Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

could coronavirus lead to food shortages?

The coronavirus is a worldwide tragedy, but for the moment at least, most of us seem to have a reliable supply of water, energy, and food (at least, those of us who normally have these things – some people in the world clearly do not and that is not equitable or fair in the best of times).

But could the coronavirus situation somehow lead to food shortages? Well, there are a few ways. One is if countries that normally export food decide to stop doing so, at least temporarily. This would hurt countries that import a significant amount of food – small, densely populated nations come to mind, as do populous nations in inhospitable environments like deserts. Bloomberg says there are some indications this process has started, but only on a small scale so far.

Kazakhstan, one of the world’s biggest shippers of wheat flour, banned exports of that product along with others, including carrots, sugar and potatoes. Vietnam temporarily suspended new rice export contracts. Serbia has stopped the flow of its sunflower oil and other goods, while Russia is leaving the door open to shipment bans and said it’s assessing the situation weekly.

Bloomberg

The problem would not be an absolute lack of food, but a possible lack of workers to pick specific crops at specific times. Then there could be supply chain problems as the crisis impacts truck drivers, warehouse workers, grocery store workers, etc.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization maintains a food price index, updated monthly. At the end of February, the index was a relative low indicating ample supply and smoothly functioning trade and supply chains.

So it sounds to me like the food supply may weather this particular storm unless we are unlucky enough to have major droughts, storms, floods, heat waves, etc. in key food growing regions at the same time.

When it comes to electricity, Wired says the U.S. supply is safe for the time being. One concern there is that mostly automated power plants are run by a relatively small number of highly skilled people, and if significant numbers of them were to get sick at the same time it would cause problems. Add to this the possibility of severe weather putting further strain on the system, and again we need a certain amount of luck to get through this.

Relying on luck is not the hallmark of robust, resilient, long-lasting systems.

hospital capacity data visualization

I was going to stop posting coronavirus tracker apps but this one looks really useful. Now that we know most infected people aren’t tested, the number of confirmed cases isn’t all that helpful as a metric except maybe to look at trends over time. The number of people in the hospital, on the other hand, is a hard number, and comparing that number to hospital capacity is very useful. This app from the University of Washington does that. It also forecasts future hospitalizations and gives a confidence range (which is quite wide, but there it is to ponder.)

This is by state, which is a slightly big and arbitrary geographic unit. Looking at my home state of Pennsylvania, things look almost reassuring, but then looking at New Jersey, they look dire. It would take me five hours to drive to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but I could almost spit on Camden, New Jersey. There will clearly be pressure to move patients across state lines within and between nearby metro areas, and in fact that is already in the news this morning.

The situation in New York looks just awful. I didn’t look at all 50 states, but a quick sampling suggests that states with large cities (and by proxy, probably large hospital systems), and states that started social distancing relatively early, are likely to do a lot better. People might think they would be safer in more rural areas, and perhaps it is true that your odds of infection are much lower, but your chances of survival if you do get infected could also be much lower. This is partially speculation and based on a few anecdotes I have heard, but I do know that this trend holds for car accidents and gun shot wounds.

To this water resource engineer, the differences in capacity use between states and the differences in the timing of available capacity suggest that you could move patients around, or move equipment and medical staff around, between regions in an organized way and save lives. Maybe somebody should get on that if they haven’t already.

yet another coronavirus tracker

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

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.

coronavirus stats by metro area and normalized for population

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.

online educational resources

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.

Google’s pedestrian foot traffic data

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.

coronavirus simulations

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.