the “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents”

Obama left INSTRUCTIONS for dealing with this exact situation. There almost have to be competent people in the federal government who were familiar with these instructions and did their best to implement them, but were stymied by incompetent managers or political cronies. There’s an alphabet soup of acronyms that is a little hard to decipher for the uninitiated, but a couple things stand out to me:

  • Early on in a significant outbreak outside the United States, the plan is to provide significant financial support, material support, expertise, and manpower support to both the World Health Organization and directly to the foreign country. This is a nice humanitarian thing to do, but is also the best defense against the outbreak reaching the U.S. and wreaking havoc.
  • Domestically, the federal government is responsible for figuring out how to screen, and quarantine if necessary, travelers arriving from foreign locations, whether those travelers are U.S. citizens or not (reminder: we are all the same species of semi-hairless virus-prone monkey).
  • The federal stockpile plays a key role, as does research and development on potential diagnostics, treatments and vaccines. These things are supposed to kick into high gear at the first sign of trouble. Again, sending materials and equipment abroad is supposed to be considered early on because that may be the best way to keep the outbreak from getting out of control.
  • The federal government is just generally supposed to provide crystal clear guidelines, communications, funding, materials and equipment and coordination to state and local governments and to the public throughout a crisis like this.

There was a plan, and at least some of these steps must already have been in motion and been shut down.

As you know, I try to avoid political statements on this blog, sticking closely to facts and consideration of potential implications of various policies and lessons learned for the future.

FAIL FAIL FAIL Trump you stupid asshole, you have the blood of 85,000 Americans on your hands as I write this and of course it’s not over. Obama for King 2020!

what’s new with “passive house”?

Well, by combining an “airtight envelope” with solar arrays, a passive house certified nursing home in Spain can actually generate more energy than it uses.

The new nursing home extension is topped with an 18 kW photovoltaic array along with 20 solar thermal panels and rooftop seating. When combined with the building’s airtight envelope, which was engineered to follow passive solar strategies, the renewable energy systems are capable of producing surplus energy, which is diverted to the old building. The Passivhaus-certified extension also includes triple glazed openings, radiant floors, rainwater harvesting and mechanical ventilation equipped with heat recovery. 

Inhabitat

So the technology exists to build like this, so why don’t we do it everywhere? Well, part of it is ignorance and resistance to adapting ideas from elsewhere to one’s own locale. A lot of it is legitimate concerns about cost. But new materials and skills can be expensive because they are in short supply locally. So, bring in a technology like this, set up local factories and training programs to build capacity, encourage entrepreneurs, provide successful examples and incentives and possibly regulations, and you can bring cost down. When the people doing it forget the old way of doing things, assume the new way is the way it has always been and the only way it can be, and are resistant to the next new idea that comes along, you have made progress.

how are people really getting coronavirus?

This blog post from a professor of epidemiology has some interesting logic. I don’t know this person, but they are a professor at a reputable university and I give their opinion some weight based on that. You can review their credentials and decide for yourself.

I took microbiology as a graduate student in environmental engineering, and I’ve done just a bit of microbial risk assessment since then. Which in no way qualifies me as an expert on covid-19. But this post did help me to think about some things harkening back to my classes, which are almost entirely absent from other media sources I am reading. In my classes and my professional work, there is a logic of dose response – you have to ingest a certain amount of material, and it has to contain a certain amount of a pathogen, for you to get sick. This usually has to do with small amounts of fecal matter present in the environment or water in my case, and the consequence typically is a bout of gastrointestinal distress curable with rest and fluids, although pretty much any disease is more dangerous to the very old, the very young, and the very sick.

That was a long preamble. You should read the blog post. But here is the brief summary:

  • If someone coughs or sneezes directly in your face, you are likely to get infected.
  • If you spend significant time indoors in a place where an infected person has recently coughed or sneezed, you are likely to get infected.
  • Other than that, you are not likely to get infected from someone breathing or even talking to you as you briefly pass on the street. You would need to talk to that person for at least 5-10 minutes to be likely to take in enough virus to get infected. That is just not very likely if you pass someone while walking, jogging, or biking. The advice of my local and state health departments is consistent with these facts. The behavior of people I observe in my neighborhood is not consistent with these facts. My behavior is consistent with these facts, even if other people in my neighborhood choose to have opinions that are not consistent with the known facts, and to try to impose those opinions on me.
  • Now, if you are indoors for awhile in a place where a lot of people are talking and breathing, and someone is infected, your odds of getting infected are high. This is why offices and schools are closed.
  • The bigger the crowd in the indoor space you are in, the more likely someone is infected. This is why conferences, religious services, sporting events, and Disney World are shut down.
  • So, people are getting infected when they have to be indoors around a lot of other people for a period of time, like in warehouses and meatpacking plants and unfortunately nursing homes. They are getting infected when they choose to attend large group events they don’t need to attend, like parades or worship services. And finally, they are getting infected when a family member goes out, gets infected, and brings it home.

