste off the stage.  What fun, is it not so?  (Excuse my French.)

 

Der Schwächste fliegt! 

What a year

It's Sunday, October 18th, 2020. Pemulis lives in Munich with his wife Joelle and two small children Helga and Heinrich. Twenty one years ago to the day (or so) Pemulis was eighteen years old and wheels up on Air Canada XYZ non-stop to Paris. Bill Clinton had more than a year remaining in his second term. The world was on edge awaiting the Y2K crisis. And who could have imagined two decades ahead and the arc of history that would transpire. Not this dude.

In the intervening years Pemulis returned to Paris a half dozen times or so, one time "hitchhiking" from Leeds "for charity", another with Joelle taking advantage of the early 2000's hedonism of 10₤ EasyJet flights, and another with Joelle and her family on a summertime train trip to the Big City from deep in the provinces (aka Grenoble). It's funny this awe that a city can possess; Joelle doesn't seem to feel that same attraction to the City of Lights but Pemulis sure does. If she felt a little softer on the subject we very well might be living there now (well, the Gilets Jaunes and the burned out cars and the crime and all that are kind of a drag and a stirring in the heart doesn't necessarily make for the number one reason to live in a place but whatever). But I digress.

Tying together the above-mentioned arc, another propitious event took place on this date just two years ago today. For on October 18th, 2018, Pemulis embarked on a new career as a soldier on the front lines in the ongoing holy war against cars. Or at least the war on human beings driving them. There have been highs and lows in the time between then and now, but as the wise Swedes Axwell, Steve Angello, and Sebastian Ingrosso (aka Swedish House Mafia) reassured me, besides to not worry not worry child, Heaven has a plan for me.

And so it was that last week (or so) Faceless Multinational Transportation Company X masquerading -- or "branding itself" -- as Friendly Progressive Transportation Company Y made the unsurprising decision to close the Munich office. This does not mean that Pemulis is out of work; rather, it means that he will continue, for now, pushing digital paper from the Ikea patio furniture (the Askholmen to be precise) not from a modern office in Munich's downtown core, but from his daughter Helga's bedroom for the foreseeable future.

So status quo, more or less. But symbolically? Perhaps something more, and perhaps just the push that Pemulis and family need to take the next step.

What might that step be? Well, theoretically one could live anywhere when one's office is your own home.

Boy are there options. Now options are, generally speaking, an objectively good thing. An Instagram Post once told me something along the lines of "wealth is not being rich, it's being free, and being free is having options". But then if the option of not having to choose is available then one might justly choose said option and that would be just as free as having more options, if you get my drift.

It would be great if little Helga and little Heinrich could keep up their language skills. Moving to the mountains in BC would be all English all the time; moving to the mountains in the Allgäu in the Bavarian Alps would be all German (and perhaps some Bayerisch) all the time; moving to Paris (remember the first two paragraphs?) would be good for some French. Munich has German and a great French school. What about a return to the Capital of the Alps? Shouldn't I at least learn German before I move away? To be fair, we've only lived here seven years so far...

The Covid-19 Biergarten Experience, redux

About 16 weeks ago (or so), the lockdowns were lifted and we experienced our first Covid-19 Biergarten Experience. A lot has changed since then, but a lot has also stayed the same: masks upon entering, fill out the form indicating the details of your next of kin, drink 5 more beers than usual to forget for just one evening the world that we somehow currently live in, the usual...

It was your typical Corona Sunday in Bayern and the family made a short trip to the local Beer Garden for a much-needed Bavarian dinner fix. The sun sat low in the sky on a warm still-clinging-to-summer evening. By this point in 2020 the children had lost all semblance of social skills, connection to reality, and ability to cope with anything, and the adults were not any better. We ran into some acquaintances who were entering the Garden at the coincidental same time as Pemulis & Co. and much like a hilarious sitcom episode re-running on Netflix the acquaintances asked us if we would like to join their table; as in the TV show, Mrs. Pemulis tried as she might to silently show her extreme disapproval of the idea but following the perfectly honed over time formula, Mr. Pemulis goofily accepted the invitation happily and prepared the audience for an evening full of laughs for some and pain for many others.

The first (and probably most severe) disaster happened when Pemulis ordered a cold, fresh, delicious Weißbier but was instead delivered what the good Bavarians refer to as a "Russ": Weißbier mixed with sparkling lemonade. Now, I'm all for a good Radler (sparkling lemonade with Helles) on a hot mid-morning bike ride, but sitting in a beer garden on a Sunday evening sparkling lemonading down a perfectly good beer for no reason other than to upset a customer? Well, I never...

