DAY 20: Community Quarantine

    DOGS- Ten days more to go. Dogs are wonderful company. 

   One thing I like about Jaya, my dog, is that she does not jump on me and scratch me, she is not like Koko.

    Koko has a different temperament, likes to run, jump, bite, scratch, anything that would attract attention. Of course, he does not know that he is hurting me.

    Jaya is nice. She sits or stand besides me, relaxed and chilled but beware she will attack anyone who tries to get near me especially Koko.

    EARTHWORMS- I have been practicing trash segregation in our household for years now but it is not as strict as it should be especially when I am busy. But despite that I have a compost pit. Ideally, composting needs lot of ingredients to speed up the process, like rice hull, or wood dust, mixture of green and dry biodegradable material, water, soil l, etc. But I do not do that, I just throw leaves, food stuffs, papers, etc, into the pit and leave it there. 

    The water coming from the sink keeps the area damp and wet which promotes decomposition.

    When I need soil, I scrape the bottom of the pit. An ideal soil, has to be loamy and not compact, different grades, right pH etc. Complicated based on what I see on you tube or read about it. Some even have testing kits for it.

    But I have one surefire way of telling whether soil is good for plants or not, earthworms.

   If there are earthworms in the soil, it's good.   

    DRY SEASON AND COVID- Will the dry season in the Philippines help contain COVID? There are posts about this a few weeks back saying that the onset of the dry season in the Philippines will stop or contain the spread of SARS-Cov-2 (the virus that causes covid). 

    I for one believe that this is so since most of the countries with the worst infection and mortality rate are countries in the temperate zone. It's it too early to tell here in the Philippines but compared to France with 50k + cases and 4k+ death  vs. a population of around 66 M, ours is still small relatively. 

    Of course it can be argued that we are not testing as aggressively as France and other countries in Europe. Granted, but let's use the realtively small number of deaths at 100+ with a mortality rate of 3-4 percent vs. a population of 100 M, it still small, as of this time compared to Europe.

    Anyway, Here is an excerpt from a research paper on High Temperature vs. COVID:

    " Rough observations of outbreaks of COVID-19 outside China show a noteworthy 

phenomenon. In the early dates of the outbreak, countries with relatively lower air 

temperature and lower humidity (e.g. Korea, Japan and Iran) see severe outbreaks than 

warmer and more humid countries (e.g. Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand) do. 

Considering the natural log of the average number of cases per day from February 8 to 

29 as a rough measure of the severity of the COVID-19 outbreaks"

      This is the link to the paper.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551767