I am informed by the New York Times and friends on Facebook that coronaplague was easily foreseeable and every intelligent person (i.e., not Donald Trump) saw it coming. Regrettably, in our own household we thought that coronavirus might be like the H7N9 avian influenza, about which WHO raised the alarm during 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 outbreaks (that later fizzled).
Because I like to be awesome at fighting the last war, what should be in our garage to prepare for a flu-like epidemic?
Here’s the beginning of a kit:
masks (50 per household member?)
gloves (100 pair)
pulse oximeter
ear thermometer
infrared forehead thermometer (how are these different from grill thermometers, if at all?)
hand sanitizer
Clorox Multi-Surface Cleaner
Clorox wipes (will these dry out between plagues?)
toilet paper (still can’t figure out why!)
paper towels (ditto)
high quality webcam for any desktop computer
high quality USB headset
Facebook Portal or Google Nest Max for keeping in touch with friends and family from the living room? (which one is better?) Also have a similar device already set up inside the homes of any older relatives.
Our Boston suburb, which imposes a two-acre zoning minimum to keep out the riffraff, has hung a “We’re all in this together” banner across the main road. (We can restore the Black Lives Matter banner eventually?)
What about on a national scale? Are we actually all in this together? I talked to four friends from the aviation world in the last few days. One is isolated on 40 acres of oceanfront with 12,000 square feet of interior space, a dock with a sailboat and a power boat (not in the water yet this season), jogging trails, a tennis court, a hotel-size home gym, etc. One is isolated on 90 acres of ocean inlet with more than 8,000 square feet of interior space, a pool, a tennis court, a dock with multiple boats. One is on 20 acres of oceanfront over in Europe (in a country that is smart enough to do load balancing of patients to hospitals). One is in a city in a southern state with ample health system capacity. He’s on more than 2 acres with more than 13,000 square feet of interior space.
None of the Americans are in states where the University of Washington doom prophets forecast any shortage of hospital or ICU beds.
We use the same “lockdown”, “stay-at-home”, and “quarantine” terms for all Americans, but the experience of this life can be vastly different for those at different income levels. In non-plague times, when rich and poor Americans go for a walk they might have fairly similar experiences. Right now, however, even if the rich started out in a medium-sized city apartment they’ve often managed to escape to an uncrowded vacation destination, e.g., the Hamptons, Nantucket, or Maine. No matter how tight the lockdown gets, the rich can usually get ample fresh air simply walking around on their own private property.
I’m thinking that this variation in experience of lockdown is driving some of the ruling class’s high comfort level with lockdown. It is one thing to hear about a single mother, her boyfriend, and three kids from previous sex partners all crammed into a 3BR in public housing nearly 24/7. But can people with massive suburban estates actually understand what a Victimhood Studies professor would call “the lived experience” of this quasi-family?
Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times, on March 26, 2020, demanded that the Great Father in Washington issue a “shelter in place” order. Leaving aside the issue of whether any state governor would be required to comply with such an order, let’s consider what Mr. Friedman’s life would be like under “shelter in place.” He lives on 7.5 acres in Bethesda, Maryland (a 1/4 acre lot there is now considered lavish). He and his wife (the daughter of a billionaire) demolished the house that was on it and built an 11,400 square foot mansion. What relationship does Mr. Friedman’s “lived experience” of sheltering in place on 7.5 acres and 11,400 square feet have to that of a middle class family stuck in New York City in a 2BR?
Combining what we’ve learned from U.S. media and 4th grade arithmetic lessons regarding exponential growth, we would expect most Swedes to be dead at this point. Yet as of April 12, a smaller percentage of Swedes had died compared to Massachusetts residents, and there was a dramatic difference in the rate of new cases (8X) and deaths (6X).
Maybe the sharp difference was a holiday (Easter) weekend data entry effect?
Here’s an update for today, based on WHO and mass.gov numbers:
The latest report for Sweden: 465 new cases and 20 deaths (Denmark was at 144 and 12). Massachusetts had 1,296 new cases and 113 deaths (8X the death rate).
I.e., Sweden (10 million population) is doing dramatically better than Massachusetts (7 million) and the stats per person are roughly comparable to shut-down Denmark (5 million). (see this post for numbers on previous days)
Sweden’s relatively relaxed approach to controlling the spread of the coronavirus has come under fire in international media and from many locals in the capital Stockholm, where more than half the country’s deaths have been recorded. Now, 22 researchers have publicly criticized the strategy and called on politicians to make changes.
Major public events such as the start of the Swedish soccer season are postponed and the physical buildings of universities are closed, but otherwise everyday life continues. Schools remain open.
