DWIM(.nl)

I have been crunching some numbers.Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we have had a little over a million contaminations in Holland and a little over fifteen thousand casualties in a few days short of a year (1.038.156 and 15.017 on February 17, 2021 respectively).We know that 90% of casualties is over 70 and two thirds is over 80, and in Holland life expectancy is a little over 80.

I have been running Windows and Linux side-by-side in dual-boot since forever. Switching between OSs this way is a pain, but the best I could get for a long time. Worse, the dual-boot configuration seems to hamper the Windows update process, so my Windows 10 version was beginning to get outdated.Previously I have considered:Running Windows 10 in a VM on a Ubuntu host with an illegal version of Windows (which I object to) or buying an extra license (which feels stupid, because my laptop came with Windows pre-installed).

I am a firm believer in the Pareto Principle which states that in many cases 80% of the result is achieved by 20% of the effort, and, consequently, that the remaining 20% of the result takes 80% of the effort. This means, if you can live with 80% of the result, you are 16 times more efficient than when you insist on the 100%.

Yesterday, our prime minister told us to keep it up. The current corona measures in The Netherlands are extended for weeks and months. The policy makes perfect sense.Except that it doesn't. To me.To me it felt like our government is working from a different set of rules than I would. And that made me wonder what their basic principle is.

We have been in Corona-lockdown for about 5 weeks now, here in the Netherlands. As we are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel, it is time to start thinking on how we can get out of it.DisclaimerI am no expert by any means. The views below are just my personal dribble. Follow the official guidelines of your government.

In some ways the COVID-19 pandemic reminds me of the Y2K bug. I remember in the late 1990s there was a lot of FUD regarding the millennium bug. If we didn't act, civilization as we knew it would end. Public facilities, like communications, electricity and water, would grind to a halt and crucial databases would be lost.

In my previous post on COVID-19 I predicted that mid April we would be past the worst in the Netherlands. This post is an update.Last week [25 March, Dutch] the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment gave the first careful signals that things were getting better: the daily growth of new patients was slowing down.