Tag Archives: coronavirus

Health Department guys

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“What guys, Officer?” Vic asked.

“Health Department guys,” Joe Bob said.

Vic said, “Oh Jesus, it was cholera. I knowed it was…”

“Then they got on the phone to the Plague Center in Atlanta, and those guys are going to be here this afternoon. But they said in the meantime that the State Health Department was to send some fellas out here and see all the guys that were in the station last night, and the guys that drove the rescue unit to Braintree. I dunno, but it sounds to me like they want you quarantined.”

“Moses in the bullrushes,” Hap said, frightened.

“The Atlanta Plague Center’s federal,” Vic said. “Would they send out a planeload of federal men just for cholera?”

The Stand

Because if the Feds from Atlanta show up in their white suits, you know it is serious. They will do whatever it takes to save the country, even if it means incinerating you and everyone you have been in contact with.

Okay, things don’t turn out so well for the country or most characters in The Stand, but it was not for lack of a rapid and heavy handed government response.

the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents”

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Obama left INSTRUCTIONS for dealing with this exact situation. There almost have to be competent people in the federal government who were familiar with these instructions and did their best to implement them, but were stymied by incompetent managers or political cronies. There’s an alphabet soup of acronyms that is a little hard to decipher for the uninitiated, but a couple things stand out to me:

  • Early on in a significant outbreak outside the United States, the plan is to provide significant financial support, material support, expertise, and manpower support to both the World Health Organization and directly to the foreign country. This is a nice humanitarian thing to do, but is also the best defense against the outbreak reaching the U.S. and wreaking havoc.
  • Domestically, the federal government is responsible for figuring out how to screen, and quarantine if necessary, travelers arriving from foreign locations, whether those travelers are U.S. citizens or not (reminder: we are all the same species of semi-hairless virus-prone monkey).
  • The federal stockpile plays a key role, as does research and development on potential diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. These things are supposed to kick into high gear at the first sign of trouble. Again, sending materials and equipment abroad is supposed to be considered early on because that may be the best way to keep the outbreak from getting out of control.
  • The federal government is just generally supposed to provide crystal clear guidelines, communications, funding, materials and equipment and coordination to state and local governments and to the public throughout a crisis like this.

There was a plan, and at least some of these steps must already have been in motion and been shut down.

As you know, I try to avoid political statements on this blog, sticking closely to facts and consideration of potential implications of various policies and lessons learned for the future.

FAIL FAIL FAIL Trump you stupid asshole, you have the blood of 85,000 Americans on your hands as I write this and of course it’s not over. Obama for King 2020!

how are people really getting coronavirus?

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This blog post from a professor of epidemiology has some interesting logic. I don’t know this person, but they are a professor at a reputable university and I give their opinion some weight based on that. You can review their credentials and decide for yourself.

I took microbiology as a graduate student in environmental engineering, and I’ve done just a bit of microbial risk assessment since then. Which in no way qualifies me as an expert on covid-19. But this post did help me to think about some things harkening back to my classes, which are almost entirely absent from other media sources I am reading. In my classes and my professional work, there is a logic of dose response – you have to ingest a certain amount of material, and it has to contain a certain amount of a pathogen, for you to get sick. This usually has to do with small amounts of fecal matter present in the environment or water in my case, and the consequence typically is a bout of gastrointestinal distress curable with rest and fluids, although pretty much any disease is more dangerous to the very old, the very young, and the very sick.

That was a long preamble. You should read the blog post. But here is the brief summary:

  • If someone coughs or sneezes directly in your face, you are likely to get infected.
  • If you spend significant time indoors in a place where an infected person has recently coughed or sneezed, you are likely to get infected.
  • Other than that, you are not likely to get infected from someone breathing or even talking to you as you briefly pass on the street. You would need to talk to that person for at least 5-10 minutes to be likely to take in enough virus to get infected. That is just not very likely if you pass someone while walking, jogging, or biking. The advice of my local and state health departments is consistent with these facts. The behavior of people I observe in my neighborhood is not consistent with these facts. My behavior is consistent with these facts, even if other people in my neighborhood choose to have opinions that are not consistent with the known facts, and to try to impose those opinions on me.
  • Now, if you are indoors for awhile in a place where a lot of people are talking and breathing, and someone is infected, your odds of getting infected are high. This is why offices and schools are closed.
  • The bigger the crowd in the indoor space you are in, the more likely someone is infected. This is why conferences, religious services, sporting events, and Disney World are shut down.
  • So, people are getting infected when they have to be indoors around a lot of other people for a period of time, like in warehouses and meatpacking plants and unfortunately nursing homes. They are getting infected when they choose to attend large group events they don’t need to attend, like parades or worship services. And finally, they are getting infected when a family member goes out, gets infected, and brings it home.

technologies we don’t have

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I’ve been thinking about the technologies we have and don’t have during this coronavirus situation, and which ones we don’t have that could make our lives easier if we had them. Also, which ones we were “supposed” to have by now if we are really living in the fabulous science fiction future.

In short, farming and manufacturing are relatively automated at this point, but transportation and many other industries closer to our daily lives are not. Computer technology is pretty far along, but it is not yet all that tied to the physical world. Take autonomous vehicles and drones. The food delivery situation during this shut down has not been all that great. Computers keep track of what goods are where and who is ordering what, but the actual deliveries are mostly done by people in diesel powered vehicles. Some of those people are sick, all are scared, and they have children home from school and are worried about family members just like the rest of us. We worry in normal times about robots taking our jobs, but this is a time when if we had reliable robot delivery, whether on the ground or through the air, it would help.

Biotechnology is just not as far along as we might have thought. The virus genome was sequenced quickly, but developing treatments and vaccines is still a painstaking process, and then making and administering them on a large scale is daunting. If we had really good computer models of human bodies, computers would be able to do trillions of drug and vaccine trials in the blink of an eye and figure out the combinations that work. We just don’t understand the physical body enough to represent it that well in a computer. So again, the computing is farther along than the physical world.

Teleconferencing and remote work has come a long way over the past decade or so. When I lived abroad between 2010-2013 and worked remotely with a team spread across three continents, the technology was expensive, unreliable, and really held us back. Now talking and screen sharing are pretty seamless, thanks to the cheap ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and speakers on our many devices. Data compression and internet connections have also made a big difference. We have some cheesy background images, but what we don’t have yet are the immersive virtual reality and augmented reality that we assume are eventually coming.

plague lit

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Wired has an article on science fiction novels involving plagues, and over at the New Yorker is a long article from the more literary genre (Steven King appears to have breached this category!).

Wired mentions:

  • three Neal Stephenson novels: Seveneaves, Anathem, and The Fall, or, Dodge in Hell
  • The Expanse (which I have heard great things about but probably won’t read because the show has spoiled it for me)
  • Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (who I recently learned is a dude. I read the first book, and liked it, but didn’t love it enough to read the other two. It is one of those books I find myself thinking about though.)
  • Ender’s Game (big fan)
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I’ve been burned out just a bit on Heinlein, but maybe I’ll give this one a chance at some point.)
  • William Gibson. No specific books, just William Gibson. (I like that I have read William Gibson, but I don’t )

The New Yorker mentions:

  • A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, 1722. (Yes, it’s about that plague. Also know as the plague.)
  • The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826.
  • Oedipus Rex (mentions the plague apparently)
  • Angels in America (yes, AIDS counts as a plague, complete with a long incubation time, asymptomatic transmission, initial government denial and botched response, and eventual development of more effective treatments, although there is still no vaccine or absolute cure.)
  • The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, 1842.
  • The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, 1912. (sort of a sequel to the Poe story, apparently)
  • The Plague by Albert Camus, 1947. (I didn’t realize Camus was that recent, but that is just me being ignorant.)
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago, 1995. (“brilliant” according to the New Yorker, but just sounds too depressing for right now.)
  • And of course, The Stand.

