This article raises the possibility that maybe an immunity test for Covid-2 could be rolled out faster than a vaccine. The concept is that people who have had the disease and recovered, thereby developing some immunity (which is still being studied and not 100% confirmed that it is long-lasting), could be identified and allowed to resume their normal routines before people who have not been exposed and/or are at high risk.
In 2015, Bill Gates put the risk of a global pandemic “worse than Ebola” at 50% within his lifetime. Bill Gates is 64. Should we listen to Bill Gates because he is rich? Of course not. But we should listen to him because his foundation is focused on public health, preventing and preparing for the sort of thing that is unfolding right now.
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.
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.
Vox has an informative article with some visuals on the goal of social distancing in an epidemic. If you can reduce the total number of infections that is a bonus, but the primary goal is to reduce the peak number of infections happening at any one time. You can do this by delaying cases and spreading them out of time, so that the capacity of the health care system is better able to deal with them. This looks very similar to a stormwater or flood control engineer – often, our goal is also to reduce and delay the peak. Reducing the volume is a bonus if you can manage it. The lesson is not that epidemics are like hydrology, it’s that there are certain fundamental system structures that lead to fundamental behaviors, and they are shared between systems. A couple more that come to mind along the lines of this basic model are congestion pricing to spread traffic out over time, and batteries to store solar and wind energy and trickle them back over time.
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.