Author: chogan@directresearch.com

I upgraded my first cloth masks today, inserting Filterete (r) 2500 fabric into commercially-made fabric masks that my wife and daughter are using.  Then whip-stitching them shut.

What I found is that, even if I doubled it up, and provided generous seam allowances, and bought the Filtrete (r) at full retail, it works out to about $0.50 per mask.

Stay with me on this.

Filtrete (r) is a 3M product, and is designed to filter out the most difficult-to-filter particles — those around 0.3 microns.  And it’s designed to do that without causing a large back-pressure.  (Because otherwise you’d screw up your HVAC system, right?)

Those particles are exactly what you want to be able to filter out, these days. Virus-sized, for want of a better term. Aerosols.  Under 5 microns. Ah, I gathered the info a week ago.  (see Post #593 for details)

Those N95 masks that are in such great shortage?  That stands for being able to trap 95% of those small particles, in a single pass, through that mask (really, respirator). That’s the gold standard.

If you look at the specs, via the 3M website (see Post #593 for details), or look at this .pdf on the 3M website, a single layer of 3M Filtrete 2500 removes 77% of E1 particles (down to 0.3 micron) in a single pass.  Two layers?  Simple math. They allow 0.33 * 0.33 = 10% Edit: oops, .23*.23 = 5% of those particles to pass.  So, the same as the N95 standard.

Yeah, there’s caveats.  That’s based on some specific rate of air flow.  And while I may be wrong, I get the feeling that my HVAC unit, with its 1 HP motor running a blower and driving air though 400 square inch filter, probably passes more air per square inch than a wheezy old fat guy, with a mask.  Meaning, me.

Anyway, in mask parlance, two layers of Filterete (r) 2500 creates an N905 mask.  If you can keep air from leaking around the edges of the mask.

And that ain’t too shabby.  For a fifty-cents-per-mask investment.

My point being, there could be a cheap way to end this.  Mask up.  Mask up in public.  Mask up in private business spaces — places where you’re indoors with people other than your family.

And, maybe, way outside the box here, if we all masked up, and followed other CDC guidelines, and had high-quality masks — maybe we could just cut this whole quarantine thing short.

The US powers-that-be won’t consider that, because there aren’t nearly enough N95 or KN95 masks to allow 330M Americans to mask up.  Those are the only Officially-Certified masks.  And KN95, only because FDA was dragged kicking and screaming into allowing that.  Search FDA here, if you want to see the story.

So, screw that.  Let’s make some.  We’re Americans, for gosh sakes.  If we were dumb enough to take an insane king’s word as law, we’d still be part of the British Commonwealth.  But our founders had better sense than that.

Some people are sufficiently behind the times that they think of those N95’s as one-use disposables, instead of nearly-indefinitely re-usable.  So let’s assume that, by now, they’ve all gotten the word that the first thing to wear out on a 3M N95 is the elastic.  And that you can sanitize them against COVID-19 by just letting them sit in an open paper bag.

But the cheap-ass economist in me keeps saying, $0.50 a head, $0.50 a head.   Call it $1.00 per person, if you are fussy enough to require a two-day mask rotation.  For the key material.  Volunteer labor.  Plus fabrics based on whatever scraps you have around.  And half-a-buck’s worth of Filtrete (r) or 13-or-higher MERV per mask.

Seriously, folks.  Fearless Leader is still talking about just letting people die as the expedient path here.  I think the last euphemism was “wash over”.  Just let it “wash over” the populace.  That’s still just the current twist on the old “high cost of dying” canard.  See posts 570 and 571.

I don’t know about you, but if push comes to shove, laws requiring an NXX mask or better, in any place where people interact, just beat the living hell out of the alternatives that are (apparently) being considered by the US executive branch of government.

What we really need is some decent observational data. A handful of communities who will lead the way.  Even the weakest evidence of efficacy makes a mask-up policy  — with good quality home-made masks — vastly better than sitting around, hoping this is going to die down on its own.

Fifty cents a mask.  N905.  Just think about it.

At present, I have enough material, from a single large Filtrete (r) filter, to supply material for an estimated 48 masks.  And I have more on the way.  And non-Filtrete MERV-13’s.  If you live in the Town of Vienna (ZIP 22180) and you’d like a piece of this material, email chogan@directresearch.com.

If there’s anything you should take away from my last few posts, it’s that this problem isn’t going to solve itself.  Someone needs to step up.

Friday a week ago, the US CDC said, mask up in public.  Huge change in public guidance. Read Post #602.  I’m not making this up.  I’m not hallucinating it.  May not sound like it, but it was a huge change from the CDC.

It was an admission that this disease was likely being transmitted in ways that they had not anticipated.  It was an admission that sick people, coughing and sneezing in public, was NOT the primary mode of transmission for COVID-19.  Because if that were true, just keeping your distance would have been enough.

And people around here took that call to mask-up to heart, near as I can tell.  There was a sea-change between the last time I grocery shopped and the time before that.

As you know, if you read this blog, I’ve been hawking the use of masks in public for a while.  And you’re smart enough to know that the “pipeline” of cases is maybe 10 to 12 days long.  It takes that long for any change in the infection rate to filter out into the statistics.  That’s 5-6 days from the point of infection to the point that you have symptoms, and then, however long it takes to get you tested, and get those test results entered into the system.

