Tag Archives: coronavirus

What wild animals were at the Wuhan market?

Leave a reply

It seems that the efforts to trace Covid-19 back to bats in the Wuhan province are pretty inconclusive. SARS and MERS were both definitively (?) traced back to bats, so people seem to have jumped to this conclusion. “Similar” viruses have been found in bats, but bats have all kinds of things and the family of coronaviruses seems to be extremely common. The WHO team does say it is extremely unlikely that any of the “several” laboratories studying coronaviruses in the city would have made a mistake leading to emergence of this virus. (This alone raises a few questions for me. Is it unusual for a city the size of Wuhan in China or other countries to have several laboratories with coronaviruses lying around? Or do most big cities have some kind of epidemiological laboratory, and the family of coronaviruses is so common that almost any lab would have examples of it in the fridge? What about the dangerous ones.) They also say definitively this is a natural virus, not a genetically engineered one.

I’ve been to “wet markets” in Singapore and Thailand, which could well be tame compared to the one in Wuhan, I have no idea. I would hypothesize that you have a lot of people working, shopping, and eating in very close proximity to each other. Sometimes you have people doing grosser things, like smoking, or spitting. Cats and dogs sometimes roam freely. And sometimes these markets are air conditioned, I have seen it both ways. So if someone already had the virus, it might have spread between people in the market and have nothing particularly to do with food or wild animals.

But I found it interesting to read what wild animals were actually for sale in the Wuhan market. Do people eat bats, or keep them as pets? (And before you judge as a westerner, be aware people in other cultures are just as horrified by some of our habits and things we eat as we are by some of theirs.)

The so-called wet market had 653 stalls and more than 1,180 employees supplying seafood products as well as fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, and live animals before it closed on Jan. 1, 2020. Days before, 10 stall operators were trading live wild animals, including chipmunks, foxes, raccoons, wild boar, giant salamanders, hedgehogs, sika deer. Farmed, wild and domestic animals were also traded at the market including snakes, frogs, quails, bamboo rats, rabbits, crocodiles and badgers…

Bloomberg

So no bats mentioned. I also find myself thinking about the various “bird flu” and “swine flu” scares of the past. It is often human-livestock contact that gives rise to concerning pathogens, so we should keep that in mind. And of course, there are still plenty of deadly pathogens being spread by mosquitoes, fleas and ticks while we are fixated on this one (admittedly horrific) unusual coronavirus incident.

how much working from home is the right amount?

Leave a reply

1-2 days a week is a sweet spot, according to human resources guidelines and some actual research.

long-run effects of telecommuting are all described by bell-shaped curves: Telecommuting first increases skilled and unskilled workers’ productivity and GDP up to some threshold. Beyond that level, a higher share of home-workers reduces the strength of the knowledge and information spillovers which, therefore, do not produce desirable effects. Too much WFH may thus be detrimental to long-run innovation and growth due to limitations of information and communication technologies as well as foregone agglomeration economies in the form of face-to-face contact and knowledge spillovers.2 Figure 1 illustrates this point via some back-of-the-envelope computations using consensus parameter values. The WFH share that maximizes GDP varies between 20% and 40% in our simulations – one or two working days per 5-day week. This is broadly in line with recommendations made in human resource management (Gajendran and Harrison 2007).

Vox

It wasn’t exactly clear to me whether the model mentioned here distinguished between the share of people work from home and the share of an individual’s work days that would be at home. That may not matter to a mathematical model, but it obviously matters to an individual.

1-2 days sounds about right to me. It’s enough to get the personal collaboration and interaction, which is important both for innovation and psychological reasons. Just having a change of scenery a couple days a week is important for psychological reasons too. That 1-2 days at home does cut down on all that wasted time and pollution caused by typical car commutes. This wouldn’t have to be the case if more people lived in communities where they could have active commutes (walking or biking), because the commute then provides some fresh air, exercise, a change of scenery, and sometimes a little social interaction. Sometimes its nice to stop at a coffee shop on the way in, and sit on a park bench for a few minutes or enjoy an…er…adult beverage on the way home (with no possibility of drunk driving, although angry car commuters can be a danger to mildly inebriated pedestrian. I’ve also noticed that car commuters seem particularly angry on Friday afternoons, while walking commuters seem particularly happy. Why is that? Because the walking commuter’s weekend has started and the car commuter’s psychological weekend doesn’t start until the car is in the garage, and in between that moment and the moment they are in are many forces outside their control.) It helps to have “third places” to unwind a bit between work and home. This is a major reason I live where I do, and one thing I have really missed during the pandemic. (Another thing I have missed is my children to and from school, parks, playgrounds, museums, etc.) Over the past year, the headaches of city living have outweighed the benefits I had taken for granted before that.