When Helga disappeared the first five minutes were really quite lovely. It's easy to all of a sudden get lost in a moment when you happen to be enjoying it and are not busy having stress take over your body and doing whatever can be done to keep the temperature of your blood below the ignition point and realizing that Hey! it can actually be relaxing sitting around having dinner with your family but then things come crashing down and it quickly becomes clear that the only reason things seem OK is that your child is nowhere to be found.

Don't worry she was eventually found behind a tree where she had attempted to pee I guess (hopefully) on the ground but actually peed all over herself. Par for the course and all that.

Heinrich had a small cold which developed the previous week at Krippe (pronounced "KRI-PUH" and which means DAYCARE) that was basically completely gone by the time we arrived at our allegedly relaxing Sunday evening outing. The acquaintances were also sitting with some of their acquaintances and Joelle sat down with Heinrich on her lap next to a man from this latter group and he asked how serious we were about this whole Corona thing and if it was OK if they sat next to one another. Joelle told him that she should warn everybody that Heinrich was a little bit sick because of Krippe but the man didn't hear Krippe he heard Grippe (pronounced "GRI-PUH") which sounds really quite close to Krippe but instead means influenza. Surprisingly he got up very quickly and made one of the most disgusted faces I've ever seen. Quite something, really. Somebody explained that Joelle had said Krippe, not Grippe, and things continued as they would but in some ways the atmosphere was never really quite the same. Pemulis ordered another beer and made sure they didn't dilute it with Sprite.

Then the Biergarten people lit the Tiki Torches. Luckily it turns out that Tiki Torches are only a White Supremacist thing in the US and they were just a nice looking way to light up the beer garden once it got dark. Unluckily, however, it turns out that kids just love fire. We left shortly thereafter.

All in all another enthralling Covid-19 Biergarten Experience. 8 / 10. Would go again.

Urban Arrowing and then Disaster

You might as well just call us Copenhageners. We are now officially a cargo bike family. It is pretty rad. It was the heady days of Summer 2020 and though we were still right in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic we were doing our darndest to adapt to the New Normal and it was high time that we upgraded our family transportation options. Despite my long-standing proponent nature toward the virtues of public transit, powers beyond our control had obviously pushed that option further down the list of things one has any desire to participate in due to not wanting to die and/or spread disease. With two small children instead of just one we found ourselves landlocked so to speak and somewhat sequestered to a more-or-less 5 km radius surrounding our abode if we wanted all to participate in any kind of outing. One option would have been the ever-dependable automobile. I looked at prices for the quite handsome Porsche Panamera, however, and -- because if I'm going to buy a car that is the car I'm going to buy -- moved on to the next option on the list. And that option was a family cargo bike. Not just any cargo bike, of course. The Porsche Panamera of cargo bikes: the Urban Arrow Family.

Yes, it's a beautiful transportation machine. It's as good as it gets for a Copenhagener, IMO. And we were embracing the Dutch Life wholeheartedly. We dove in with both feet (or whatever you say). We went to the Isar, we headed towards the mountains, we were embracing life. And then, Heinrich took a giant bite out of the side of the bucket, and we came crashing back down to Earth.

Is this the new normal?

Welcome to Summer 2020: home of the new normal. I'm surprised that there are people who -- I think anyway -- are able to act like nothing is any different and life continues as normal. What a crazy trip. I feel like life is on hold. We can kind of do a lot of the things that we're used to doing and that we want to do, but every now and then there is some big reminder that things are more than a little weird right now.

Helga starts farm camp on Monday. Ah the classic list outlining for parents what their kid needs to bring on the first day of camp. Sunscreen, rain boots, 2 face masks that fully cover the mouth and nose, a hat, a water bottle, antibacterial wipes, rain clothes, and plenty of disinfecting hand sanitizer.

We are hoping to go on a holiday to Italy next month. I found one hotel that looked promising. They even outlined their new special procedures: you don't have to wear a mask when you're at your table eating, but of course when you get up to go to the buffet you do. And you don't serve yourself. There is now a glass partition between you and the food and you ask the staff -- who wear full face protection -- to serve you what you would like. And the pool is open! Using a "special anti-viral form of chlorine" (???).