The first time interval is determined by biology.  But the second, we might plausibly hope, can be affected by humans.  As in, can be shortened as this progresses.

So I thought I’d bring the most recent data to your attention.  Today’s data.  Just about exactly 10 days after the CDC said, mask up.

I’m just gonna present the info.  Draw your own conclusions about whether today’s case count increase was different, or not.

Me?  I’m lighting a candle tonight and offering a prayer.  Because if this is just a statistical blip, we are in deep doo-doo.  Again, see just prior post.

M—-UP is the day the CDC asked us all to mask up in public.  The arrow points out the 10th day after.  If this is mere wishful thinking, I’m happy to have one night where I think, even mistakenly, that I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

I’m not set up to look at the US as a whole.  But I’ll settle for this, for now.

More on masks tomorrow.

 

 

This is another post for those of you who don’t quite know what to say when your kids ask you what math is good for.  I think this is at a pre-algebra level but I’m not sure.  It’s about exponents and logarithms.  But anything I do here, probably a child who’s a few years from that, but good with a spreadsheet, can do it that way.

Christopher Hogan, Ph.D.  chogan@directresearch.com

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The context

Daily percentage case growth is about 10% in both Fairfax and in Virginia.  What you see below is a plot of the current percentage rate of growth in COVID-19 cases in Fairfax (orange) and Virginia (blue).  Here’s a plot of the average daily percentage increase in cases.

But, of course, because the base for that percentage increase keeps growing, that number (count) of new cases seen each day continues to go up.  And that’s what you see below, again for Fairfax (orange) and Virginia (blue).

What we are all hoping to see, in the near future, is an “inflection point” in the growth of coronavirus cases.  In practical terms, that’s the point where we reach the top of the hill on those last two graphs, and the daily count of new cases begins to fall.  When that occurs, it will be the first clear signal that we have started to get a grip on this.  The first simple indication that this is behaving qualitatively differently from an unchecked epidemic.

That inflection point will tell us, for sure, that we are moving away from an unchecked epidemic.  Because raw epidemics, at least at the start, almost always show exponential growth.

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Exponential growth.

Source:  A calculus-level lesson on exponential and logistic growth, from Kahn Academy.

You see a lot of overly-complicated definitions of exponential growth.  It’s really just the same idea as compound interest.  Next year, the money in your CD will be whatever it is now, plus 2%.  And then the year after, it’ll be whatever it is next year, plus 2%.  And so on.

Constant percentage growth.  That’s exponential growth.  Looking at the graphs above, if conditions don’t change, tomorrow’s case count will be today’s count, plus 10%.  And the day after will be tomorrow’s count, plus 10% of that.

Unchecked epidemics tend to spread exponentially for the simple reason that each person tends to infect N others, who then go on to infect N others, and so on. So the math for this really is just a straightforward reflection of the biology.

For example, suppose that with Binary Syndrome, you’re only sick for a day.  But in that day, you infect two others, who go on to become sick the next day.  And repeat.  After you start the epidemic rolling, the count of active cases then goes 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on.  On the Tth day, the case count is 2^T.  Two-to-the-power-T.  Two-to-the-exponent-T.  Hence, exponential growth.

And the originator of the epidemic?  The day when there’s only one case.  Call that day zero.

If there had been 10 of you, at the start, instead of just one guy, the case count would simply by 10* 2^T.   And if this were Trinary Syndrome instead of Binary Syndrome, and each person infected three each day,  and you started with 10, you’d get a daily case count of 10*3^T.

Actual epidemiologists don’t use different bases for this case-count figure.  They wouldn’t use 2 for one disease, and 3 for another.  Instead, they put them all on a common basis using Euler’s  Number (not to be confused with Euler’s Constant), or “e”, the basis of natural logarithms.

If you knew that “e” was in honor of Euler, pat yourself on the back for an excellent education.  Heck, if you so much as remembered that Euler was a mathematician, you get full credit.

You can do that — convert everything to base “e” — because there really aren’t an infinite number of different exponential curves, one for every base.  There’s only “the” exponential curve or formula, the one that uses a base of “e”.  Anything you can express with a base of 2, 3 or any other number, you can express with a base of “e”.  You just need to add a parameter — one number in the formula that reflects the exact curve you want to represent.

And it takes just a bit of work to get from the obvious formula for the Binary Syndrome case count — using a base of 2 — to the professional standard formula, using a base of “e”.  Solve for a, in this equation.

2^T = e^a*T

ln(2^T)  = ln(e^a*T)  Take natural logs (ln = natural log)

ln(2)*T = ln(e^a*T) Logs convert exponentiation to multiplication

ln(2)*T = a*T  That, my friend, is the definition of a natural log.

a = ln(2)  Divide out the T’s

a = eh, about 0.693 or so.

So instead of a case count of 2^T on the Tth day, an epidemiologist would say a case count of e^0.693*T  .  Take a spreadsheet and check that, and you’ll see that on the 4th day, you’re expecting 15.99 cases using the exponential curve. Close enough.

The beauty of this is that now you have a common way of comparing all epidemics, based on the rapidity of their spread.  Just compare that exponent. And you can easily handle cases in the real world, where the average spread rate isn’t going to be a whole number.