A couple more thoughts on working from home:

  • Obviously, some kinds of jobs can do it more than others. The kind that can tend to be higher paying. I think we have all learned something over the past year about “essential workers”, which actually means essential jobs done by expendable workers. Here’s a crazy idea – people who volunteer to do dangerous jobs like deep sea diving and drilling for oil in war zones get hazard pay to make it worth their while. It should be possible to have a government program that supplements the pay of ordinary people doing ordinary jobs under emergency conditions.
  • Co-working seems to me to hold some promise as a compromise between working in a corporate office and working from home. You get a professional atmosphere, a bit of breathing room between work and home (which let’s be honest, your family members may appreciate as much as you do), and you can significantly cut down on your commute – ideally, your co-working site should be accessible on foot, by 100% safe protected bike lane, or in a pinch by public transportation. Over time, this could allow your employer to downsize the office if that is what they want to do, without transferring 100% of the burden of operating an inefficient and far from ideal professional office to each individual worker in their family home. Some employers may have concerns about confidentiality, but outside high-security industries this should be manageable through things like sound-proof booths in the co-working sites.
  • Finally, my observation among professional workers is that some people and some specific jobs are better suited to it than others. I have noticed that the same people who struggled with communication in the office (for a variety of reasons – language barrier, personality type, or just being young and not having figured it out yet) are the ones who have been left behind in the co-working world. If those people are otherwise valuable, employers need to figure out how to bring them along through mentoring, training, carrots and/or sticks of some sort or they won’t realize the career potential they otherwise could have.

fun with coronavirus math

Leave a reply

Let’s do some coronavirus math! This is a word problem, kids. I’m writing on January 14, 2021, and this post will be horribly outdated, but possibly of historical interest, when you read it.

The total number of cases confirmed to date as of today, in the U.S.: “23.1 million+” (New York Times)

The CDC’s ratio of actual cases to confirmed cases: 7.2 (CDC)

Number of cumulative cases in the U.S. so far: 23.1 million * 7.2 = 166 million (166,320,000)

Population of the United States: 328.2 million (Google)

% of our population that has had the coronavirus = 166 / 328.2 = 51%

% of our population that has been vaccinated: 3.1% (Financial Times)

But all other things being equal (which I am sure they are not), 51% of the people vaccinated will have already had the coronavirus, so the vaccine so far adds 1.6% to 51% of our population. Call it 53% to be generous.

We have heard a variety of estimates on what constitutes herd immunity, but the number 70% seems to be sticking at least in the media (I don’t have a source handy, and need to go do some other things now.) So we might not be that far off. The (painfully) slow but steady vaccine rollout tortoise will eventually get to the finish line, people are continuing to get infected at high rates every day in the meantime, and nobody wants to see another wave from the new variant, but if and when it hits us it might push us over the mark (at a horrific human cost, of course).

One last thought is that at the moment, I suspect we are immunizing people who are more likely to have already had an infection than the population as a whole. We are being told this is the most ethical approach, or the quickest way to lower risk for the population as a whole, or some combination of the two. The ethical statement may be true, although this seems subjective. I thought ethics was not up to ethicists, but rather ethicists were supposed to ascertain what our society as a whole considers ethical, and maybe compare that to other human societies past and present. I haven’t seen public polls of what people think is ethical, although they may exist. I can see a case that the way the vaccine is being rolled out is ethical, but I can also see a case for a random lottery being equally ethical.

Better planning and communication would not just be ethical, they are the common sense need and our government is continuing to fail, fail, fail and people are dying, which is the opposite of ethical governance. To my ears, it is arrogant to hear them lecturing us about ethics.

why we’re numb to mass death

Leave a reply

I’ve always found close up pictures of Hiroshima victims to be some of the most affecting images I’ve ever seen, and yet knowing that 100,000* people were vaporized in a fraction of a second has less emotional effect. We also get numb to hearing about steady numbers of deaths that add up to a lot over time, like car accidents. I’m not a monster – this is a bug in human psychology. This article in Axios gives other examples of the phenomenon, from the Holocaust to the Rwanda genocide to the U.S. coronavirus meltdown. The article links to an academic paper by Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon, who studies this “psychic numbing” effect.

