The Okie in Isolation: DoorDash and the Johns Hopkins Map

By Bobby Neal Winters


We did Mexican last night.  I discovered DoorDash.  It is an app that lets you order food from local restaurants and have it delivered.  You put in your credit card; select your restaurant; choose your order from their menu; and order it. You will have put in your credit card and your address when you set up the app.
They bring it to your door and leave it there.  You don’t have to meet them.  Just pick up the sack with tongs, dressed in your hazmat gear and you are good to go.
We had a nice meal and felt better out ourselves for supporting one of my favorite restaurants in town.
In addition to El Caballo de Oro, they deliver for Wendy’s, Sonic, and a number of others.
I’ve been thinking about how this disease (or any disease) is transmitted.  I’ve been looking at the Johns Hopkins map. It shows the number of those infected and the number dead.  Zooming in on the Kansas map, I was stricken by how the cases were distributed in Kansas.  Highway 69 is a straight Euclidean line coming directly out of Johnson and is clearly delimited by the little red dots of contagion.
Johnson county as of this writing has 32 confirmed cases. Highway 69 is the way we get there from this part of the state.  I suppose that if anyone wanted to use this it would help make a case about how important Highway 69 is to this part of the world.  There would be those who would say, yeah, it brought us disease; I can’t argue with that: It brings us everything.
The map does provide a good illustration of how disease spreads. You get first in the hubs, the places where the roads cross.  From there it spreads to the secondary hubs.  From Chicago to Kansas City; from Kansas City to Pittsburg; from Pittsburg to Girard; from Girard to Hepler.
These transitions take time.  Lowering the bump means increasing the length of time in these transitions.
Take this same model and move it to a town.  Say a Rotarian comes back from Johnson County with the disease.  She gives it to people in the club.  They go to church the next Sunday, not know they have it.  They give it to Catholics, Methodists, Presbytereans, and Baptists.  They send their kids to school and day care and bam, it is everywhere.
So we shut down the local hubs.  We watch some more TV. We order in.  Some DoorDash from Sonic sounds good.  Maybe tomorrow.