As I said earlier, exponential curves are ones that have a constant percentage growth rate.  And if somebody hands you a formula, like the one above, it’s easy enough to get from the factor “a” in that formula, to the growth rate.  The ratio of cases on day T+1, to cases on day T, is always:

e^a*(T+1)/ e^a*(T)  = e^a*(T+1)* e^-a*(T) =  e^{a*(T+1) -a*(T)} = e^a

Again, plug that into a calculator to make sure that’s right.  And e^0.693 is 1.9997.  Again, close enough.  We started from a series that doubled every day, and we have a series that (within rounding error) still doubles every day.

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But back in the real world …

Source:  A calculus-level lesson on exponential and logistic growth, from Kahn Academy.

That’s all well and good.  But that growth can’t go on forever.  That simple exponential growth curve assumes you have an infinite pool of people, ready to be infected.  So this really only characterizes the start of an epidemic.  At some point, even with no intervention at all, eventually enough people have had the disease and are now immune to it that you begin to deplete the pool of persons able to contract the disease.

So, even without intervention, at some point the spread of Binary Syndrome would slow.  It would no longer double each day, due to the simple fact that you run out of people to infect.

And, even more realistically, if you get your two infections in because you touched two (and only two) randomly chosen individuals, then the rate of growth doesn’t just suddenly hit the wall when all the uninfected people are gone.  When you start out, you touch two, and infect two.  But as time passes, there’s a greater and greater chance that one (both) of your two touches is (are) already immune.  So the rate of growth slowly declines.  As you begin to deplete the pool, your average daily infection rate drops below 2.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that in the real world.  Some viruses are hard to spread in summer, presumably because the higher humidity destroys them faster.  And that reduces the spread.  Sometimes people wise up, and (e.g.) stop shaking hands during a flu epidemic.  And so on.

But that’s the basics.  In a “natural” epidemic — where nobody tries to stop it — early-stage growth is exponential.  And, if nothing else happens, that only slows down when the disease runs out of targets.

And at the end, the remaining uninfected become so few and far between that a lot of people begin infecting less than one additional person.  And at that point, the epidemic winds down.  Each day you get fewer new cases than the day before.

And that’s still exponential “growth”.  But with a negative exponent.  Estimate what that factor “a” above would be, if every current infection yielded just 0.5 new infections (instead of the 2 we started with): a = ln(0.5) = -0.693 (or so).

And if that number looks familiar, great.  And for many, it will eventually dawn on you that the natural log of (1/2) has to be the negative of the natural log of 2.  Which is even better.  If not, don’t worry about it, just use a calculator.

And the result of all of that is what epidemiologists and others refer to as a sigmoid curve or logistic curve.  For a classic epidemic, the number of people starts small, and grows like crazy.  Then something happens, one way or the other.  You begin to run out of uninfected people.  You begin to vaccinate people.  Something.  Growth in new cases slows down (in percentage terms).  Then, at some point, it actually slows down to the point where the daily count of new cases starts to fall — the “inflection point”.  And then, eventually, it stops.  The count of total infected people levels off.  No new cases.

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Why exponential growth is dangerous.

More than two weeks ago, Virginia Commonwealth University began converting some of their dorms to overflow hospital space.  That’s not because they are over-reacting.  Nor did they do it out of blind fear.

Rather, it is a calculated step.  Literally.  They did it because somewhere, a statistician or epidemiologist made a projection of the likely number of peak cases for this epidemic, based on exponential growth and the sigmoid/logistic curve.  Possibly tempered with some real-world experience of how such pandemics are most likely to behave.

It’s a classic example of what I call the “Panic Early and Often” approach.  Somebody looked at those projections and said, we’re going to need some more beds.  And they set about getting it done. Far better to figure that out sooner than later.

But they aren’t setting up as many beds as they possibly can.  That would be hugely expensive.  They’re setting up as many as they think they  might need.  Plus, probably, a margin for error.

(Oh, would that NoVA toilet-paper shoppers had done the same.)

In this case, a whole lot of money, and maybe a whole lot of suffering, relies on somebody, somewhere, being able to do that calculation and projection right.  Or, as right as it can humanly be done.  Too high, and you waste a lot of money redoing these rooms.  Too low, and you run out of hospital beds.

So if your kids ever ask you what math is good for, this is a dandy example.

It’s tough to make predictions, particularly about the future.  And I hardly have the depth of understanding that the government’s own epidemiologists do.  On the other hand, once we’ve settled on doing a logistic curve, and have a ready source of the data (us-counties.csv, on this page), even something as simple as Excel will fit that logistic curve to the data.

So we can do a simple-minded check on this.   Do the data look like they are following an exponential growth curve?  And then, how will things look, three weeks away, if nothing changes and that exponential growth continues?

I want to be clear that, per the first blue graph above, we are seeing daily growth rates slowly declining in Virginia.  And its far too soon to see the effect of the latest CDC guidance to wear a mask when you are in public.

But for those who might think that VCU over-reacted, we can certainly take the situation just as it stands, right now, and see what things will look like in three weeks.  If nothing changed from the current growth rate.  In four easy graphs.

And what’s our criterion?  Right now, the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association says there are 5953 available hospital beds in Virginia.  How does that compare to the likely total coronavirus case count (times hospitalization rate per case), three weeks from now, under constant exponential growth.

This first chart fits an exponential trend line to the last 28 days of total case counts in Virginia.  And it shows that the fit is lousy, but in a good way.  And that’s because the growth rate has fallen significantly over this period.  So an exponential fit to the last 28 days isn’t usable, because the situation changed too much over that time.