The MD/PhD infidel (not a “scientist”) who doubts the shutdown religion does get one paragraph:
State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell quickly hit back at the researchers’ claims. SVT reported that Tegnell said there is “a fundamental inaccuracy in that article” regarding the numbers used.
Following the terrible examples of China, the United States, Britain and others, Sweden has decided that coronavirus is overrated.
The European nation known for being cold and socialist has not ordered any sort of lockdown, is still allowing up to 50 people to gather in groups and has been weeks behind the rest of Europe on social distancing advice, Time Magazine reported.
A top doctor as a large Swedish hospital told Time that this lackadaisical approach will “probably end in a historical massacre.”
4/15 comment: Sweden at 1033/114; Denmark at 299/14; Massachusetts at 1,755/151. It seems that there was a substantial lag in reporting deaths in Sweden due partly to a three-day Easter holiday weekend. Even if all of the 114 deaths had occurred in the preceding 24 hours, the rate of new deaths in Massachusetts is substantially higher when adjusted for population. Total deaths in Massachusetts are at 1,108 versus 1,033 in Sweden, a 1.5X higher rate in the shut-down region of Massachusetts versus the up-and-running get-it-over-with region of Sweden.
It does look as though neighboring Denmark has at least deferred some infections and deaths with its temporary lockdown. As the top epidemiologist in Sweden says, “time will tell.” As noted in the comments below, we were told that, without an economic shutdown, coronavirus would kill 2.2 million Americans. Sweden did not shut down. They should be suffering close to 70,000 deaths from the exponentially growing virus, not 1,000 or 2,000. Even with the upsetting catch-up number of deaths following the holiday weekend, Sweden’s outcome so far seems inconsistent with most epidemiologists and government think that they know about coronavirus.
MIT Technology Review, the alumni magazine for what is regarded by people worldwide as the finest engineering and science school… in East Cambridge, titled its March/April 2020 edition “The Predictions Issue.”
There are ten breakthrough technologies presented for 2020 and a multi-futurist section regarding “How to predict what’s coming in 2030 and beyond.”
The breakthroughs circa 2020 include “hyper-personalized medicine” in which a single individual with a unique genetic defect can be patched up with heroic multi-disciplinary effort. We have purportedly made breakthroughs in anti-aging pills and AI-discovered molecules. We have more AI in general. The most important breakthrough is “Climate Change Attribution” in which we can figure out which unpleasant weather events are due to climate change: “If we choose to listen, they can help us understand how to rebuild our cities and infrastructure for a climage-changed world.”
Seven pages are devoted to the saddest emotional event of the 21st century, i.e., the failure of pollsters to warn us that the United States was packed with stupid, sexist, and racist Deplorables who would consider voting for a candidate who “appeals to the worst in us.” (Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon for this year. If election prophets don’t predict a certain Biden victory then enough of the righteous will be motivated to go to the polls and defeat Hate.)
The most interesting section, in light of recent events, is the collection of predictions regarding our world through 2030. The folks whom the magazine tapped (which happens to include one person of color and an LGBTQIA+ novelist, as well as a gender ID balance in favor of people with typically female-associated names) worked from the following assumptions: (1) the Earth will be warmer; (2) computers and Artificial Intelligence will be more powerful.
What did the best futurists that magazine could find miss entirely? That a human population of 8 billion on Spaceship Earth is an incredibly tempting target for a novel virus and that the virus would arrive in a lot of readers’ lungs on the same day as the magazine itself.
I wonder if this is a good way to determine the world’s level of coronapanic.
This is a great time to be claiming asylum. From Iceland, for example:
A0145/20 NOTAMR A0144/20 Q) BIRD/QAFXX/IV/NBO/E/000/999/6512N01832W A) BIRD B) 2003241427 C) 2004162359 E) COVID-19: PASSENGER RESTRICTIONS. ALL PASSENGERS ARE PROHIBITED TO ENTER ICELAND EXCEPT EU/EEA, EFTA OR UK NATIONALS. THE FOLLOWING ARE EXEMPTED:
FOREIGN NATIONALS WITH IMMIGRATION STATUS IN SCHENGEN STATES, OR THOSE WHO HAVE FAMILY MEMBERS IN THE SAME COUNTRIES.
PASSENGERS IN TRANSIT.
HEALTH AND CARE WORKERS ON PROFESSIONAL TRAVEL. 4.TRANSPORTATION CREWS (AIRLINES AND FREIGHTERS).
INDIVIDUALS REQUIRING INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION.