A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately. However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies – such as genocide – or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. We believe this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action. We shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.

The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide

I’ve often thought about a class that would teach the history of a war or tragedy by the numbers, by focusing on the number of deaths, who the people were, where they occurred and when they occurred. I think that would be educational (if depressing). But to put it in perspective you might need some visuals. One idea would be a stadium with people vanishing from seats. (This would work for, say, up to 100,000 deaths.) For even larger numbers, maybe you could start with a point in the center of the town where the class is being held or where students live, and then expand the dot outward as though all the people who live inside it were to vanish. You could even make this an app based on census data, and let the user pick the center of the bubble. Then finally, you probably should tie some of the deaths to individual stories, or interviews with survivors, friends and family. For me personally though, the numbers are important to put the emotional stories in context, and I am wary of news stories that don’t have numbers. Morbid stuff!

* Okay, I admit the “100,000 people in a fraction of a second” is just a number I picked somewhat for shock value. According to Wikipedia, 70,000-80,000 people were either vaporized instantly or burned to death shortly after the blast. Then a bunch more died of radiation poisoning of course. Does this make it any better? No, when it’s my turn please just vaporize me.

mRNA vaccines

Leave a reply

According to Der Spiegel, the mRNA vaccine development technology accelerated to deal with coronavirus could be adapted to protect against some forms of cancer and other diseases. In fact, some scientists working on these other diseases switched temporarily to coronavirus vaccine development, and will eventually go back to their regularly scheduled programming.

The trick is that each patient receives an mDNA that is precisely tailored to the genetic profile of the cancer they are suffering from. These personalized cancer immunotherapies are still considered experimental, but the results of the initial study were so promising that Türeci, Şahin and their team were able to publish their results in July 2017 in Nature, the prominent scientific magazine. Almost two years later, a 52-year-old skin cancer patient in the U.S. received the experimental BioNTech treatment, after which he told Nature: “I was actually witnessing the cancer cells shrinking before my eyes.”

Der Spiegel

If a massive investment can break a log jam that has stymied research progress into a particular problem for decades, why don’t we do it more often? It would seem to support one of our most competitive industries, create jobs and stimulate the economy in the short term, and I would imagine it has a long term economic payoff. It would be nice to have an HIV vaccine and a male contraceptive shot or pill, just to name a couple.

Since this is publicly funded, will the “recipe” be made available to the WHO or other countries’ health agencies for free. That would seem like the moral thing to do. I also wonder though if the technology could be put to nefarious purposes like biological warfare or terrorism.

aerosols

Leave a reply

A group of academic scientists has put together a long paper with scientific information intended for the public on Covid-19 aerosol transmission. I think this is pretty nice science communication. It is not dumbed down, but it avoids jargon. The graphics they include are mostly helpful. Here are a few takeaways:

  • Secondhand cigarette smoke is a useful analogy to think about. If you are around smokers outside, you are inhaling much less of their poison than if you are around them inside. The amount of time you are around them makes a huge difference – however, this group says the 15 minute CDC guidance is not supported by good evidence. Outside, distance makes a big difference. Inside, being closer is probably worse, but if you are in an enclosed space with them for any period of time you are at pretty high risk. Opening a window should help, but not as much as being outside.
  • Scientists disagree on the relative importance of the three pathways – surfaces, droplets, and aerosols. In the face of uncertainty, it is probably prudent (this is my opinion) to treat them as roughly equal and take precautions against each. Someone coughing or sneezing in your face is a big problem – stay 6 feet away for that reason alone, especially from anyone un-masked.
  • Aerosols probably persist for 1-2 hours. (My thought – this suggests staying in a hotel should be relatively safe. The room has been cleaned, hopefully the maids were wearing masks, and hopefully they cleaned the room in the morning and you are checking in in the afternoon.)
  • Sun and wind tend to reduce risk. All other things being equal, low temperatures and low humidity seem to aid transmission. (Don’t count on the opposite helping you in a sealed room, though. But I am a proponent of humidifying in the winter anyway.)
  • The time it takes air in your house to turn over varies widely – “30 minutes to 10 hours”. For commercial buildings, 12 minutes to 2 hours. Hospitals around 5 minutes!
  • A carbon dioxide concentration of 800-950 ppm is indicative of good ventilation indoors. A carbon dioxide meter costs about $150.
  • Air filters should help, and yes you can tape a furnace filter to a box fan. (I knew it!)
  • “There is no evidence that COVID-19 has been transmitted when people walk past each other outdoors. (But I’m using the bandanna system just because people are scared and confused out there.)
  • Taxis and rideshare are not zero risk, but reasonably probably, maybe reasonably low risk if everyone is masked and windows are open. If it is too cold to open windows, it is better to be drawing in outside air than just recirculating air.
  • Airplanes have very good ventilation, so it is a myth that one infected person on an airplane can infect everyone. If they are sitting right next to you, not wearing a mask, and/or coughing/sneezing, they can infect you. The airport itself is also probably higher risk than the plane. (But let’s remember people are working in all these places.)
  • They say “schools should operate in person only if the levels of infection in the community are low.”
  • Elevators are also actually quite well ventilated, and you are not in there for very long. Again, you don’t want people unmasked and/or coughing/sneezing on you. No singing allowed in elevators.
  • The dental office is suspect. Technology exists to ventilate them safely (but I didn’t see anything obviously new or high tech at my dentist recently.)
  • Masks still help with aerosols. Even though the particles are tiny, they are still inside droplets, which are tiny but not as tiny. Nothing in the air moves around in straight lines, it is turbulent and random, so even if particles are smaller than the openings in the fabric many of them will hit the sides and the risk will be significantly reduced. (Also suggests one reason having multiple layers is better.)
  • Masks work better if they fit well. (I’m a little tired of this, my family has about 100 masks now and not one of them fits well. If there are 1 or 2 I think fit pretty well, they are always in the dirty laundry when I need them. The same gremlins that steal one of each of my favorite socks also steal masks on occasion.)
  • Face shields and plexiglass barriers don’t help a lot with aerosols. You need a mask.

September 2020 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The Covid recession in the U.S. is pretty bad and may be settling in for the long term. Demand for the capital goods we normally export (airplanes, weapons, airplanes that unleash weapons, etc.) is down, demand for oil and cars is down, and the service industry is on life support. Unpaid bills and debts are mounting, and eventually creditors will have to come to terms with this (nobody feels sorry for “creditors”, but what this could mean is we get a full-blown financial panic to go along with the recession in the real economy.

Most hopeful story:

  • The Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis had the courage to take aim at campaign finance corruption as a central reason for why the world is in its current mess. I hate to be partisan, folks, but right now our government is divided into responsible adults and children. The responsible adults who authored this report are the potential leaders who can lead us forward.

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

  • If the universe is a simulation, and you wanted to crash it on purpose, you could try to create a lot of nested simulations of universes within universes until your overload whatever the operating system is. Just hope it’s backed up.

James K. Galbraith on the coronavirus economy

Leave a reply

Here is how James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, explains the effects of coronavirus on the U.S. economy.

  • The global market for U.S. exports has shrunk drastically. The U.S. exports high-tech capital goods like airplanes and weapons.
  • The U.S. oil industry is pretty much shut down because hydraulic fracturing is not cost-effective at current prices, which are caused by low global demand.
  • Car sales are down because people are driving less, and their cars are going to last longer.
  • The service economy is largely shut down. He says it will not reboot quickly because many services are basic luxury goods, things people have been convinced to want but don’t necessarily need, and things that people can do at home if they really want or have too. To certain extent, people have gotten used to doing things at home, and there is also the problem that many people have lost jobs (in the service industry) and will not have extra income to spend on luxury goods.
  • The service industry business model typically depends on very high occupancy (i.e. crowding) to be viable. Businesses are starting to fail and will continue to fail. Once commercial districts start to have high vacancy, they tend not to come back quickly.
  • Unpaid bills and debts are starting to mount, and this will eventually become a problem for creditors and investors.

Here are his solutions, along with my thoughts in parentheses.