Just because you can fit a curve to some data doesn’t mean the curve is right.  Or even useful.

Now let’s try fitting a curve to 14 days and to 7 days.  If we’re lucky, and the situation is stable, we’ll get something close to the same curve either way.  And we do.  And because I know we do, I’m also going to include a 7-day projection, based on those fitted curves.

Using the last 14 days of data, we’d project 14,000 cases by the end of next week.  If nothing changes, and it just follows the same curve.

But we know that the growth rate has been falling, from the graphs at the very top of this post.  So how does it look if we use just the last seven days?  Sure enough, lower growth leads to a smaller projection.  Only a little over 10,000 cases, based on using the slower growth rate seen in the last seven days.

But here’s the danger of exponential growth.  Let me see what this looks like, three weeks from now.  Same curve, just looking a little further ahead.

And now, that same curve, if left unchecked, generates a case count of 50,000 three weeks from now.  I’m not going to show the math, but given the current COVID-19 hospitalization rate, that would in fact consume just a bit more than every empty hospital bed in Virginia.  (The only fact not in your possession is the fraction of diagnosed coronavirus cases that get hospitalized.  Currently, that’s 14.2%).

Was VCU justified in going to the expense of building overflow capacity.  Yeah, two weeks after they made that decision, using the lowest “static” growth rate estimate we can justify, it looks like they’re going to need those before three weeks pass.

A more sophisticated model would note that the growth rate hasn’t been “static” but has been falling, and would work that in.  But this is more than enough to say that, however this turns out, VCU clearly made the right call.

Methods:  The best estimate I could find says that people who are infected with coronavirus walk around for three or four days, in an infectious state, before their symptoms emerge (reference).  And, at least one model of the Wuhan epidemic suggested that there had to be a considerable number of people who were infected, but whose cases were never reported.

Based on that, and the recent number and trend of case counts, I came up with the estimate above.  That’s the last four day’s worth of new cases, adjusted for the recent average daily growth (to bring it up to today), and then a fudge factor added to account for cases mild enough that the infected individual never gets tested (and so does not appear the case counts).

I’ll discuss that last one below.  How many unrecorded cases of coronavirus are there, really?  And how on earth could you know?

So, take this estimate with a grain of salt.  You see all kinds of wild numbers out there.  With this one, at least you know how I came up with it.

And if it’s anywhere near ballpark, it provides you with plenty of reason to take all possible precautions when in public, around others.

Under the worst-case assumptions, if the Pan Am Safeway gets 2000 customers a day, they’re now at the point where they might have eight infectious customers per day, walking through that store. Continue reading Post #624: How many people are spreading this, now, in Fairfax County?

Source:  Amazon.com

As a health economics consultant (now retired), one of the joys of my job was rubbing elbows with the best-of-the-best of US health care manufacturers.  I was never more than a bit player, but was good enough to recognize excellence when I saw it.

And now that I’m retired, I can name names.  In my two decades of experience, two US companies always stood out, year after year, as the best of the best.  Just, always, the smartest people in the room.

One of those was JNJ — Johnson and Johnson.  How a company founded around the time of the Civil War ever ended up thriving into the 21st century, I cannot even fathom.

So, in my experience, if JNJ says it, it’s so.  They have shrewd business management matched to the best scientific minds in the business.  And the capital to back that up.  If they say something’s going to happen, I absolutely trust that it will.

They’re promising world-wide mass production of an effective coronavirus vaccine, with batches ready for use on an emergency basis in early 2021.  And a billion doses soon to follow after.

So that puts an upper bound on this, I’d say.  You can take that to the bank. If its JNJ, that’s not vaporware.  That’s not wishful thinking.  That’s a statement that this will happen.  Because they’ve worked out all the angles, and they know they can do it.  Otherwise, they wouldn’t say so.  That’s the JNJ way.  At least, in my experience.

This pandemic isn’t going to last forever.  And in a real sense, it’s not going to last any longer than JNJ says it will.  Not because they’ve done some wishful thinking.  Not because it’s expedient to boast about a cure.  Simply because they’ve done their homework, and they know they can do it.

And they’re probably going to make a decent profit doing it.  Because, when you get down to it, that’s the only reason they’ve been around for a century and a half.  Capitalism gets a bad rap in health care.  And to some degree that’s deserved.  But, occasionally, you’re really glad to have a big, smart, badass capitalist firm on your side.

You can read the press release here.

I still wish they’d skip Phase 1 clinical trials, all things considered.

We don’t want to be the last people to do this.  I doubt that Vienna Town Council has the moxie to do it.  Start emailing the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.   We need this yesterday.

Long Beach CA now has a mandatory mask ordinance for all essential businesses.  That was only issued yesterday.

Montgomery County, MD is getting set to do the same thing.  If you’re inside any essential business, you must wear a mask.

Los Angeles, CA passed a mandatory mask law for essential businesses two days ago.

Inc says that every employer should mandate masks.  Which, again, tells me that many are not.

As of two days ago, several localities were passing laws requiring that grocery stores provide employees with masks.

Municipalities are passing mandatory mask laws.  Including Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Many of the counties in South Florida are now requiring masks in essential businesses.

The state of New Jersey requires masks when in essential businesses, as of yesterday.  But Hoboken required that almost a week ago.

And if this report is correct, five days ago, the DoD decided that anyone on DoD property has to wear a mask.  They’re not screwing around with this.  Neither should we.

