Tag Archives: coronavirus

August 2020 in Review

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Goodbye summer, hello fall (or do you prefer to say autumn?) in this weird and consequential year.

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • We just had the 15-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a major regional crisis that federal, state, and local governments failed to competently prepare for or respond to. People died, and decades later the recovery is incomplete. Coronavirus proves we learned nothing, as it is unfolding in a similar way on a much larger and longer scale. There are many potential crises ahead that we need to prepare for today, not least the inundation of major cities. I had a look at the Democratic and (absence of a) Republican platforms, and there is not enough substance in either when it comes to identifying and preparing for the risks ahead.

Most hopeful story:

  • Automatic stabilizers might be boring but they could have helped the economy in the coronavirus crisis. Congress, you failed us again but you can get this done before the next crisis.

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

  • Vehicle miles traveled have crashed during the coronavirus crisis. Vehicle-related deaths have decreased, but deaths per mile driven have increased, most likely because people drive faster when there is less traffic, absent safe street designs which we don’t do in the U.S. Vehicle miles will rebound, but an interesting question is whether they will rebound short of where they were. One study predicts about 10% lower. This accounts for all the commuting and shopping trips that won’t be taken, but also the increase in deliveries and truck traffic you might expect as a result. It makes sense – people worry about delivery vehicles, but if each parcel in the vehicle is a car trip to the store not taken, overall traffic should decrease. Even if every 5 parcels are a trip not taken, traffic should decrease. I don’t know the correct number, but you get the idea. Now, how long until people realize it is not worth paying and sacrificing space to have a car sitting there that they seldom use. How long before U.S. planners and engineers adopt best practices on street design that are proven to save lives elsewhere in the world?

humidity helps reduce coronavirus transmission

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Humidify those schools!

The relationship between climatic factors and COVID‐19 cases in New South Wales, Australia was investigated during both the exponential and declining phases of the epidemic in 2020, and in different regions. Increased relative humidity was associated with decreased cases in both epidemic phases, and a consistent negative relationship was found between relative humidity and cases. Overall, a decrease in relative humidity of 1% was associated with an increase in cases of 7–8%. Overall, we found no relationship with between [sic] cases and temperature, rainfall or wind speed.

Transboundary and Emerging Diseases

Not being a scientist or doctor, I have always assumed that mucous membranes inside your nose help block germs, and that a dried out nose in the winter time is one reasons colds, coughs, and flu spread through schools and offices every winter. It seems like a relatively simple measure to take that would have a clear positive effect. Now, to sit back and wait for my children’s schools and my office building manager to explain why it can’t be done.

10% drop in vehicle miles traveled predicted long-term

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KPMG says some of the sharp reduction in vehicle miles traveled during the coronavirus crisis is likely to be permanent, with people getting used to working from home and shopping online. The numbers they came up with are a 9-10% reduction in vehicle miles traveled (this factors in both a decrease in personal vehicles and an increase in delivery vehicles, if I understand the article) and a drop in car ownership from 1.97 to 1.87 per household.

Covid Act Now

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This is a new site that gives a Covid risk rating based on five indicators: daily new cases, infection rate, test positivity, ICU headroom, and contacts traced. They try to give the same information by county, but they only have the data to provide a couple of the indicators at the county level. I know this data exists for my county, but it must be collected and stored (or not) differently in different counties and different states, so that there is no single organized database of it. This is the kind of thing the federal government could provide leadership on, and once again, they are just failing us in epic fashion.

I’ve added this to my running list of Covid data and simulation sites.

U.S. still isn’t screening international arrivals!

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In looking for that explanation of why some countries have largely dodged the coronavirus bullet while the U.S. is melting down, many people are focused on masks. I wonder if the almost total failure to screen airport arrivals could be the single most important factor. Thousands of plane loads of infected people from Italy landed in the U.S. northeast airports in February and March. The CDC’s screening and tracking protocols completely broke down, and it got out of control before there was any chance to contain it. Fast-forward to June, and they still aren’t effectively screening airport passengers!

Then we arrived in the US. No one at Dulles International Airport checked passengers’ temperatures. SAA had given each passenger health forms to fill in for the US authorities. No one asked for them. No sanitisers were on offer. No social distancing was practised in the immigration queues. People literally breathed down my neck. In Joburg the 2m apart rule was strictly observed.

At the immigration counter my passport was stamped and the very nice border policeman said: “Welcome to America.”

I waltzed over to baggage reclaim, got my luggage and left. I could have walked into the US coughing, sweaty and feverish and not a single authority would have known — they hadn’t bothered to do a basic check that I wasn’t indeed feverish.