  • Redirect idle industries that export capital goods to internal goods such as public infrastructure. (Makes sense, although it’s not necessarily the same people and equipment. Retooling and retraining would be necessary.)
  • A federal jobs guarantee in industries like teaching and home health care. (Makes some sense, but it makes sense to let the private sector lead in markets that are functioning well. The trick is identifying which sectors like education represent genuine market failures.)
  • Nationalization (or the local government equivalent) of some firms and industries that can’t survive at the reduced volumes. (yuck, in general, but maybe industries where this already exists to some extent, like utilities and transportation.)
  • Domestic manufacturing (maybe, but makes sense to focus on industries where we have a competitive advantage, plus those with value for risk management, resilience, robustness – certainly food, medical equipment, etc.)
  • Just have a universal health care system like all other advanced countries. (For crying out loud, just do it now!)
  • Debt forgiveness, especially student and medical debt. This transfers some wealth from creditors to debtors. He says this will occur in either a controlled or uncontrolled way, so we might as well pick controlled. He says major financial reforms might be necessary, like turning banks into public utilities. (Sounds good to me, but can’t happen without major campaign finance reform.)

coronavirus changes to keep

Leave a reply

This article in Axios lists some changes brought about by the coronavirus that we might want to keep after the coronavirus.

  • not just remote work, but remote hiring and onboarding – There are now people working at the local branch of my company who I have never met in person. Conversely, it seems no more weird to work online with people anywhere in the world* who I have never met in person, than it does to work with someone local who I have never met in person. This gets us closer to the economists’ dream of a truly mobile workforce that could iron out some inequities. (* Time zones still exist, and I can tell you from working with U.S. staff while I was living in Asia, working in the middle of the night still sucks. I worked with someone in South America last year though who was only one time zone away from mine, and that worked out great. India – I love you guys but the time zone thing is just too brutal…)
  • new movies streamed – well, okay, if you’re a big movie buff… but I do see the distinction between movies and TV shows with a series of hour-long episodes slowly dissolving, and the shows tend to be higher quality. I suspect 2-hour movies that take a year or more to produce and then release may be on their way out.
  • more seamless delivery of everything – yes, but we still need street and parking design in our cities to catch up
  • telehealth and teletherapy – yes, this seems good. I’d like to see home visits make a comeback basic routine health care – no real sign of that yet, although my life insurance company did recently send a nurse to my house to check my weight and blood pressure, stick me with a needle and collect a cup of my pee. So it can be done. Here’s an idea – let’s do vaccination this way.
  • Maybe some states are realizing the internet needs to be treated like a public utility going forward. We’ll see….
  • better remote education tech – this article mentions smaller class sizes and better parent-teacher-school communication. I agree – some of what the remote model lacks could be offset by more one-on-one and small-group attention where it will do the most good.

I’d like to add timed tickets to this list. I’ve seen a few museums, parks, etc. do this in the past, but it has become much more prevalent to buy a ticket that gets you in within a certain window during the day, and this has a huge crowd control benefit. Things are just much more enjoyable when they are less crowded. I also like restaurants and stores that let you check in online, then text you when your table or customer service person is ready for you. Let’s get rid of standing in line forever!

genetic engineering and coronavirus vaccines

Leave a reply

Some of the coronavirus candidates are being developed using tech such as chicken eggs that have been around for a while (no, I don’t know which one came first…) But there are also some cutting edge genetic engineering technologies being applied to commercial vaccine development for the first time.

The gene-based vaccines (several based on messenger RNA, and which I’ll refer to as mRNA vaccines from here on out) are novel and promising because of the speed with which they can be designed and scaled for manufacturing, but none has ever been licensed for use to combat a disease. The mRNA candidates inject genetic coding from the SARS-CoV-2 virus into the vaccinee, which then induces the body to create part of the virus to attack with an immune response. In other words, through genetic coding, the body itself produces a component of the pathogen, which then primes the body to attack the full virus if it later presents itself.

Viral vector vaccines using adenoviruses are also more novel than traditional vaccine platforms. Viral vector vaccines use a genetically engineered virus that is not the vaccine target to deliver into the cells of a vaccinee the genetic instructions to produce a protein of the targeted virus, which then induces an immune response. The European Medicines Agency (Europe’s counterpart to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) recently approved an adenovirus vaccine (with a booster) for the prevention of Ebola.

AEI

I remember reading in the past that new techniques like these should be applied to vaccine development, but weren’t being because the sure-fire profit motive wasn’t there for the big drug companies. I guess tens of billions of dollars in government funding changed that in a matter of months. The good thing is we will have this technology up and running going forward. The bad thing is it sounds a little scary if it were to fall into the wrong hands.