I could go on.  Just Google it and skip down a page or two.  I didn’t come close to exhausting the list of governments that are now requiring masks for anyone entering into an essential business.

In the Commonwealth, essential business are all that’s left open.  Let’s get a mandatory mask law in place in Fairfax County.

 

This has now been completely reorganized, and I’m more-or-less done with it.  The upshot is, we need a mandatory mask law.  That’s as much as we can do, at present, to reduce disease transmission in the public spaces.  And if we have even a hint that transmission within businesses is an issue, we now need to start thinking about legal restrictions on the non-public areas of businesses, governments, and other organizations.  Anywhere unrelated individuals share indoor space.  Because any of those places could be vectors for spread of infection.  We need to focus on them next.  After we get a mandatory mask law in place.

Christopher Hogan, PhD., chogan@directresearch.com

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Virginia’s experience versus Wuhan’s experience.

Virginia, USA.   Underlying data are from the Johns Hopkins coronavirus website.  The graph is my analysis.  And the title is wrong — that’s actually through yesterday 4/10/2020.

Key to actions taken in Virginia:

• A———-  Schools closed
• B———-  Restaurants, gyms, limited to no more than 10 persons at a time
• C———– Sit-down restaurants, theaters, gyms, beauty salons, etc — closed.   All gatherings of more than 10 people prohibited.  Adhere to social distancing recommendations “to the extent possible”
• D———– Same as C, plus mandatory social distancing, and (in theory) illegal to be in public places except for outdoor exercise and essential trips.  Essential means trips to your job, church, or to essential businesses.

Essential businesses include:

•  Grocery stores, pharmacies, dollar stores, and department stores (as long as they sell food or medicine)
• Medical, laboratory, and vision supply retailers;
• Electronic retailers that sell or service cell phones, computers, tablets, and other communications technology;
• Automotive parts, accessories, and tire retailers as well as automotive repair facilities;
• Home improvement, hardware, building material, and building supply retailers;
• Lawn and garden equipment retailers;
• Beer, wine, and liquor stores;
• Retail functions of gas stations and convenience stores;
• Retail located within healthcare facilities;
• Banks and other financial institutions with retail functions;
• Pet and feed stores;
• Printing and office supply stores; and
• Laundromats and dry cleaners.
• And child care facilities (addressed separately).

Retail businesses now fall into three classes.  The ones above are categorically open.  There’s a separate list of those that are categorically closed (e.g., beauty parlors, recreation facilities, movie theaters).  And then everything else is limited to 10 customers at a time.  But the Governor’s last order (3/30/2020) may have implicitly closed those, because, in theory, it is now illegal to travel to get to or from those.

Non-retail businesses are not covered by any of this.  So in addition to this list, anything that can be done that does not require any retail aspect (literally customers coming into the business) is open.  I am uncertain as to whether or not this applies to wholesalers, for example, a wholesale plumbing-supply facility or similar, where customers enter the facility, but … it’s doesn’t meet the plain-language definition of “retail”.

Finally, I scanned the executive orders, and did not find that the Governor had required local governments to close public facilities or not.  Ours have.

All of that information on Virginia is from the Governor’s executive orders.

Wuhan, China.  Underlying graph taken from:  Characteristics of and Important Lessons From the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in ChinaSummary of a Report of 72 314 Cases From the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Zunyou Wu, MD, PhD1; Jennifer M. McGoogan, PhD, JAMA. 2020;323(13):1239-1242. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.2648

Daily increase in cases, China:

Blue = onset of symptoms, tan = return of test results (i.e., case officially counted as coronavirus).

Key to actions taken in Wuhan

• A: Wuhan and adjacent cities were locked down.
• Z:  Daily increase in known coronavirus cases peaked.

The 12 days is due to the lag between infection and symptoms (about 4 or 5 days), and the lag between onset of symptoms and reporting of the test results (about a week).  That’s also why the blue bars have a flat spot at A — those are largely people who were already infected on the lockdown date, but only began to feel the symptoms an average of 5 days later.

And that’s why I said, nearly a month ago, that if closing the schools worked as a way to contain coronavirus, then we’d have expected to see the turnaround around the start of the fourth week in March.  Others, at that time, were saying end of March.  We are now rapidly approaching the middle of April, and we still have not reached the inflection point — the point where the count of new cases, each day, begins to fall.

So, by the Wuhan metric, Virginia’s steps A, B and C didn’t quite cut it.  And, really, in terms of impact on the average person, step D is just step C, rephrased for emphasis.  So if C didn’t cut it, I’m skeptical that D will.

The point of this paper is to suggest that our current “soft” lockdown doesn’t appear to be stopping the spread of coronavirus.  Not if you look carefully, and compare to an example of lockdown that worked.  We’re slowing it, sure.  But not stopping it.  Or, really, we’re not stopping it fast enough.

The doubling time for cases, at the peak of spread was about three days.  We had 25%/day growth in cases, which translates to doubling the cases every three days.  Right now our case growth in Virginia is down to about 10%/day, which means cases double every week.  But it doesn’t seem to be budging any lower than that in Fairfax County.  And if it’s going to get materially lower than that in Virginia, it’s going to take quite some time to get there.

What’s the problem?  If we continue at that rate, it’s just a matter of time before Virginia hospitals run out of ventilators.