We bought (well, ordered) a cargo bike recently. It is an Urban Arrow Family and it is mad wack. But to try it out and fill out the forms choosing all of the accessories which you need and which bring the total price to greater than what we paid for our first car, we had to wait in a line outside as only one group / family / whatever in the store at a time and of course you have to be wearing a mask the whole time.

But once it arrives it is going to be sweet!

Österreich und Corona

This past weekend the Pemulis family left Munich for the first time in 5 months. We drove deep into the alpine mountains of Salzburger Land in Austria where we had rented a cottage for a 4-night getaway. The cottage sat at approximately 1400 metres above sea level in a small town surrounding an alpine lake called the Zauchensee.

The trip got started as I made my first use of public transportation since March to head to the north of the city and pick up our rental car. As somehow seems to be rather common (and which you wouldn't expect in Europe -- let alone Munich) I was led to a Ford station wagon. It was pretty sweet with all the standard cool stuff you expect nowadays like rear camera, radar alerts, integrated navigation system, etc., but often ending up with a Ford when renting a car in Germany feels a little weird.

I successfully manoeuvred the shiny black estate car toward the south side of Munich and before heading home I had a quick stop to make at the local baby store where we had on the previous day purchased a very expensive child seat. The man (I should say boy actually) installed the seat in our car and I was ready to head home to start packing up the car. First, however, I experienced a very authentic Munich Moment when leaving the parking lot of Kinnings Baby: besides my rented Ford, there were 5 other cars in the parking lot. 3 Audis -- all station wagon A6s, and 2 Porsches -- a Panamera and a Cayenne. So clearly this was one of the "common" baby stores...

Over the next 6 or 7 hours (approximately) we packed up the car to get ready to go. Somehow this takes longer every single time we go anywhere. But finally, after a lot of stress and struggling, and tears and sweat, we were all loaded up and off we went! One nice breakthrough of this car trip (both out and back) is that Heinrich was happy in the car! He didn't cry at all and he slept a little in both directions. This is a huge development as with every single other car trip (including as recently as February when we were in Spain) he would scream at the top of his lungs for the duration of the ride. This was, as you might imagine, less than ideal. Spoiler Alert: while he learned to be happy in the car, he is further than ever from learning how to sleep.

We arrived at the cottage quite late in the day and of course we had an original plan of grocery shopping in the nearby town after arriving but upon arrival the grocery store was already closed. Since there was no food in the cottage, Helga and I headed down the hill to town to get a pizza (or 4) from the local pizzeria. Interesting that while in Germany there are strict regulations about mask-wearing, in Austria no one was wearing masks in the grocery store (which I went to the next morning) or in the restaurant. While of course here in Germany you don't wear a mask if you're sitting at your table (you have to eat after all), all of the employees are doing so at all times. Here it was as if Corona didn't exist. It was almost strange in its semblance of normality. Anyways, we paid for the pizza and headed the 10 km back up the hill to our cottage for a traditional Austrian dinner: take-out pizza.

I will spare the details of the night as it was the same as at home and repeated each of the four nights that we were there: Heinrich not really sleeping at all and screaming and yelling as loud as he could for a good portion of the night. Fun times. In other unfortunate news Helga had caught a cold (it did take 3 weeks of being at Kindergarten for it to happen though) and so she wasn't sleeping that great either -- but nowhere even close to in the same universe as the disaster that her younger brother represents during the nights.

One of the highlights of the area where we were staying was the high quality hiking and trail running. We went for a couple of family hikes

and both Joelle and I got to each do a couple of epic trail runs covering quite a few hundred metres of elevation gain.

On Sunday we took the chair lift up a few hundred metres to explore the mountain a little more. Another funny thing about the regulations here is this: as I mentioned previously there are no requirements for masks in stores or restaurants. However, for the open air chair lift, with only our family members on board, masks were required for everyone aged 6 and above. Weird.

But the trip and wearing the required masks was worth it because up high on the mountain it was really nice, we had some nice lunch (beer for mom and dad and ice cream for Helga), and there was a big Spielplatz.

All in all it was a nice short vacation and great to get out of the city for the first time in a very long time. We look forward to our next excursion to the mountains... coming soon!