INDIVIDUALS TRAVELLING BECAUSE OF ACUTE FAMILY INCIDENTS AND DIPLOMATS, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS STAFF, MEMBERS OF ARMED FORCES TRAVELLING TO ICELAND FOR DUTY, OR HUMANITARIAN AID WORKERS.
What if you don’t want to say that you’re being oppressed? Tahiti!
A0164/20 NOTAMR A0153/20 Q) NTTT/QXXXX/IV/NBO/A/000/999/1315S13830W999 A) NTTT B) 2004130523 C) 2004300959 E) COVID-19: CREWS/PASSENGERS REQUIREMENTS IN ACCORDANCE WITH FRENCH POLYNESIA GOVERNMENT AIMING AT PREVENTING INTRODUCTION OR SPREAD OF INFECTIONS BY THE NEW CORONAVIRUS 2019: I. THE PILOT ARRIVING IN FRENCH POLYNESIA MUST PROVIDE THE HEALTH PART OF THE AIRCRAFT GENERAL DECLARATION UPON LANDING AT TAHITI FAAA. II. ALL TRAVELLERS ARRIVING IN FRENCH POLYNESIA INCLUDING AFTER A TECHNICAL STOP, MUST FILL IN THE PUBLIC HEALTH PASSENGER LOCATOR FORM (SEE ICAO ANNEX 9, APPENDIX 13 AND FRENCH ORDER OF 9 JULY 2014 CONCERNING PASSENGER LOCATOR FORMS). III. THE PUBLIC HEALTH PASSENGER LOCATOR FORM MUST BE HANDED OUT TO PASSENGERS BY THE CREW, COMPLETED AND HANDED OVER BY THE AIR OPERATOR TO THE AERODROME OPERATOR AT THE DESTINATION AIRPORT.
More: Visit https://direct.arinc.net/public/covid_19_notams.pdf (note that this is organized by ICAO airport code, which is what a pilot would enter into an aircraft GPS, not by the IATA code that you might use to buy a commercial airline ticket)
Our results suggest that the IHME model substantially underestimates the uncertainty associated with COVID19 death count predictions. We would expect to see approximately 5% of the observed number of deaths to fall outside the 95% prediction intervals. In reality, we found that the observed percentage of death counts that lie outside the 95% PI to be in the range 49% – 73%, which is more than an order of magnitude above the expected percentage. Moreover, we would expect to see 2.5% of the observed death counts fall above and below the PI. In practice, the observed percentages were asymmetric, with the direction of the bias fluctuating across days.
So… the model was “wrong” (actual fell outside predicted 95 percent range) as much as 73 percent of the time!
A friend in Holland in is his 60s and therefore beginning to enter the real risk window for COVID-19. When I call to check on him, he is usually out in the busy square of his university town. “Some students just walked by with six crates of beer,” he remarked. Holland never truly shut down. Unlike Sweden, however, the schools closed. “The teachers are unionized,” my friend said. “So they knew they’d get paid whether or not they went to work. Of course they immediately refused to work and said that the schools had to be closed in the name of protecting everyone.” How about the stores? “Everything is open except for the red light district,” he responded. (If the gals working there could somehow make it to Boston, they could earn a lot more than they’d been getting in Amsterdam!)
(How’s Holland doing? The Population is 17 million. As of April 9, they’d suffered 2,248 deaths compared to 10,853 in France, population 67 million. I.e., the Netherlands has had a lower death rate than France. France began locking down on March 13.)
If people making the decisions on shutting down continue to get paid, when would they ever suggest reopening? Who is involved in or has influenced decision-making in the U.S. on this issue?
One thing the above folks all have in common: they will still have the same job at the same pay regardless of the length of the shutdown. What’s their lockdown experience like? I was on FaceTime yesterday with a (flying friend) professor of “science and public policy,” i.e., exactly the kind of person whom a government might turn to for advice. He is suffering through the lockdown at a 20-acre family property right on the ocean.
If your job is engineering or manufacturing widgets, on the other hand, every additional day of shutdown is additional risk that a customer will decide to buy widgets from Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, or Chinese suppliers that remain up and running. You will come back after the shutdown to reduced revenue and a much tougher competitive environment in direct proportion to the length of the shutdown.
Given that even one death is one death too many from COVID-19 and that we should always act out of an abundance of caution and that we assume that our shutdown has had a tremendous life-saving effect, when would folks who are immune to any negative effects of economic/societal shutdown ever decide that it is time to reopen?