Today, per the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, we currently have 283 ventilator-dependent COVID-19 cases in Virginia.  There remain about 2150 ventilators on-hand in Virginia hospitals and not currently in use (same source).  Doing some crude arithmetic, at the current one-week doubling time, we’ve got about three weeks to get this under better control. 

OK, I guess I had better say this, even though I would rather not.  That three week figure? That’s at the end of the pipeline, where the pipeline starts with infection, and ends with people on a respirator.   That pipeline is arguably 10 days long — median five days from infection to symptoms, and then (purely a guess) another five for the typical case that will need a ventilator to get on the ventilator.  So if the SHTF day appears to be three calendar weeks from now, at current growth rates, that means we have about a week and a half to make some material reduction in the spread of the infection in the population.  Or hope that such a reduction simply appears spontaneously.

It’s not really as doom-and-gloomy as that, because physicians in New York have figured out expedient ways to extend the respirator supply, such as splitting one respirator between two patients.  That’s truly inferior medical care.  And with a one-week doubling time?  That buys you one more week, if the growth rate remains unchecked.  It would be better if we could avoid that.

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The Virginia experience:  Case growth rates in Virginia and Fairfax County

Wuhan managed to reach the inflection point — the point where the daily increase in new cases begins to decline — after just 12 days of lockdown.

By contrast, if I now look at case growth rates in Virginia and Fairfax — defined as each day’s new cases, divided by total cases so far — for Virginia, that’s been slowly declining.  But it is currently about 10%/day.  For Fairfax, in particular, that shows no trend toward falling lower than 10%/day. 

Either way, there’s no indication that case growth is stopping any time soon, from the measures taken so far.

A daily 10% growth rate means that cases double every week.  This is better than it was at the outset, where the doubling time was about every three days, for the US, for Virginia, and for Fairfax County.  (Above, where the solid line is at 25%, that’s a three-day doubling time.)

And if they double ever week, three doublings ought to get us near the point where every free ventilator in the Commonwealth is occupied.  Per the rough calculation in the first part of this paper.

So it’s not as if the current attempt has done nothing.  Plausibly, it took us from having cases double every three days, to having cases now double every seven days.  That is, I guess, what flattening the curve is all about.

But it may not yet be good enough to avoid a crisis here in the Commonwealth.

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What else can we reasonably do, short of a full lockdown?  Mandatory mask ordinance.

Right now, whether or not we can end the current shutdown in any reasonable length of time hinges on whether or not masking up in public, on top of step D, does stop it.  That’s the only material change since Point D.  And if it doesn’t?   Well, you tell me what’s next.  Either we do things that are even more invasive.  Or we wait this out for a very long time.

The rest of this material was moved to Post #622.

My main point is that we may have to go full Wuhan on this.  Total lockdown.  Or we may have to live with this for a vastly longer period than Wuhan did.  And if those are the realistic options, we need to starting thinking of the economic consequences accordingly.  We may be living in a fool’s paradise if we are expecting Wuhan-like results without paying a Wuhan-like price for it.

So at the minimum, we have to take the tools we have in place now, and make them work as well as they can.  The CDC finally got around to recommending masks in public.   It’s time to make that mandatory.

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Background:  Key Questions to Ask.

The Town of Vienna, VA is going to start public hearings on the tax and water/sewer rates Monday 4/13/2020.

That got me thinking about whether the Town’s budgetary response to COVID-19 — which I characterize as “business as usual” — is warranted.  Near as I can tell, they seem to be working under the assumption that all will be well.  That if there is a revenue shortfall, they can cover it out of reserves.  And so, they haven’t even bothered to postpone discretionary items.  For example, it’s full-speed-ahead on the quarter-million-dollar contract to rewrite all the zoning laws in Vienna.

They aren’t alone in taking that approach.  I’d say Fairfax County is doing roughly the same.  Pay freeze, hiring freeze, and that’s about it. No plan for any major retrenchment, as of yet.

But to know whether “business as usual” is a prudent budget strategy or not, you need some guess as to how this pandemic is going to play out.  Locally, at least.  If not nationally.  I think that any reasonable economic projection has to start with that.  (Or, turning that on its head, “business as usual” implies that you’re assuming a relatively modest course of the pandemic, at least locally.)

Peeling that back one more layer, the obvious first question is:  Is the current shutdown working?  And just to cut to the chase, I think I’m going to have to say no, not really.  Halfway measures locally and in the Commonwealth appear to be producing halfway containment, so far.  Slowed the growth, but not stopped the growth.

And so, as I see it, everything right now is riding on the effects of masking up when in public.  Because as far as I can tell from the data, shown above,  everything done up to that point has merely reduced the exponent on exponential case growth.  We haven’t contained it up to that point.  All we have done is managed to slow the growth some.  And the 4/3/2020 change in CDC guidance, to include wearing a mask in public, has resulted in the only material change in prevention behavior in the past few weeks.

Which is why I am calling for the Town to issue a mandatory public mask ordinance.  This is both because I think that’s a proper public health measure, and because I’m going to have a supply of cheap single-use masks that could be used to “prompt” the people who don’t yet get it.

In the following sections of this paper, I’m going to ask a few more questions that I think are vital to understanding this, but for which there is absolutely zero public information.  We need to start asking those questions, because if public masking doesn’t work, this lockdown is going to have to get tighter, or last a long time. Worse, lockdown is a blunt instrument, and it is not purely driven by public health concerns, but by economic concerns as well.  So not only are we unsure where to target any further restrictions, in an information vacuum, they’ll get targeted based on economic criteria instead of public health criteria.