JUSTICE MALALA: What three American airports taught me about Covid-19 and political leadership

Before it gets to the U.S. arrival, the article recounts the strict measures in place in South Africa (“one of the nations Trump included in the class of “shithole countries” – direct quote from the article). I’m not familiar with this person or publication, by the way, but it matches my experience traveling in Southeast Asia (Singapore and Thailand specifically) during the 2009 swine flu epidemic. Temperature screening and screening questionnaires were everywhere, beginning the moment I arrived at an airport, and continuing in shopping centers, on public transportation, etc. It was all polite and professional, but I knew that if I developed symptoms I would be taken to a government-run quarantine center for 14 days. (And as long as they had three meals a day and a decent internet connection, that didn’t sound like the end of the day!) Thailand and Singapore have both handled this pandemic very well. Thailand in particular is a middle income country with (until recently) a lot of back and forth travel to Wuhan, China.

You can argue that the “second wave” or “second peak” horror show now unfolding in the U.S. can be pinned on poor state and local leadership, but the early failures of airport screening, tracking, and testing were squarely on the federal government’s shoulders, and they not only failed spectacularly compared to most other countries, they haven’t learned anything!

June 2020 in Review

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In current events, the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is spinning out of control as I write this in early July. I made a list of trackers and simulation tools that I have looked at. Asian countries, even developing countries, pretty much have it under control, Europe is getting it under control, and the U.S. and a few other countries are melting down. Some voices are very pessimistic on the U.S. economy’s chances to come back. So of course I’m thinking about that, but I don’t have all that many novel or brilliant ideas on it so I’m choosing to write about other things below. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
Most hopeful story:
  • Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost

coronavirus trackers and simulations revisited

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Update: December 13, 2020 (and from time to time since then, I update links if I notice they are broken)

This post is getting a surprising amount of attention. I don’t normally update posts, but I am updating this one since it is getting attention and the commentary in the original post is significantly outdated. Rest assured, if you are a historian in the far future studying what I was thinking back in June 2020, I have kept the original post at the bottom. I am keeping all the links, just grouping them somewhat and removing (from this section) the outdated commentary. (Thank you, Word Press, for making a simple copy-and-paste operation like this beyond excruciating.)

Data Trackers

  • Johns Hopkins – map, stats, access to data sets
  • New York Times – a national (U.S.) map by county and plots by state (now, with a paywall! as of 7/30/21. Which I will never pay because WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!)
  • Financial Times – similar to others, but they look at excess deaths a little differently and have some interesting graphics
  • BBC – similar to NYT, but international
  • CDC – changed this link to their “COVID-19 by County” page on 2/26/22; the updated recommendation is to mask indoors if new cases in your county are 200,000 per 100,000 population per week, AND if the number of people entering the hospital and/or in the hospital is above certain thresholds. It’s a little hard to find the data and figure out yourself, so if you trust the CDC (and who wouldn’t?) you can just type in your county and they will tell you if it is high/medium/low.
  • https://coronavirus.thebaselab.com/ – a variety of maps and plots
  • City Observatory – intermittent data-based articles and maps
  • Our World in Data – excellent interactive country-level data, maps, and plots. A tip – you can also type in “world” or the name of a continent in the country box.
  • https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ – a very clever animated time series of growth in cases over time, by country
  • Reuters – just more numbers and maps, similar to NYT
  • Covid Act Now – state-level data and communication in a simple, easy to understand index format
  • Harvard Global Health Institute COVID Risk Levels Dashboard – similar to Covid Act Now, but less simple and less easy to understand. Seems to have more ability to drill down into county-level data, although when you do that much of it is blank.
  • Wastewater surveillance from “Biobot Analytics” – added 4/30/22.

Simulations

  • University of Washington IHME – the best place I have found for understandable future projections. At the state level.
  • FiveThirtyEight – compares different models (no longer updating as of 7/30/21)
  • https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/ – This site calculates the probability that someone in a group of a given size is infected, based on the estimated rate of active cases in a U.S. state.
  • MicroCOVID – a risk calculator based on local data and allowing you to adjust your risk tolerance and try out various scenarios (added 8/8/21), such as “one night stand with a random person” (on the latter, please remember there are other diseases besides just Covid-19, for example antibiotic-resistant syphilis…)
  • Covid-19 Forecast hub – another visualization of various models and ensembles of models

Vaccine Trackers

Local Pennsylvania/Philadelphia Interest

  • The state of Pennsylvania has a useful dashboard which they have now made public (or it was public before and I didn’t notice.) It compares cases, positive tests, and hospital data for the current and last 7-day period, at the county level.
  • Speaking of Philadelphia, a shout out to the Philadelphia Health Department which provides some open downloadable data.