While the rank-and-file righteous were posting on Facebook their hopes for continued exponential growth through November in American deaths, journalists were publishing their hopes for dramatic near-term exponential growth in Swedish deaths. As infidels against the religion of “saving lives” via social and economic shutdown, the Swedes deserve to experience the full wrath of the coronavirus god:
After 8 days of unimpeded exponential growth since that April 4 article, how many thousands of deaths did 10 million Swedes experience in the last 24-hour period, according to the WHO? 17. Seventeen thousand? No: 17. Locked-down Denmark, with a population size half of Sweden’s, had 13.
4/12 comment: Sweden has 466 new cases; locked-down Denmark has 177. Sweden suffered 17 deaths; Denmark 13. I.e., adjusted for its 2X population, wide-open Sweden has a higher rate of new cases and a lower rate of deaths. Massachusetts has gone off the rails compared to Sweden. With 2,615 new cases, Massachusetts has 8X the new case rate of Sweden’s. With 70 deaths, locked-down Massachusetts has 6X the death rate of Sweden.
In other words, the exponential doom forecast for schools-/restaurants-open Sweden has actually happened, but to schools-/restaurants-/offices-closed Massachusetts. The University of Washington prophets are still showing that Massachusetts will suffer a higher death rate, adjusted for population, than New York (though Sweden’s death rate will be yet worse, say these lockdown advocates, roughly twice as high as New York’s).
Graphic from today’s NYT:
Separately, I still think it is an open question as to whether the number of worldwide new cases of COVID-19 is declining. Testing continues to ramp up, but the number of new cases is only 17 percent higher than it was on April 1.
Certainly the Swedish numbers will not convince Americans who bought into the shutdown religion, any more than a high death rate during the Black Plague sowed doubt in the minds of the Flagellants (if half the people in a town were killed, the Flagellants would say “if we hadn’t whipped ourselves, the death rate would have been nearly 100 percent”!).
[Separately, a friend asked privately “What is your ultimate Sweden prediction? It is nice we actually have a control that rational people can look on.” So that I can’t go back on this and deny him the opportunity to ridicule me later, I will put my answer here. Massachusetts and Sweden are fairly comparable in terms of percentage of the population that live in an urban area. Sweden’s population has a slightly older median age, but, perhaps healthier so that’s a wash. My prediction is based on the Massachusetts “curve flattening” efforts, including shutting down schools, restaurants, and offices, saving zero lives compared to Sweden’s shutting down mass gatherings. Neither Sweden nor Massachusetts will run out of health system capacity and therefore every patient will get whatever medical interventions are available. Sweden spends 11 percent of a lower per capita GDP on health care versus 17 percent here in the U.S., but our incompetence could easily soak up the difference in spending and therefore the systems should be equally effective (actually equally ineffective would be more accurate right now due to the lack of any drug or procedure that seriously impedes the virus). The American system will not let anyone die, regardless of how many organ systems are destroyed, so long as Medicare can still be billed, and this will be the basis of a differential. My prediction is that Sweden’s death rate from COVID-19 for all of 2020 will be 1.15X the Massachusetts rate.
(Where are they right now? Sweden has 887 deaths, or 90 per million inhabitants. Massachusetts has suffered 756 deaths so far, roughly 110 per million.)
As long as we’re making predictions, what about the total for Massachusetts and Sweden? The University of Washington right now says that doom is in store for Sweden. They’ll have 13,259 deaths through August 4, 2020. They’ll have 79 ICU beds and need 3,378(!).
Shut-down Massachusetts is forecast to suffer 6,739 deaths through August 4, 2020, out of a total U.S. death toll of 61.545. I.e., with 2% of the nation’s population, we will have 10% of the COVID-19 fatalities. This seems like too large a share, even for a population that spends most of its time reflecting with satisfaction on how stupid people in the south and Midwest are (imagine if we’d put that effort into stockpiling masks and coming up with a plan for a flu-like epidemic!). So let’s cut this back to 7% of the U.S. fatalities: 4,300 (if we believe the 61,545 prophecy). This implies that Sweden will lose 5,000 citizens by August 4, 2020. I have much less confidence in these numbers than in the idea that the death rates in Sweden and Massachusetts will be within 20% of each other.]
Update 4/14: The latest report for Sweden: 465 new cases and 20 deaths (Denmark was at 144 and 12). Massachusetts had 1,296 new cases and 113 deaths (8X the death rate).
