Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #857: Getting ready for a hard winter, part 1.

At some point in the recent past, you probably saw some monster headline about the huge plunge in US Gross Domestic Product, due to COVID-19.  Like the one at the left.  (Source:  CNBC).

That, in turn, was based on the numbers as calculated by Bureau of Economic Analysis.  When graphed, they looked like this.  (Source:  BEA.)

 

In this post, I’m going to explain why that’s hugely misleading, as presented.  (Hint:  They took the actual drop, and multiplied by four).  And then look at other sources of national data, to get a handle on the average impact of COVID on the economy as a whole.  So far. 

The picture isn’t sunny.  But it’s not (yet) the disaster that is (or, really, appears to be) pictured above.

Continue reading Post #857: Getting ready for a hard winter, part 1.

Post #854: Now will you take this seriously?

On September 12, 2020, I suggested that a box fan, some duct tape, and a 3M Filtrete ™ air filter was the best and cheapest approach to safe indoor dining in the COVID-19 era.  That’s Post #810.

I am not alone in figuring out that an air-curtain approach is the best possible method for separating individuals, once we all acknowledge that aerosol transmission is possible.

I’ve already voted, so I’m not tracking the debates.  But my wife thought it was worth quoting the NY times in this regard.  Because the fan-filter-duct tape solution is now slowly entering common knowledge.

"'A box fan, an air filter — and duct tape to attach them.

With four such cobbled together devices, at perhaps a total of $150, the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday night could be made much safer, according to experts in airborne viruses."
"Dr. Milton and his colleagues have contacted the debate commission, as well as both campaigns, to recommend purchasing plug-and-play air filters — excellent models cost just $300 each — or four box fans and air filters taped together. Each debater would have one device positioned to suck up and clean the air exhaled, and another to produce clean air.


In research conducted with singers over the past few months, Jelena Srebric, a mechanical engineer at the University of Maryland, found that this so-called Corsi box — named for Richard Corsi, an air quality expert at Portland State University — can significantly decrease the number of aerosols."

We will eventually figure this out.  Apollo 13 came home on the basis of duct tape and quick thinking.  America will eventually get through this crisis.  In part, perhaps, on the same basis.

 

Post #853: How is Governor Christie doing?

Source:  NJ.com.

We’ll probably never see a count of all the COVID-19 cases generated by the White House Rose Garden cluster event.  The White House won’t allow CDC to do contact tracing, nor will the White House itself do contact tracing.

I lost count somewhere around 19 persons directly infected, the last of which has now caused the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to go into quarantine.

"It's not clear how (Adm. Charles) Ray was infected, though he did attend a White House ceremony on Sept. 27, just one day after President Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee. Multiple people at that event contracted COVID."

Source:  NPR

But the one infected person I’m keeping in mind is the former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie.  He is a high-risk individual, due mainly to severe asthma and a degree of obesity.

And so far, it looks like he’s following the classic rule of reporting on the health of a politician:  No news is (probably) bad news.  (See Post #846, and bottom of Post #848).

Now, we can’t be sure of that.  But as these things go, any good news tends to be publicized immediately.  And so you have to infer that a lack of news at the minimum means a lack of good news, and in all likelihood means means bad news.

It appears that the only coverage of Governor Christie is in the New Jersey press.  He “checked himself into the  hospital” on Saturday.  He had a 10-minute conversation with a reporter on Monday morning.  And nobody has heard from him, via any means (voice, text, tweet), or has gotten an update on his status, since that time.

Based on Medicare data, the 50th percentile for hospital length-of-stay for Medicare-paid COVID-9 cases is 7 days.  (Which is actually seven nights in the hospital, as these things are counted.) Governor Christie has now been hospitalized for four days.  So, absent any hard information, the next marker comes this Saturday.  If he hasn’t been discharged by then, the reasonable assumption would be that he’s pretty severely ill. 

At this point, the national news media seem to have forgotten Governor Christie.  Has the Trump administration done the same?  Will anyone in the Trump administration, unprompted, mention his name, publicly wish him well, publicly express some degree of concern for him or his family, and so on.  Will he even merit a pro-forma “our thoughts and prayers are with you”? Or, if he is seriously ill, will they do their best to toss him down the memory hole?  That’s the second thing I’ll be keeping an eye on.

 

Post #852: College re-openings that are succeeding.

Source:  William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard, downloaded 10/6/2020.

Starting a month ago, I did a handful of posts on press coverage of COVID-19 and students’ return to college campuses.  (Post #786, Post #788, and then sporadic mentions after that.  Ending with a discussion of the absolutely nutso “Right to Party” proposed by the governor of (where else) Florida (Post #825).

The gist of all that is that a) newspapers make it their business to report only the bad news and the outrageous actors, so you don’t ever hear about the success stories, and b) the success stories have a few, simple, obvious things in common. Continue reading Post #852: College re-openings that are succeeding.

Post #850: The CDC says the A-word, but it still doesn’t get it

The A-word being Aerosol or Airborne.

Ah, at this point I’m so tired of this topic, I’ll just let you read the grudging and limited extent of the change in CDC guidance.  You can find it on the CDC website, at this link.

I particularly like this bit of weasel-wording, emphasis mine:

There is evidence that under certain conditions, people with COVID-19 seem to have infected others who were more than 6 feet away.

Continue reading Post #850: The CDC says the A-word, but it still doesn’t get it

Post #849: A must-read on patterns of COVID-19 spread

I rarely just ditto a published article on this blog, but this one, in The Atlantic, is the most sophisticated discussion of COVID-19 spread and contact tracing that I’ve seen to date.

Briefly, this Atlantic article is about “k” or “dispersion”, the measure of how lumpy or “clustered” the spread of COVID-19 is.  The fact that most of the spread isn’t due to one-person-at-a-time spread.  Most  spread is due to “clusters”, where one person infects many people, all at the same time.  And to the point, it’s about what that should imply for everything from contact tracing, to how the government goes about trying to bring the pandemic under control.

It’s also incredibly timely, because the large cluster of cases arising around or during the recent White House Rose Garden ceremony is normal for COVID-19 spread.  Within that group of top Republican supporters, we did NOT see one person a day showing up as infected, each day, over the course of a dozen days.  As if each person had passed it along, one at a time.  That would have matched the stylized pattern for (e.g.) seasonal flu.  Instead, we saw the 15-and-counting individuals (so far) showing up all at once, all apparently infected at more-or-less the same time, with one or a few closely-related events.

We’ll never know the actual count of people ultimately infected via that event, because the White House won’t allow anyone else to do contact tracing, and will not do any contact tracing itself.  Just another way in which the Republican leadership expresses its contempt for the CDC guidance on containing this disease (Post #848).

The title of that Atlantic article reads like a typical piece of clickbait.  (“Use this one trick to lose tons of belly fat!”.)  And it’s tough going in spots.  But for me, at least, it was well worth the time it took to read it through.

The piece is about how some countries “get it”, with respect to the prevalence of COVID-19 clusters, and have modified their approach to the pandemic accordingly.

But not the U.S.  And because the U.S. response hadn’t really taken clusters into account as the main mechanism of disease spread, our response remains something of a … well, I’ll let you fill in the blank there.

Continue reading Post #849: A must-read on patterns of COVID-19 spread