If the answer to “is this working” is “no”, the next obvious question to ask is:  Why are people continuing to catch COVID-19?  And is there anything more we can do about that?

Is this all within-family spread of already infected individuals (so-called secondary attack).  Is this people picking it up at work?  Are they picking it up as they shop?  Is it a smattering of everything?  Or, worst case, is it literally true that nobody can tell where people are picking this up now?  If true, we’ll have to go from “shut it down” to “shut it all down” if we’re going to get to the other side of this in any reasonable amount of time.

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Three key questions.

Will masking up in public change this materially?  Because that’s about all we have left, short of a Wuhan-style shutdown.  By eye, at least in the Town of Vienna, 85%-90% of people appear to be taking that seriously when in the public spaces.  That was my best guess, from my trip to the grocery store yesterday.

Maybe next time I’ll stand outside and literally count faces.

But for businesses, governments, and other organization, near as I can tell, there is no law requiring mask use in non-public business spaces.  The Governor’s last order applied to anyone in a space that is open to the public. So, you can (e.g.) still have a staff meeting, talking at one another, without masks.  I’m also pretty sure that even the social distancing requirements are not mandatory within non-public business, government, and private spaces.

And so, a sub-question is, what fraction of all time spent indoors, around non-family members, remains non-masked time?  Are there any places where individuals (other than family members) are sharing indoor spaces and not wearing masks?  Particularly, where they do a lot of talking?  Because if so, per my prior posts, that’s a transmission risk, no matter what the CDC does or does not say about it.

And as a second sub-question, is the current spread of disease primarily among the non-compliant?  Are we looking at people who (e.g.) didn’t keep their social distancing, weren’t washing their hands, and so on?  Can we simply explain it by sloppiness?  If so, presumably, at some point we will exhaust our supply of stupid people, they’ll all have gotten it, the new infection rate will drop, and we can get on with our lives.  By contrast, if these new infections are among careful and compliant individuals, then all bets are off.

Second, how much more will we have to do, if masking up in public doesn’t work?  I’m not even going to answer that one, but instead will use it to emphasize that a mandatory mask law, broader than the current mandatory social distancing law, will be a heck of a lot less intrusive and destructive than the alternatives that may become necessary.

And, finally, how does this virus continue to spread?  Because if we could do the epidemiology right now, to figure out typical situations that are leading to virus spread now, we could target interventions to that.  For sure, the whole CDC story about symptomatic individuals coughing and sneezing in public is just baloney, at this point.  It has to be pre-symptomatic individuals, and it has to be some route other than coughing and sneezing in public, because nobody is doing that now, and there is extreme social reinforcement of not appearing sick in public.

But if it’s not that, then what is it?  My fear is that epidemiologists are interpreting absence of evidence for evidence of absence, for anything other than droplet transmission.  I.e., maybe they think it’s short-range, close-contact “droplet” spread because that’s the only thing they can actually trace.  Maybe their traditional methods can only find that type of transmission.

And so, I’m afraid that what’s being reported out is that they have identified cases where it was spread by close personal contact.  And what is NOT being reported out is that they are also finding cases where close personal contact cannot plausibly explain it.

Think of it like a police investigation.  If they only report the cause when they “solve” a case, and the only cause of infection that they can trace is close personal contact, then … what they are going to report is that this is all being spread by close personal contact.  And they’re not even going to mention the cases that they haven’t solved, because they don’t know how those folks got it.

Now lest you think I am crazy, have a look at the table below.  I can’t tell whether this just reflects an agency overwhelmed by case load (so “under investigation” largely means “haven’t gotten to it yet”), or whether this really means that they have looked a a bunch of those “under investigation” cases and in fact have found many for which close personal contact is not a reasonable explanation.

But note the numbers, and in particular, note the categories.  They don’t even have a category for anything BUT transmission via close contact, for domestic cases of the disease.  And note that about 96% of cases are “under investigation”.  By eye, that almost looks like, when they identify close contact, they close a case, right?  And so, as far as they know, all of this, that they know about, is transmitted by close contact?  Please tell me that’s not what’s going on.

Source:  CDC, at this link

So the huge uncertainty here is whether that last category is a lot of unexamined cases, or a lot of unexplained cases?  That’s a pretty crucial distinction, and if that contains a large number of unexplained cases, that has huge implications for the next steps we need to take.  Because, for starters, it means that droplet transmission from being in close contact with somebody probably isn’t the main transmission route.

So I now need to find some state agency that has a version of that table where they have, in fact, split out that last category into two pieces:  We haven’t looked yet, versus we looked and close personal contact did not explain the infection.

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Searching for some clues about community spread cases as a fraction of all cases.

(And the very first thing I find is that Virginia is using Tableau to put their data on the web.  Tableau is the Roach Motel of data — data go it, but they never comes out.  Ah ,they have a separate data download section outside of Tableau.)

The second thing I note is that the Virginia Department of Health data appear more updated than the Hopkins data.  More or less, they are a day ahead on reporting, and the dates used to tag the data are off, by one day, relative to the Hopkins data. 