The Covid-19 Biergarten Experience (TM)

In this brave new world we need to adapt or die (so to speak) and eventually life must go on. If you step back and think about it for more than two seconds it's really quite astonishing that this is "a thing" but it is and so we accept that there has to be a balance found between keeping people alive and the other very important thing of companies continuing to make money. And so there's a push from politicians / businesses against the push from public health experts about when and how much to open up economies and societies and whatever else and I have to admit that people also need to be able to do things that make them human like socialize so it's not all just greedy business owners. But, in doing these once-normal things, we can't just jump right back into how things were before (though unfortunately many will see the opening up of life as we knew it to mean exactly life as we knew it and put all of us in danger but that's another story I suppose). We have to adapt and to participate in things like, you know, living, we have to approach it quite differently. Restaurants can now open here in Germany but tables have to be some very large distance apart and everyone has to wear masks (except when they're eating of course), etc. And then there's the ever-so-important part of Bavarian social and family life: the Biergarten...

The Biergarten / "Beer Garden" is -- not joking -- like really important in Bayern. It's not the roped-off licensed area for over-19's at outdoor festivals like in North America. It is where you go on Sunday with your family and friends. A beer garden isn't really a beer garden without a playground for children and, unlike in a restaurant, you sit wherever there's room and it's not weird at all to share tables. You're supposed to. You have to. It is all very informal, very low-stress, and very relaxing. But not so much in the Covid-19 times...

To research this story, on a recent unfortunately rather blustery day -- a Sunday, in fact -- I visited a popular local Biergarten with both family and friends. The very first thing that you notice that is now different than before is that when I said above that the Biergarten is not what they often call the "beer garden" in North America, one of the many aspects making it not that kind of beer garden is its openness; there is almost never any kind of specific single entrance or exit and there are definitely not gates or barriers or something of the sort to clearly delineate and enforce what the confines of the Biergarten are and are not. Well, not anymore. The Biergarten was roped off with a single entry point and a single exit. Fine. But related to these people funnelling devices is a new requirement which makes sure that you do not forget that you are living in the time of Corona. There is a long table with stacks of paper forms and some pens. It looks very much like the registration area at a small running race where you can sign up the day of the race but you first have to fill out a form and then pay your entry fee. Here, however, you must write down the name, address, and phone number of your entire party as a form of analog contact tracing. This is the primitive version of what Apple and Google are trying to do with mobile phones and what China is probably doing by Satellite and Artificial Intelligence. The idea is that if anyone who was at the Biergarten on that day eventually gets Covid-19, then everyone who was also there will get a call saying you had better quarantine yourself and you had better get tested. Now I'm not 100% sure how this information gets back to the Biergarten people. Like I'm not sure if it's voluntary on the person who gets sick to remember they were there two weeks ago and to call the place up and say "hey I was there two Sundays ago -- can you call all those people?". I sure hope not because if I got sick with Coronavirus I think the last thing on my mind would be "hey I better call that Biergarten where I was a couple of weeks ago before they hook me up to this ventilator"...

On the way through the entryway you have to wear a mask. When you go up to buy your beer (only bottles except they'll give you a glass for Weißbier because drinking Weißbier out of the bottle would be unthinkable for a German, Corona or no Corona) you also have to wear a mask. When you are sitting at your table (tables are now all spaced nicely far apart) you do not need to wear your mask. When you arrive at a table there is a small laminated card saying that this table is safe to sit at because it has been disinfected. When you leave the Biergarten you must bring that card with you on the way out so that people know your former table is now contaminated. They will then sanitize the table and put a brand new card back on so that the cycle may repeat itself.

All in all the visit was pleasant. While we probably wouldn't have chosen by ourselves to let Helga go play in the Spielplatz, it may have been therapeutic to have that outside push by the anonymous parents of the child she really wanted to go play with and for whom playing in the playground was clearly no problem at all. And it was definitely therapeutic for Helga (as long as she doesn't get Corona as a result). She needed that freedom and social interaction and for a brief moment in time she almost looked like a kid enjoying life and living in simpler times. Perhaps we can look forward to one day experiencing more than just a moment.

Corona 5: Scheiße

"Corona Virus ist nicht schön!" Helga likes to say. She has been known to be correct about some or even many things, and in this particular situation, she is right again. The Corona-Krise is affecting many people in many different ways. We are (so far anyways) much better off than many people (and we are thankful for that) who have really been directly affected but it seems no one is immune from the secondary effects. Just last week the high tech offices of [LARGE MULTI-NATIONAL PEOPLE TRANSPORTATION CORPORATION MASQUERADING AS FRIENDLY PROGRESSIVE START-UP] here in Munich were hit pretty hard by said secondary effects when approximately half of the office was laid off. Our GWMD protagonist Pemulis was thankfully spared but things will certainly change -- and not necessarily for the better -- with these drastic and unfortunately quite unexpected Corona-Krise upheavals.

