Category: Coronapanic

One of the arguments advanced by citizens of our Boston suburb (Lincoln, Massachusetts) in favor of a $600/square foot renovation/reconstruction of the K-8 school (about $250,000/student, making it perhaps the most expensive school ever built in the United States) was that the 25-year-old windows in the classrooms and the exterior door from every classroom to the outside grass (single-story building) were leaky and prevented the building from reaching Net Zero nirvana. Without A/C in the classrooms, teachers had windows completely open for much of the year.

The construction project, contracted for at the very peak of the Boston real estate market, will commence in June 2020. (One argument by project proponents was that the vibrant local real estate economy would continue to expand forever, thus construction costs would rise at 5 percent forever, so we would be saving huge $$ by spending $110 million now.) The building shell will be sealed as tightly as possible and fresh air will be kept to the absolute minimum. Students will have to funnel in through one of a handful of exterior doors and funnel out through those same doors when school ends. Obstructing direct student egress from individual classrooms was sold as a defense against mass shooting. Apparently students are safer when trapped into their classrooms than they would be if they’d run 1/4 mile away.

I wonder if we have been and are building ourselves into a plague-friendly environment. Even with energy recovery ventilators, we still need to minimize fresh air in order to achieve Net Zero Nirvana. Green building advocates claim that somehow indoor air quality is actually higher in the latest green buildings, but perhaps they are comparing them to the failed Jimmy Carter-era energy crisis sealed office buildings (complete with plastic carpet emitting toxic fumes for decades!).

It is tough to believe that the new school, in which air gets in and out primarily via a handful of central pipes, will be as plague-resistant as the old school, in which every group of students had direct access to fresh air via a massive window bank and/or an open door.

As the U.S. population grows, thus packing a higher percentage of us into multi-family housing, and an ever-larger percentage of our buildings are designed for minimum energy consumption, will viruses end up being the primary beneficiaries?

Related:

• “LEED Building Standards Fail to Protect Human Health” (Yale): One of LEED’s major accomplishments — saving energy by making buildings more airtight — has had the paradoxical effect of more effectively trapping the gases emitted by the unprecedented number of chemicals used in today’s building materials and furnishings. … Programs such as LEED place relatively little emphasis on indoor air quality.

I had searched in vain to find the Swedish equivalent of the IHME model that Americans love. Surely there had to be an academic in Sweden who wanted to be interviewed by hysterical journalists about the forthcoming doomsday. Yet I couldn’t find anything in English, at least. I thought that maybe Swedes simply didn’t care how many people would get sick, when peak deaths would occur, or how many of their fellow citizens would die. They seemed to be content to let the 15 epidemiologists on the governor’s team be their only soothsayers (example).

As usual, I was dead wrong! “Can we trust Covid modelling? More evidence from Sweden” (The Spectator) shows that Sweden had its PhDs willing to make a few assumptions and then stick them into a simple model. And the ones who came up with the most dramatic forecasts of doom got some media attention. Demand for critical care was going to be “16,000 patients per day” in early May:

Another team upped this to over 20,000:

The government team thought Sweden would have 1,700 patients in the ICU right now. The actual number is around 500.

The doomsayers thought that doom was inevitable even if the Swedes converted to the Church of Shutdown:

And obviously, there is an argument that these models scared us into changing our behaviour and ramping up capacity, and so helped us to avoid a disaster. But they were also clearly based on faulty assumptions that would always result in absurd predictions. We know this, because both models actually assumed that it was already too late, and estimated that ICU capacity would be exceeded by around 10 times even if Sweden switched to strong mitigation.

The need for ICU beds in Sweden will be ‘at least 10-fold greater [than capacity] if strategies approximating the most stringent in Europe are introduced by 10 April’, wrote Gardner et al.

Those strategies were never introduced in Sweden, and yet, additional ICU capacity is 30 percent and the number of patients in intensive care has been declining for two weeks. The newly constructed field hospital in Stockholm, with room for hundreds of patients, has still not received any patients. It will probably never have to open. Here’s a zoomed-in graph of eventual ICU: numbering in the hundreds, not the predicted thousands.

(i.e., the Swedes also built a temp hospital that was never needed!)

I’m kind of curious as to why Americans have placed such faith in the prophecies offered by epidemiologists given that epidemiology is primarily a retrospective activity and there is no historical data on how virus transmission is affected by a Western-style “porous lockdown”. It is as though people in the 1980s had decided that the “complexity” theorists of the Santa Fe Institute, who also could spin a few assumptions into an interesting tale, could be relied upon as reliable oracles. People don’t have the same faith in models of the future stock market. Nobody says “I’m going to hire three PhDs, download R, and become fabulously wealthy starting next week after my team’s model tells me the future prices of stocks.”

At the end of March, I wrote “First friend with COVID-19: mild symptoms for 5 weeks”. He recently got an antibody test:

So… he’s positive for antibodies to coronavirus, but “sensitive information, such as the sex of your baby” remains private.

His reflections on the experience:

• “Maybe I should have taken off work when I had it.”
• “It was like having three flus in a row.”
• “I did some of my best work during that period.”

Science-deniers defy and deny the settled science and, what’s worse, suggest that Covid-19 may not be a more serious problem than influenza:

Yealy was asked whether people should worry about COVID-19 more than the regular flu. He said people should be “worried differently,” pointing out that both take their heaviest toll on the elderly, especially nursing home residents, and people weakened by other medical conditions.

Yealy said he “would not think of it as more or less, just two different illnesses that share some features, but have some distinct differences.”

These people are reopening their business, prioritizing money over human life, justifying their lust for cash by claiming that “the death rate for people infected with the new coronavirus may be as low as 0.25%”.

Related:

• “What’s the penalty for reopening your business early? For a Dallas salon owner, it’s seven days in jail”

Happy Mother’s Day to those readers who identify as “mothers”!

Conversation with a 10-year-old:

• Why do they tell us to wear masks and avoid crowds if we can’t catch coronavirus?
• When adults want children to do something for their benefit, one good strategy is to tell the children that it is actually for their own benefit.
• Like Mother Gothel in Tangled!

For readers unfamiliar with this epic retelling of the Rapunzel story, the senior citizen Mother Gothel (a witch who identifies as Rapunzel’s mom) keeps the healthy 18-year-old imprisoned by telling her that the outside world is full of danger and peril.

Look at you, as fragile as a flower
Still a little sapling, just a sprout
You know why we stay up in this tower

That’s right, to keep you safe and sound, dear
Guess I always knew this day was coming
Knew that soon you’d want to leave the nest
Soon, but not yet

Listen to your mother
It’s a scary world out there
Mother knows best
One way or another
Something will go wrong, I swear
Ruffians, thugs
Poison ivy, quicksand
Cannibals and snakes
The plague

(Lyricist Glenn Slater should get a prize for that last line!)

Although the typical Covid-19-tagged death in Massachusetts is of an 82-year-old with “underlying conditions” (more than 98 percent), our media tends to feature healthy young people cut down in their prime by the evil virus, an ever-present lurker in any activity that young people might formerly have enjoyed. The result is a remarkably high number of healthy young people isolating themselves out of personal fear, just as Rapunzel isolated herself voluntarily until shortly before the movie picks up her story.