native plant and pollinator gardening in Pennsylvania

This post has a ton of information on gardening with native plants and gardening for pollinators in Pennsylvania – sources of plants and seeds, recommended species and combinations of species for various conditions, and links to a variety of government and non-profit organizations that can provide even more information.

“supporting” ecosystem services in cities

This long article makes a distinction between services provided by natural and semi-natural areas in cities, and a concept of a city as a whole as an ecosystem that provides services. What it reminded me of, though, is the distinction between the UN’s definition of “regulating” ecosystem services and “supporting” ecosystem services.

• Regulating ecosystem services, such as control of stormwater discharge, mitigation of heat in urban areas, mitigation of noise, etc.

• Supporting ecosystem services, such as provision of habitats for urban biodiversity, provision of pollinators for urban farms, etc.

Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning

In the engineering world I inhabit, we have the regulating services reasonably well figured out. We don’t always do a great job of implementing and enforcing, and we exempt too many projects, but basically we have cost-effective standards and best practices for things like flood management and water pollution reduction.

The supporting ecosystem services are mostly not even on our radar. And that means that when we are designing for flood or water quality objectives, our designs are not as green as they might be if we took biodiversity and habitat into account. It might not even cost more to do that, but it would require a more expansive way of thinking. To do that, we would need to communicate effectively to the decision makers and then the rank and file just why they should care.

UFOs

Fact: pilots and astronauts see weird, unexplained flying objects in the sky from time to time. The U.S. military has released some unclassified videos of real footage from real airplanes, it says because these same videos are already floating around on the web and people aren’t sure they are real. Of course, there are plenty of fake videos on the web, but now as long as you accept the U.S. military as a source of factual information, you can accept these as facts. And how many classified videos exist for each unclassified one?

I find these facts inconvenient. I don’t really want to take this seriously, but I feel like I have to at least give it some thought. These things aren’t necessarily aliens. They are simply what they are called – unidentified. But it seems clear that somebody is testing something. Or playing with something. Or intentionally messing with our minds. Who and why? Well, at least some serious people (see May 17, 2011 Fresh Air: “Area 51 ‘Uncensored’: Was It UFOs Or The USSR?”) have claimed that the Soviet Union used UFO rumors and possibly even actual UFO-like aircraft to sew confusion. So maybe some government or mad billionaire is testing a drone, either to sew confusion or just for fun.

If it is super-technologically advanced aliens playing with toys, with the technology to hide in plain site and the technology to crush us like bugs anytime they want, I guess we should just say thank you for not doing that so far.

technologies we don’t have

I’ve been thinking about the technologies we have and don’t have during this coronavirus situation, and which ones we don’t have that could make our lives easier if we had them. Also, which ones we were “supposed” to have by now if we are really living in the fabulous science fiction future.

In short, farming and manufacturing are relatively automated at this point, but transportation and many other industries closer to our daily lives are not. Computer technology is pretty far along, but it is not yet all that tied to the physical world. Take autonomous vehicles and drones. The food delivery situation during this shut down has not been all that great. Computers keep track of what goods are where and who is ordering what, but the actual deliveries are mostly done by people in diesel powered vehicles. Some of those people are sick, all are scared, and they have children home from school and are worried about family members just like the rest of us. We worry in normal times about robots taking our jobs, but this is a time when if we had reliable robot delivery, whether on the ground or through the air, it would help.

Biotechnology is just not as far along as we might have thought. The virus genome was sequenced quickly, but developing treatments and vaccines is still a painstaking process, and then making and administering them on a large scale is daunting. If we had really good computer models of human bodies, computers would be able to do trillions of drug and vaccine trials in the blink of an eye and figure out the combinations that work. We just don’t understand the physical body enough to represent it that well in a computer. So again, the computing is farther along than the physical world.