In other very related news, Germany has started to "gradually" reduce the social restrictions on society and as anyone with half a brain could have told you, the results are already frustratingly disappointing; from The Guardian: "Germany sees infections rise again after easing lockdown". Well duh. The problem is not necessarily with the letter of the law -- the estimated transmission rate had dropped to somewhere around 0.5 in the last weeks. Having a closed economy and keeping kids out of schools can in many cases be worse than the disease itself and a number that low warrants some changes to the blunt instrument of total lockdown. But as is almost always the case, there is what the law says, what can be and is enforced, and what people interpret as the repercussions, severity, and seriousness / necessity of laws and regulations. In this case, if you look outside in almost any city in Europe, one can very successfully apply the adage: give people an inch, and they will take a mile.

It seems that people's default understanding of rules are to the letter, rather than the spirit, of those laws. And unfortunately, the spirit of the law is generally what matters. Perhaps the regulation changes should have read something like "you may now gather in groups... if you absolutely have to". Without those last few words -- which are of course lacking -- people seem to generally take the rule as "you may now gather in groups... because there is no more danger of any kind whatsoever... why not have a BBQ? Have a big party because all the badness (TM) is over". It is nicht schön being the pessimist / realist here, but I'm fairly sure this is not some transient disruption to our lives that will end and then everything will go back to normal. Barring the fact that for many people their lives will never be the same again, for everyone we have to come to the realization that life might forever be different. It has to be.

As of yesterday all stores in Germany can open. Anyone inside the store -- customers and employees alike -- must wear a mask, but it's still kind of crazy. The transmission rate is estimated to have gone up past 1.0 again and that was really fast. Especially because you'd think that many sensible people are taking either a wait-and-see approach or at least are understanding the fact that while we can go out and do more things, it doesn't mean that we have to. I would like nothing more than a return to something resembling normality: being able to go to my office so that I could actually concentrate on work for more than 7 minutes at a time; going for a walk down the Maximilianstraße past Cartier, the State Opera, and the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten to get a really good coffee; buying a couple of groceries on the way home without worrying and spending 30 minutes wiping them down with antibacterial wipes once I get home.

The big difficulty for me, I think, is not being able to have a specific future to look forward to. There's always been a running race or a trip somewhere or a visit from a friend to point to in the near future and know that it's something that's coming and so the current pattern of getting up, working on something, figuring out dinner, cleaning up, and going to bed will at least be broken up for a little bit in a little bit of time. But it's hard to hold that hope right now because our future is anything but specific.

Corona 4: infection rates and cool graphs

Covid-19: the fun never ends. So you've heard about the lockdowns beginning to "ease" in Europe, the redneck / right-wing nut protestors in the US, and definitely -- for a while now -- about flattening the curve. But how, other than going stir crazy inside and politicians and business owners getting worried about re-elections and profits, respectively, how can we know when it might be safe(-ish) to start lifting restrictions, going back to "normal" (whatever that will be), and -- most importantly -- knowing how and when the virus might be starting to go away? The answer is (or more accurately, part of the answer is): the infection rate (aka "R_t: the effective reproduction number", even better aka "The Metric We Need to Manage COVID-19").

R_t is, as the name of this article suggests, the "effective reproduction number" or "infection rate" and in this case we of course mean for Covid-19 (what else would anyone be talking about these days?). Similar in some ways to the replacement fertility rate, which is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime required to sustain a given population, R_t can tell us what we can expect to happen in a population -- but in this case, how the virus might keep spreading or start to slow down. For replacement fertility, the important number is right around 2.0 (it's a little higher due to some other factors like child mortality rates but for our purposes and in general for the developed world you can think of it as 2.0). If the number is < 2.0 in a country, eventually (without immigration), the population will disappear. If it's > 2.0 then the population will grow. Easy, right?

