Tag Archives: pandemic

more from Bill Gates on coronavirus

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You can still decide for yourself if Bill Gates is someone we should listen to on coronavirus. But he sounds cautiously optimistic, at least when it comes to developed Asia and the U.S.

[Someone asking Bill a question on Reddit: ]I read the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report as well as this explanation in a historical context. Essentially, it says that by doing nothing, 4 million Americans die. Through the mitigation strategy—i.e. social distancing and “flattening the curve”— it says that 1.1-2 million Americans will die. However, it also says that the suppression strategy, or “shutting everything down for 18 months”—will lead to only a few thousand people dying...

[Bill’s answer: ]Fortunately it appears the parameters used in that model were too negative. The experience in China is the most critical data we have. They did their “shut down” and were able to reduce the number of cases. They are testing widely so they see rebounds immediately and so far there have not been a lot. They avoided widespread infection. The Imperial model does not match this experience…

China is seeing very few cases now because their testing and “shut down” was very effective. If a country does a good job with testing and “shut down” then within 6-10 weeks they should see very few cases and be able to open back up…

Gates Notes

more coronavirus tracking

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This massive data analysis entry from Our World in Data is a pretty good example of how to take a data set and beat the crap out of it from every angle.

I like what they did. Since it’s by country, it allows interesting comparisons across countries but is not meant to provide local or regional-specific information. Countries are pretty big. My favorite trackers that are most relevant to my situation are still the City Observatory analyses of U.S. metro areas and the University of Washington simulations of available hospital capacity. The latter are by state.

an immunity test for Covid?

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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.

March 2020 in Review

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To state the obvious, March 2020 was all about the coronavirus. At the beginning of the month, we here in the U.S. watched with horror as it spread through Europe. We were hearing about a few cases in Seattle and California, and stories about people flying back from Italy and entering the greater New York area and other U.S. cities without medical screening. It was horrible, but still something happening mostly to other people far away on TV. In the middle of the month, schools and offices started to close. By the end of the month, it was a full blown crisis overwhelming hospitals in New York and New Jersey and starting to ramp up in other U.S. cities. It’s a little hard to follow my usual format this month but I’ll try. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • Hmm…could it be…THE CORONAVIRUS??? The way the CDC dropped the ball on testing and tracking, after preparing for this for years, might be the single most maddening thing of all. There are big mistakes, there are enormously unfathomable mistakes, and then there are mistakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people (at least) and cost tens of trillions of dollars. I got over-excited about Coronavirus dashboards and simulations towards the beginning of month, and kind of tired of looking at them by the end of the month.
Most hopeful story:
  • Some diabetics are hacking their own insulin pumps. Okay, I don’t know if this is a good thing. But if medical device companies are not meeting their patient/customers’ needs, and some of those customers are savvy enough to write software that meets their needs, maybe the medical device companies could learn something.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I studied up a little on the emergency powers available to local, state, and the U.S. federal government in a health crisis. Local jurisdictions are generally subordinate to the state, and that is more or less the way it has played out in Pennsylvania. For the most part, the state governor made the policy decisions and Philadelphia added a few details and implemented them. The article I read said that states could choose to put their personnel under CDC direction, but that hasn’t happened. In fact, the CDC seems somewhat absent in all this other than as a provider of public service announcements. The federal government officials we see on TV are from the “Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases”, which most people never heard of, and to a certain extent the surgeon general. I suppose my expectations on this were created mostly by Hollywood, and if this were a movie the CDC would be swooping in with white suits and saving us, or possibly incinerating the few to save the many. If this were a movie, the coronavirus would also be mutating into a fog that would seep into my living room and turn me inside out, so at least there’s that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4chSOb3bY6Y

Bill Gates warning of pandemic risk in 2015

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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.

yet another coronavirus tracker

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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!

another coronavirus tracking tool

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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.

more epidemic simulations

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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.

coronavirus simulations

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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 goal of social distancing

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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.