Teleconferencing and remote work has come a long way over the past decade or so. When I lived abroad between 2010-2013 and worked remotely with a team spread across three continents, the technology was expensive, unreliable, and really held us back. Now talking and screen sharing are pretty seamless, thanks to the cheap ubiquitous cameras, microphones, and speakers on our many devices. Data compression and internet connections have also made a big difference. We have some cheesy background images, but what we don’t have yet are the immersive virtual reality and augmented reality that we assume are eventually coming.

plague lit

Wired has an article on science fiction novels involving plagues, and over at the New Yorker is a long article from the more literary genre (Steven King appears to have breached this category!).

Wired mentions:

  • three Neal Stephenson novels: Seveneaves, Anathem, and The Fall, or, Dodge in Hell
  • The Expanse (which I have heard great things about but probably won’t read because the show has spoiled it for me)
  • Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (who I recently learned is a dude. I read the first book, and liked it, but didn’t love it enough to read the other two. It is one of those books I find myself thinking about though.)
  • Ender’s Game (big fan)
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (I’ve been burned out just a bit on Heinlein, but maybe I’ll give this one a chance at some point.)
  • William Gibson. No specific books, just William Gibson. (I like that I have read William Gibson, but I don’t )

The New Yorker mentions:

  • A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, 1722. (Yes, it’s about that plague. Also know as the plague.)
  • The Last Man by Mary Shelley, 1826.
  • Oedipus Rex (mentions the plague apparently)
  • Angels in America (yes, AIDS counts as a plague, complete with a long incubation time, asymptomatic transmission, initial government denial and botched response, and eventual development of more effective treatments, although there is still no vaccine or absolute cure.)
  • The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe, 1842.
  • The Scarlet Plague by Jack London, 1912. (sort of a sequel to the Poe story, apparently)
  • The Plague by Albert Camus, 1947. (I didn’t realize Camus was that recent, but that is just me being ignorant.)
  • Blindness by Jose Saramago, 1995. (“brilliant” according to the New Yorker, but just sounds too depressing for right now.)
  • And of course, The Stand.

The science fiction book I keep thinking about though, which is not on either list, is Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov. In Robots of Dawn, life on Earth is nasty, brutish and short. But there is a race (of humans) who have moved to space, and they live hundreds of years in part by avoiding virtually all physical contact with each other. They can do this because the human population is very low on a large planet, robots do all the work, and they have excellent video conferencing facilities. Humans basically never come into close physical proximity, with the one exception that husbands and wives get together only for the purpose of making babies, which is surprising because you would think a futuristic civilization where robots do all the work would have discovered in vitro fertilization. At the very least, you could send a robot over to your wife’s place with a turkey baster full of…well, you get the idea.

I’m thinking about a 2020 summer reading theme. I don’t think I want a plague theme! I could do worse than dig into some Neal Stephenson novels I’ve missed. I could always go back and read some Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve never read The Stand, so maybe.

what E.O. Wilson is up to

What, you haven’t received this month’s issue of The Bitter Southerner yet? An interview with E.O. Wilson finds him 90 years old and only semi-retired, living in Massachussetts.

In 2016, Wilson published Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which he claims that if every nation sets aside half its landmass and waters for nature, then we can ensure the continuing existence of 85% of all species on the planet — including ourselves. The book garnered acclaim and criticism, but, like much of Wilson’s work, its central tenets have become more mainstream over time. 

is this the great depression?

The words “great” and “depression” are being used in close proximity these days. Joseph Stiglitz says a depression is when people only spend money on food, and by that definition we are kind of there. Noah Smith at Bloomberg says the U.S. unemployment rate currently stands around 11% and could be headed for 20% or 30%. The Great Depression topped out at 25% so by this definition too, we are headed there. The article points out that it is not just the depth of the recession that is important but its duration. At this point, there has not been a spike in interest rates or widespread bank failures, and the stock market has stabilized (i.e., it’s fluctuating around a lower level than its recent peak, but not wildly fluctuating). As people are legally allowed to resume normal activities, we will see if they do or if they choose not to out of fear. That is when banks and investors could get even more nervous about lending to businesses without good prospects of success, interest rates could spike, and a long-lasting wave of bankruptcies, defaults, and job losses could ensue.