I'm not dead yet

It's been a week since I wrote anything here. I haven't caught the flu, and am doing my best to avoid it. Other than going to the grocery store, I've been avoiding going outside. When I do go out, I've made sure to avoid opening any doors with my bare hands and touching things that someone sick may have touched.

The new figures state that over 1 million people have been sick in the last 3 weeks. This amounts to roughly 2% of the population. about 50,000 have been hospitalized, and 170ish have died. This means that if you happen to fall into the 2% of people who manage to get sick, you have a .017% chance of dying. Clearly you can see what has everyone worrying about a flu pandemic. From what I can read, this is on par with historical (and annual) flu outbreaks in Ukraine. It's just that this year its H1N2. As the week has gone on, you can see even more how the entire thing has been politicized. One day one of the presidents aides even mentioned the possibility of declaring a national emergency and pushing back the election because of the flu. ...The election in January. That idea has been put down since then.

As for me, I've been keeping busy with odds and ends of work that needs to get done. I "get" to reread all of the reports I previously wrote and edit out any politically sensitive/offensive information. Fortunately there isn't too much, and it's mainly related to the labs in Uzbekistan. Still, I'm going through all of the reports and making sure everything is good. In the process I've also found various typos that I made in the reports I turned in (like spelling 'patent' as 'parent'). Considering that it's been maybe 1 or 2 typos per report...and there was 140 pages of original writing...I'm not sure if that's a good sign or a bad sign.

I've also discovered that Ukraine gets Scotland weather in the winter. It's dark by 4:30 every day, the sun doesn't come out, and there's a 50% chance of rain everyday, and a 90% chance of drizzle. As I said while I was in Scotland years ago - no wonder everyone drinks by 9AM and smokes all day.