It's similar with the effective reproduction rate. But in this case, it tells us the average number of people that an infected person will infect. If it's > 1.0 then the virus will keep spreading. If it's < 1.0, then the virus will eventually disappear. As Tomas Pueyo put it in this excellent article The Hammer and the Dance: "If R is above 1, infections grow exponentially into an epidemic. If it’s below 1, they die down." Let's look at a simple example:

1. Imagine 10 people have the virus and we are experiencing R_t = 2.0. Then those 10 people will each infect (on average) 2 other people. So then we have 20 new cases (eventually the original 10 people will get better, we hope, or, sadly, will stop being counted as "active cases" in another way). Those 20 people, with the same infection rate, will each infect another 2 people each, and now we have 40 new cases. Et cetera...

2. Now imagine that 10 other people have the virus, but because of social distancing, self-isolation, and other "restricting" measures, the R_t has been pushed down to, say, 0.85. Those 10 people will then infect a further ~8.5 people (we can round up to 9 to be conservative), who will then infect 9*0.85 = 7.65 (or around 8), who will then infect 8*0.85 = 6.8 (or around 7), until, eventually, there's no one being infected.

So, obviously, the point of the lockdown measures (among other things) is to push R_t down towards 0. And we can only consider opening things up if we are confident that we can keep R_t below 1. From The Hammer and the Dance again:

In Wuhan, it is calculated that R_t was initially 3.9, and after the lockdown and centralized quarantine, it went down to 0.32.

But once you move into the Dance [easing lockdown measures], you don’t need to do that anymore. You just need your R_t to stay below 1: a lot of the social distancing measures have true, hard costs on people. They might lose their job, their business, their healthy habits…

As long as you can keep the infection rate under 1 until there's a vaccine, then we can prevent another outbreak. With the background in place, we can now finally get to the big question and (hopefully) some answers: what is R_t currently in different places, what has it been in the past, and where is it going?

What is R_t right now?
Unfortunately, as you can probably imagine, we can't compute an exact value for R_t. It is a latent (hidden) variable. We can observe the effects of the infection rate, though, which is (of course) the number of people being infected. The way one does this is (duck for cover): statistics! Probabilistic inference! And most exciting of all, Bayesian inference! What a coincidence that the author of this blog's PhD thesis was on this very topic! Now, there are very few things in the world that tend to be as boring and/or annoying as someone explaining their PhD thesis work, so I will try to keep the explaining part to a minimum, and the cool results part to a maximum. Sadly, there is some background that I just can't help myself but feel that I have to lay out here. It will be super basic though.

Bayesian statistics uses Bayes theorem to understand degrees of belief in events happening. The main important thing that distinguishes it from frequentist statistics is that we infer probabilities of events based not only on running many trials and building up statistics, but on our prior belief (encoded as a probability) that something will (or will not) happen. We're mainly interested in computing posterior probabilities which (thanks to Bayes theorem) are understood to be proportional to the likelihood of our data given some proposition being true, times our prior belief that the proposition in question really is true. Tiny obligatory simplified example of coin tossing time. In pure frequentist statistics, if we flip a coin 5 times and each time it comes up heads, our model will predict that this coin will be heads 100% of the time. In Bayesian statistics, if we encode a prior belief that, like most coins, it will come up heads 50% of the time, then our model will have a more sensible prediction that (depending on the likelihood and prior functions that we chose) will be closer to predicting that heads will come up maybe a tiny tiny bit more often than tails. If we keep running experiments and after 1000 trials (for example) we still see heads coming up like 950 times, then the evidence (aka likelihood) will overwhelm our prior belief and we'll again come to the conclusion that this coin is not very fair and is in fact weighted to come up heads a lot more often.

It's well known that we are not able to count every single person who gets infected (for example, recent research suggests that Covid-19 may be between 50 and 85 times (!!) as prevalent as official figures suggest). Thankfully, however, as long as we use the same method to count the number of people infected, it doesn't really matter for our purposes if it over- or under-estimates the raw numbers -- as long as it's more or less consistent.

Our method
This is great because I love Instagram so much: the guys who created Instagram have created a website, rt.live, which not only calculates values of R_t for all of the US states (and graphs them really nicely), but also explains their method and provides some code that we will use to extend their analysis to places that readers of this particular blog may care more about; namely, Germany and Canada.

As Kevin Systrom does at rt.live, we will use a variation of the Bettencourt and Ribeiro method (probably no relation to the Milwaukee Admirals sniper Mike Ribeiro). This method uses Bayes' Theorem with the following setup:

P ( R_t | k ) = P ( k | R_t )  P ( R_t ) / P ( k )

This gives an expression to calculate the probability of R_t given k new cases, or P ( R_t | k ). This is the posterior probability (see above) that we're interested in. This is equal to:

- The likelihood of seeing k new cases given an infection rate of R_t, P ( k | R_t ), multiplied by
- The prior probability (or prior belief) of what R_t might be before we've seen any data, P ( R_t ), divided by
- The probability of seeing this many new cases in general, P ( k ).