An attempt to calculate Rt, the effective reproduction number, in each state: Which states have the epidemic least “under control?” To answer this, I plotted states where the best case (eg. low end of HDI) is above 1.0, indicating the true value of Rt is almost certainly above 1.0. Surprisingly, Rhode Island, Maryland and Massachusetts sit at the top. Part of this may be that Rhode Island is earlier in its infection curve, but seeing large states like Massachusetts and Texas above 1.0 is worrisome —especially because none of these states have hit the headlines as being trouble spots.
“Some Countries Are Taking Social Distancing More Seriously Than Others” (Bloomberg) contains some fascinating data collected by Google. They can figure out whether or not people in any given country are naughty (not socially distant) or nice (socially distant): “In Italy, public places are a lot quieter than before the spread of coronavirus. In Sweden, they’re busier.”
Google and the journalist/editors, of course, assume that more socially distant = more righteous. More social is depicted in red and less social is depicted in green.
Sweden is just packed with covidiots milling about together and transmitting the lethal virus! But also Germany, supposedly shut down. Americans heeded the call to take to their sofas. We love to consider ourselves superior to Mexicans. And every Hollywood Democrat wants to escape Trump via emigration to Canada, not Mexico, but Mexicans have changed their behavior far more than Americans or Canadians.
Is everyone sick of seeing friends and co-workers compressed into a portion of an already-small monitor?
The only good video conference experience that I have had was back in 2000 in Australia. A university with two campuses used the rear wall of a lecture room as a life-size window into a room that was about 20 miles away. People in that remote room appeared life size on the rear wall. The data link speed was, I’m sure, nowhere near as good as the standard fiber-to-the-home services today. The projectors could not have been as good as today’s projectors. But it was surprisingly natural to converse with people who seemed to be just on the other side of the wall.
Multi-city law firms today often have advanced systems. A huge direct-view TV (85″?) on one wall of the room in New York can show what is going on in a similar room in D.C. It doesn’t seem as effective as the system that the Australians had back in 2000, though, because the people who appear on the screen are not as big as the people who are live in the room (or as “live” as anyone can be who is working on a patent infringement question!).
Back in 2003, I wrote up an idea for a infrastructure that would enable a person to work side-by-side with an assistant in another part of the world: “it is as if a wall in one’s office is opened up to the assistant’s office thousands of miles away”. Why not build home offices like this as standard? A window in front and video walls left and right. If the plague returns, everyone who currently works side-by-side in a Silicon Valley coding plantation can go home and still work side-by-side with at least two co-workers at a time.
I’ll cut and paste the research idea from 2003…
Americans make expensive employees. Productivity is measured as economic output per dollar of labor input. In the absence of technological advances, the only way to improve labor productivity is to move the job to a low-wage country. Pairing every American office worker with an assistant in a low-wage English-speaking country (or a low-wage part of the US) would be an excellent way of boosting productivity without exporting jobs, assuming that an effective coordination system can be constructed.
The Labus Novus coordination system will comprise the following components:
a life-sized two-way video conferencing system; it is as if a wall in one’s office is opened up to the assistant’s office thousands of miles away
an information system that records everything relevant to the high-wage worker’s job, including facts, reference material, contacts, correspondence, appointments, and relationships among these items [like a more sophisticated Microsoft Outlook]
robot arms and other robots within the high-wage worker’s office that can be manipulated by the low-wage worker, thus enabling the assistant to pull folders from file cabinets, position papers on a desk, etc., from the other side of the planet
Current state-of-the-art video conferencing systems require 6 Mbits of point-to-point bandwidth. Thus the requirement of extremely high quality video conferencing implies the need for research in video analysis and compression, network protocols and routing, and semiconductors and optics for very bright images.
[Ooops! This is rather unfortunate to read, 17 years later! 6 Mbits?!?]
Outlook-on-steroids might sound straightforward but doing the job right can be as challenging as all of Artificial Intelligence. We are building support for a computer-mediated assistant rather than attempting to build a fully automated personal cognitive assistant. This does not reduce the difficulty of achieving a complete solution but it does increase the utility of an incomplete solution.
A desire to give the assistant the ability to manipulate physical objects half a world away (telepresence) justifies research in broad areas of robotic actuators and sensors.
Funding Possibilities: Phone companies are logical sponsors for this research. Telcos built a tremendous amount of network capacity in the 1990s but then neglected to offer any services besides voice communication, thus resulting in falling prices and bankruptcies. Only about 10 percent of the fiber installed through the U.S. is actually being used. Continuously active high quality video conferences have the potential to consume all of currently unused bandwidth in the networks.
Note that the system could be used domestically, yoking together a worker in an expensive crowded place such as New York City with an assistant in a low-wage uncrowded place such as Iowa.
