Here’s another tracker someone has put together, allowing comparison of countries based on days since their first case of the virus. For the US, it has state and county-level features although it appears data is not available for all of these. Metro-area data would be even more awesome, but now I’m asking too much in an app someone has put together and posted to the world for free!
I like the Johns Hopkins tool, but either it doesn’t let you break down the data by both geography and time, or it is not obvious how you would do that. At a first glance, this tool from weather.us appear to do that, and produce the data in a table that you could play with yourself.
Why does this matter? It might be nice to get a sense of when you think your city or region is starting to turn the corner from an exponential growth curve to an S-shaped curve that will eventually level off. The news media might or might not provide that information in the form you would like to see it on a given day.
I like this City Observatory approach to coronavirus stats. They are reporting numbers by metropolitan statistical area and normalizing them per 100,000 population. They are also reporting the rate at which cases are growing in each metropolitan area. They are using static tables and graphs but I think these provide much better information than the fancy maps and dashboards I have seen. The fancy maps and dashboards are updated more often – the ideal approach would blend all this together. As long as I am making a wish list, it would be nice to see the number of people hospitalized in each metro over time. That is the number we are looking for – the stock of available beds to first reappear as a positive number, then start to grow. When that happens I think we will start to see more public and political pressure to get people back to work. I expect high risk people to have to hide in their homes for quite some time after that, which is sad but I think that is the balance our society is likely to strike. If there comes a point later in the year where that stock of available hospital capacity starts to shrink or disappear in a given metro, that is when we might see shorter, more geographically targeted social distancing orders come and go.
There are a ton of articles about online education resources right now, when so many of us are trying to work from home, take care of children, and keep an eye on older relatives all the same time. None of this helps those of us with small children very much. There are a ton of educational materials available, but very young children are still going to need constant attention in order to make the most of them, and you would also need to somehow find some prep time away from the children in order to make the most of them. For most of us, there is almost no time away from the children, and if we get a precious few moments we may want to invest them in our own mental health, maintenance of which is necessary for the children in the long run. The only advice I have there is for adults to take shifts to give each other some down time if possible, and spend that precious limited downtime on things like exercise (outside if at all possible), yoga, meditation, hobbies like gardening or reading things that are fun and not stressful. I am finding the situation moderately stressful, but I recognize it is much harder for lower income people, single parents, people in the medical field, and anyone who is sick or taking care of someone who is sick.
Anyway, now that I have said they are not helpful, here are a few resources I have come across in the last few days. Some of these are Philadelphia-area specific but other cities might have similar things.
To my fellow parents, I really do wish you all the best. To those thinking about becoming parents, being a parent really is a wonderful, rewarding experience on balance. It’s just that if you live in a country without much family or government support, and plan to work full time while raising said children, you should be aware that you are giving up pretty any semblance of personal leisure time for several years until they become more independent.
The Philadelphia Inquirer has an article showing foot traffic at various locations around the city during the coronavirus shut down compared to average. As might be expected, foot traffic is down pretty much everywhere except grocery stores, where it is up slightly. This matches my personal observations. It doesn’t match the media accounts of crazy lines at grocery stores and big box stores in the suburbs. Maybe this is because in a dense walkable city, we have many small stores instead of a few large stores, and people tend to spread out their shopping over the entire day and week and to buy just a bag or two at a time that they can carry home. There are odd, sporadic shortages, but I have not observed any extreme shortages of basic goods.
The data supposedly come from Google. I tried to find out more about how, where and when Google is collecting this data, and came up short after 15 minutes or so of looking.
Now, I admit that clearly dense cities with a lot of social interaction have their down side right now. The big dense cities are also where the most international arrivals happen, and this factor along with density might be why they are the worst places to be right now. Hopefully they also have the largest medical facilities with the most experienced medical staff, but whatever we have is clearly not going to be enough to help everyone who needs help in the next month or so.
Okay, the current pandemic is not a game and not fun, people are suffering and I certainly don’t want to make light of it. But maybe we can at least learn something about systems, such as positive and negative feedback loops, S-shaped curves, and time delays. Netlogo has a few agent-based virus simulations to play with. The MIT system dynamics people put together a whole lesson on simulation of an epidemic as a teaching tool. (This is part of their “road maps” series, which you can find here. Just be warned that many of the hyperlinks don’t work, but if you cut and paste the names of the documents into a search engine, you can usually find them.)