Oh dear, this is already getting a bit complex. But please bear with me for just a little bit longer and then we'll get into the nice graphs, I promise. I will spare you the actual inference calculation, but we need to at least understand what we will use to model each of the expressions mentioned above.

First, the likelihood function. Since we're modeling counts of something, we will use the Poisson Distribution. From our friend wikipedia, this models the "probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time or space if these events occur with a known constant mean rate and independently of the time since the last event". It has a single parameter λ (lambda) which is the expected number of occurrences. After some derivation, we can connect λ with k (number of new cases) and our famous rate R_t. It's like this:

which can then be plugged into the Poisson Distribution and we get a nice formula for our likelihood:

Remember that we know k_t-1 (it's the number of new cases on the previous day). Those who have studied biology will probably recognize our expression for λ as a standard exponential growth model. Note that the γ is the reciprocal of the serial interval (γ ≈ 1/7 for Covid-19).

So what does this likelihood function actually look like? Consider an example where we have 4 days of data: on day 1 there were 20 new cases, day 2 had 40, day 3 had 55, and day 4 had 90. Then, the likelihood of R_t for each of these days looks like this:

Next let's look at our prior. Remember this is our prior belief how likely values for R_t without having observed any data. Because the value of R_t for one day will probably be very close to its value on the previous day, we use a normal (Gaussian) distribution with a mean equal to the value of R_t on the previous day. Therefore our prior looks like this:

where σ is a hyperparameter that we can estimate (or just use some "sensible" value) and is the Gaussian's variance. An example prior distribution P ( R_t ) with R_t-1 = 3.9 (an estimate of what the initial value was in Wuhan) and σ = 0.3 (we can choose a good value by maximizing the likelihood of our observed data) looks like this:

What this means is there's a very high probability of the new value being around 3.9 again (in fact it is the most likely value) but there's quite a spread of possible values (and getting exactly 3.9 is actually extremely unlikely). For example, if we integrate the probability distribution function above from 3.0 to 3.5, this tells us the probability of R_t falling between 3.0 and 3.5, and that probability is 18.24 %.

Finally, we're ready to combine the prior probability with the likelihood function and perform inference with our observed data. All we have to do for that is multiply the prior by the likelihood and normalize.

Applying the model to real-world data

The Worldometer is providing up-to-date numbers for new confirmed cases of Covid-19 across the world. I gathered the data for Germany and Canada on Thursday, April 23rd from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/ and https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/canada/ respectively. Here are the total number of cases for Germany and for Canada starting on March 2nd:

Just looking at the graphs above, while Germany has a lot more total cases than Canada (almost 4x as many -- Germany has ~150,000 while Canada only has ~40,000), it looks like right now Germany's cases are growing more slowly, and therefore likely has a lower R_t. Let's find out!

We can see more clearly in the following graphs that indeed Canada's new daily case numbers are currently going up, while Germany's are going down (we also show a "smoothed" curve -- and use that in our model calculations -- because it helps control other unseen errors in the observed numbers like people who didn't get counted, etc.).

Again, the raw numbers are bigger in Germany, but the fact that those numbers are going down is what's important. Let's see those infection rates!!!

The data points show the maximum likelihood estimates of the infection rate for each day and the grey shaded area shows 90% of the probability density interval of our posterior. You can see that we get more confident of the estimate range as we gather more data. In both cases, the good news is that the trend for the infection rate is clearly on the way down. For Germany, as the initial data suggested, the infection rate is slightly lower than it seems to be in Canada and perhaps it is enough for a very cautious gradual re-opening of the economy (but I personally doubt it).

The graph looks nice, but here are some more specific numbers for the last few days, first in Germany (left), and then in Canada (right):

The tables above show the maximum likelihood (ML) estimate -- i.e. the most likely value for R_t followed by the low end of the 90% probability density interval and then the high end. For Germany, our best guess for the current infection rate is 0.77 and is almost for sure not lower than 0.49 and almost for sure not higher than 0.98. For Canada our best guess is 1.08 and it's almost for sure somewhere between 0.81 and 1.30.

So does this mean that things can go back to normal any time soon? I'd say... definitely not.