Miscellaneous Stuff

Original Post (June 27, 2020)

I decided to list out and summarize the variety of trackers and simulations I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Like many people (in the U.S. Northeast at least), I was glued to coronavirus info on various screens from roughly mid-March to mid-May, then my attention started to gradually drift to other things as the situation got better. Now, it seems that it has either stabilized at a not-quite-out-of-the-woods level, or is slowly reversing itself as we see other parts of the country start to be affected more seriously (sorry if you are reading this and are being affected, we in the Northeast take no pleasure in your suffering, I promise, although we suggest you turn out any bigoted anti-science politicians in your area who are letting this happen.) Anyway, I find that I am interested in starting to look at trackers and simulations again on a daily basis. These are in the order I discovered them.

  • Johns Hopkins – a neat map early on, although now the entire world has become a blob. Still a good place to stare at data.
  • New York Times – a national (U.S.) map by county and plots by state. seems to load even though I have used all my free articles for the month.
  • BBC – they update continuously but I’m not sure if this link will be to the latest
  • CDC – this is what I would have predicted would be the go-to source of information and expertise if you asked me before all this started…but it’s mediocre at best. Yes, that just about sums it up.
  • https://coronavirus.thebaselab.com/ – a variety of maps and plots to stare at, not my first stop but a little different if I am tired of others
  • University of Washington IHME – still the most informative state-level simulations I have found, accounting for hospital capacity among other things
  • City Observatory – they did an awesome analysis by U.S. metro area, which I have not seen anyone else do (human beings interact with each other socially and economically in cities and their suburbs, which often cut across states, and states often contain metro areas that are not connected much socially or economically. Economists, social scientists and urban planners know this of course, but nobody else studying the epidemic seems to have figured this out. Seriously, other data visualization and simulation sites, you can do this, it’s just a matter of grouping data by counties.) Unfortunately, they quit updating it and have not automated it. I still check every now and then to see if they have picked it up.
  • Our World in Data – pretty much every conceivable way of looking at data by country. I like to look at confirmed deaths per million across countries. By this measure, the starkest contrast is east vs. west. The eastern countries were hit first, hard, and without warning, and their death rates are very, very low. They have a variety of government types, responses, ethnicities and cultures. I just don’t think anybody has come close to explaining it. The U.S. is in the middle of the pack of western countries, which somewhat contradicts conventional wisdom and suggests news organizations are making the obvious error of not normalizing by population.
  • https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/ – an animated time series of new confirmed cases in the past week vs. total confirmed cases, both on a log scale, by country. As I write this, shows the beginning of a concerning uptick for the United States, and Brazil out of control.
  • Reuters – I actually never wrote about this one, but it has a map and some numbers.
  • FiveThirtyEight – they have an aggregation of various simulation models out there. New York and New Jersey look like a stream sprayed horizontally out of a garden hose, while Texas and Florida (today) look more like a fire hose.
  • https://covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu/ – This site calculates the probability that someone in a group of a given size is infected, based on the estimated rate of active cases in a U.S. state. I assume it’s estimated active cases, anyway, or it wouldn’t make sense. It would be better by metro area (seriously guys, someone just get this done), but still a nice idea. I’m in Philadelphia, but I figure the New Jersey numbers are probably the most applicable.
  • Covid Act Now – provides a composite risk index at the state level, and county when county level data is available in the right format (which is not that often)
  • Harvard Global Health Institute COVID Risk Levels Dashboard – keeps it simple with just data on new cases, but gives you a variety of nice mapping, charting, and tabular formats to slice and dice the data at country, (U.S.) state or county level.
  • The state of Pennsylvania has a useful dashboard which they have now made public (or it was public before and I didn’t notice.) It compares cases, positive tests, and hospital data for the current and last 7-day period, at the county level.
  • Speaking of Philadelphia, a shout out to the Philadelphia Health Department which provides some open downloadable data.
  • I look at the FAO food price index on occasion. It’s falling lately. Sometimes I look at oil and gold prices, and how many Special Drawing Rights can be bought with one U.S. dollar. Oh and, the Rapture Index is at an all time high!

pandemic reinsurance

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You can buy insurance against a pandemic. Well, if you are a giant corporation or a small country. It seems like insurers wouldn’t be able to offer it, but some of the reinsurers, which insure insurance companies against rare catastrophic risks, actually do. They do it by finding parties that can insure them, and the parties that are willing to insure them are pension funds, because when old people start dying in large numbers pension funds actually have a lot of extra cash lying around. The bigger the pandemic and the more people are dropping like flies, the more cash they have to pay off the reinsurance companies. Yes, the insurance business is kind of sinister, so there it is. From Wired.

May 2020 in Review

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You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

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

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

CDC in the ICU?

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I’m not the only one disappointed in the CDC. The Lancet has a scathing editorial.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

The Lancet

Well, you can read the rest for yourself, but the answer to the question is defunding and political interference.