And of course, there is the old flash game Pandemic 2, which is kind of fun in ordinary times but seems a little crass to play now, or at least to admit that you’re playing it. (Your goal is to kill everybody in the world, for example by making them vomit blood from their eyes…) On the other hand, Flash seems like it is on the way out so if you want to try this game it may be best to try it soon. And those of you stuck at home without multiple small children to entertain (not a category that includes me!) might have the time right now.
The Washington Post has some interesting simulations that explain why quarantine is not all that effective a strategy, and why aggressive social distancing can be so effective. Basically, by isolating healthy people from each other you can drastically slow down the rate of spread and reduce the number of cases hitting the health care system at any one time to something manageable. These are agent-based simulations with accompanying time series graphs, and I find them pretty intuitive and informative.
The Atlantic has an article on just how badly the United States has dropped the ball on testing people for the novel coronavirus compared to other developed countries. We can add this to list along with overall life expectancy, child and maternal mortality, mass incarceration, depression, suicide, drug overdoses, blackouts, traffic delays, educational outcomes, drinking water quality, poverty, and the list goes on. We were great once, in the sense that we were the world’s leader on most or all of these categories. Over the last decade or two, we have not just lost that leadership position, we have fallen to the bottom of the pack and continue to lose ground. True patriots don’t just say their country is great again and hope that makes it true in the face of contrary evidence, they face the facts and do something about it.
MIT Technology Review has a roundup of online Coronavirus dashboards. The most popular one apparently is from the Johns Hopkins Center for System Science and Engineering.
I try not to write a lot about fast-moving current events because anything I write will be instantly outdated (I’m writing this on the morning of March 1, 2020). But here are a few thoughts I have and things I am reading on the subject.
First, I plan to pay attention and do whatever the health authorities suggest I do. “Health authorities” means the CDC, my state health department, and my county health department. These sources aren’t infallible. Already, it appears the CDC could have used a test from the World Health Organization to monitor for the virus here, but they thought they knew better, dropped the ball completely, and there has been no monitoring. That means it could already be spreading undetected and the chance to contain it to just a few people could be lost. There is also concern about budget cuts to pandemic preparedness and public health in general by the Trump administration, and interference by political appointees and industry lobbyists. Despite all this, “the authorities” have the most expertise and are the most reliable source of information available. I have added these three sources (the CDC, my state and county health departments) to my Twitter feed. (I almost never use Twitter, but I do find it useful in a fast-moving situation like a snowstorm or oil refinery or power plant disaster – the first of which, there have been zero this winter and the second and third of which, there have been two, quite recently and quite close to my house.)
I have a decent backlog of food in my house and am trying to add a little extra. If “the authorities” tell me to keep my children home from school or myself home from work, I plan to do it. If they don’t I don’t plan to. I just hope the people who keep the water, power, gas, and communication systems running continue to go to work. An extended quarantine could be different from a fire, flood, or hurricane in this way, but of course it would be much longer. The CDC has not given any guidance on cabin fever, which can be an extraordinarily debilitating illness among children and their caregivers in confined spaces.
I wondered what powers the federal, state, and local authorities actually have and what the break down is between them. This Bloomberg article talks about that a little.
That’s in part because the president clearly has the power to declare a national health emergency and start ordering quarantines. This power comes from Congress, and is conferred on the president by the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act. As the name suggests, this is the same law that lets the president declare disaster relief emergencies. President Donald Trump invoked this power in late January, when he declared a public health emergency and ordered the quarantine of Americans returning from areas of China where Covid-19 had already spread. Quarantines can also be authorized by the surgeon general, who is specifically given that power by federal law.
Bloomberg
The article says that local jurisdictions pretty much have to do what their state authorities tell them to do. The CDC can’t actually commandeer state officials, but that states can choose to place their officials under CDC direction, and they most likely would. So effectively, there really is a chain of command from top to bottom.
By definition, a quarantine limits the freedom of movement of people who are completely innocent of any wrongdoing to serve the overall good of avoiding more infections. Supreme Court doctrine directs that essentially all our individual liberties can be suspended if the government has a compelling interest to do so and if its measures are narrowly tailored to achieving that end. Slowing a pandemic is a textbook example of a compelling state interest; and quarantine is presumably the narrowest available method to do so in the middle of an outbreak.
Local police would seem to have the authority to enforce a quarantine, but how strictly they might do that and whether citizens would be able to challenge that on legal grounds has not been fully tested. I note that during “mandatory” hurricane evacuations, local police departments generally don’t drag people out of their homes against their will. Of course, in that situation they are just putting themselves and their families at risk, not others. If someone was walking down a busy street wearing a suicide vest, of course the police would shoot that person because they are a danger to others.