The science fiction book I keep thinking about though, which is not on either list, is Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. In Robots of Dawn, life on Earth is nasty, brutish and short. But there is a race (of humans) who have moved to space, and they live hundreds of years in part by avoiding virtually all physical contact with each other. They can do this because the human population is very low on a large planet, robots do all the work, and they have excellent video conferencing facilities. Humans basically never come into close physical proximity, with the one exception that husbands and wives get together only for the purpose of making babies, which is surprising because you would think a futuristic civilization where robots do all the work would have discovered in vitro fertilization. At the very least, you could send a robot over to your wife’s place with a turkey baster full of…well, you get the idea.

I’m thinking about a 2020 summer reading theme. I don’t think I want a plague theme! I could do worse than dig into some Neal Stephenson novels I’ve missed. I could always go back and read some Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve never read The Stand, so maybe.

is this the great depression?

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The words “great” and “depression” are being used in close proximity these days. Joseph Stiglitz says a depression is when people only spend money on food, and by that definition we are kind of there. Noah Smith at Bloomberg says the U.S. unemployment rate currently stands around 11% and could be headed for 20% or 30%. The Great Depression topped out at 25% so by this definition too, we are headed there. The article points out that it is not just the depth of the recession that is important but its duration. At this point, there has not been a spike in interest rates or widespread bank failures, and the stock market has stabilized (i.e., it’s fluctuating around a lower level than its recent peak, but not wildly fluctuating). As people are legally allowed to resume normal activities, we will see if they do or if they choose not to out of fear. That is when banks and investors could get even more nervous about lending to businesses without good prospects of success, interest rates could spike, and a long-lasting wave of bankruptcies, defaults, and job losses could ensue.

April 2020 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The coronavirus thing just continued to grind on and on, and I say that with all due respect to anyone reading this who has suffered serious health or financial consequences, or even lost someone they care about. After saying I was done posting coronavirus tracking and simulation tools, I continued to post them throughout the month – for example here, here, here, here, and here. After reflecting on all this, what I find most frightening and depressing is that if the U.S. government wasn’t ready for this crisis, and isn’t able to competently manage this crisis, it is not ready for the next crisis or series of crises, which could be worse. It could be any number of things, including another plague, but what I find myself fixating on is a serious food crisis. I find myself thinking back to past crises – We got through two world wars, then managed to avoid getting into a nuclear war to end all wars, then worked hard to secure the loose nuclear weapons floating around. We got past acid rain and closed the ozone hole (at least for awhile). Then I find myself thinking back to Hurricane Katrina – a major regional crisis we knew was coming for decades, and it turned out no government at any level was prepared or able to competently manage the crisis. The unthinkable became thinkable. Then the titans of American finance broke the global financial system. Now we have a much bigger crisis in terms of geography and number of people affected all over the world. The crises may keep escalating, and our competence has clearly suffered a decline. Are we going to learn anything?

Most hopeful story:

  • Well, my posts were 100% doom and gloom this month, possibly for the first time ever! Just to find something positive to be thankful for, it’s been kind of nice being home and watching my garden grow this spring.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There’s a comet that might be bright enough to see with the naked eye from North America this month.

one more covid tracker

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I thought I was over covid trackers, but I just can’t help it. I know this isn’t my first “one more”, and it might not be my last. This one plots new cases over the past week on the vertical axis vs. total confirmed cases on the horizontal, the animates over time. You can add any country or U.S. state. The simulation starts whenever 10 cases were reported in that location, and you can see them grow at first exponentially and then deviate from the line when they start to get it under control. You can pick a log or arithmetic axis – log is good for the math, but it kind of lets you forget that there is a difference between 10 people dying and 10,000 people dying. Anyway, it’s nice and thanks to this person for posting it for free.

ferrets and coronavirus

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Ferrets are highly susceptible to coronavirus. Apparently, ferrets are susceptible to similar respiratory diseases as humans in general and are used in research for that reason. Cats are also susceptible, but dogs and farm animals generally aren’t.

If this were a movie, humans would eradicate the virus but it would persist in a small community of feral cats somewhere, mutate into something even more horrible, and jump back to humans.