The first odd fact is that if I calculate known infection rate per 100,000, what I get is not at all what I expected to see.  We’ve all seen the data showing that death rates are highly skewed toward the elderly.  But, aside from the oldest old, the infection rate is not.  Presumably, below, these are all cases who were ill enough to seek medical attention, or were known to have been exposed by (say) a family member.   So this reflects some combination of exposure rate, propensity to get infected if exposed, and then, propensity to develop some severity of symptoms once infected.

Source:  Case counts are from the Virginia Department of Health.  Population counts are Census 2018 civilian population projections by state and age.

The interesting thing to me is how flat that looks for adults, putting aside the oldest old (80+).  All things considered, you’re almost as likely to get a reportable case of this if you’re a 30-something as if you’re a 70-something.  I’m sure that (e.g.) hospitalization rates and death rates don’t look like this.  Those are strongly skewed toward the elderly.  But reportable infection rates are not.  Unfortunately, I could not find Virginia numbers for either of those, by age.

And, again, putting aside the oldest old, the peak for adults is in the working-age population (50-59), not the retirees (70-79).

The second clue is that what I am looking for, initially, is the fraction of cases attributed to “community spread”.  “Community spread means there is at least one case where we don’t know how someone contracted COVID-19. They didn’t have contact with someone who has tested positive or traveled to highly impacted area.” (Source)

But nobody tracks the fraction of cases that are thought to be community spread (i.e., where there’s no obvious source for the infection).  The only thing you can find is news reports when each state or area got that dreaded first community-spread case.  Like so:

Mid-March, “several” out of 17 total cases in Madison, WI were investigated and found to be community spread cases.  (Source).

North Carolina, one case out of the first 100 was a community spread case. (Source).

Four out of the first 64 US cases were known community spread cases (Source).

North Dakota, 2 out of the first 7 were community spread (source).

One out of the first five in Long Beach, CA (source).

Several out of the first 45 cases in Virginia (source).

Four out of 13 in Denver (source).

One in the first 20 in LA (source).

One in the first three in Pasadena, CA (source)

I don’t think I can draw any conclusions from this.  When the statistic is based on finding the first community-spread case, what you see is then subject to the randomness of the order in which the cases were discovered.  From this sort of information, I don’t think you can even conclude whether or not community spread is (or was) common.

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Time to hazard a guess:  Why is the infection rate so high in the working-age population?  Maybe they’re picking it up at work.

Let me repeat that graph of disease prevalence per 100,000, above.  As noted, that combines a) amount of exposure, b) likelihood on being infected when exposed, and c) likelihood of having a case that is severe enough to warrant testing.

Here’s the funny thing.  I’m certain that the prevalence of severe cases, upon infection, ramps up steeply with age.  All the numbers indicating severity — hospitalizations per infected person, ICU stays per infected person, and deaths per infected person — all ramp up steeply.

I’m willing to be that the propensity to be infected, upon exposure, is at best level with age.  Arguably, younger people with better immune systems and generally better physical condition ought to be able to shrug this off.  So that, too, might plausibly rise with age.  But, conservative, let’s assume it’s uniform for all ages.

And so, back-solving, the easiest way I can think of, to explain this graph, is if people are getting exposed to coronavirus at work.  That is, a much higher exposure rate for the working-age population is more-than-offsetting the much higher propensity to get a bad case of this, if infected, among the retiree population.

That’s conditional on what I think I know about the other two pieces.  If exposure were equal, the working-age population should have vastly lower rates of illness severe enough to warrant testing.  Something is pushing up the infection rate in the working age population.

(Oh, and nothing suggests that this might be due to higher exposure to children.  In the WHO report on the China experience, they could not find a single instance where children were the vector of infection for a family.  Plus, the infection rate in kids is miniscule.)

So I’m guessing it’s work.  We all either have to shop, or get our food delivered.  Nobody’s going to church.  Mask recommendations only apply in public spaces. Nobody goes out to a public space if they don’t have to.  I hope.  So that’s all more-or-less a wash.

But if you have to work, you have to work.  And if exposure at work is the last untouched disease transmission channel, we need to focus on that.  Because at this point, assuming a mandatory mask ordinance, that’s the last area we haven’t done anything with.

And I keep coming back to Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.  Nobody let a symptomatic individual anywhere near Boris Johnson in the past month.  But I’ll bet he’s been in a lot of meetings, with a lot of people, in stuffy little rooms, over the past month.  If aerosol spread is more common than has been thought, and there are a lot of pre-symptomatic individuals, spending a day in a small, poorly-ventilated office, with a pre-symptomatic individual seems similar to spending an hour or two in a hospital room, with a person who has symptoms (and so likely sheds virus at a higher rate).  And for the hour in the hospital room, an N95 respirator is mandatory.  But for working in an indoor setting, it may not be.

Does anyone have a clue what fraction of people in Fairfax County are still “going to work”, meaning, physically showing up at some workplace?  And if so, are any businesses not making their employees wear masks while at work?

Five days ago, the DoD decided that anyone on DoD property has to wear a mask.  (But this seems to apply only in cases where 6′ social distance can’t be maintained.)  Presumably that means that, to that point, there were DoD employees working in the same space without masks.

So here’s the pitch.  I think, with the addition of a mandatory mask law, we’ll have done as much as we can do to protect people from infection when they are in a public place.  Near as I can tell, if we do that, the only other step would be outright shutdown and lockdown.

But I’m far from sure that we’ve done everything we can for workplaces.  And if we could get any hint that transmission in workplaces remains a significant channel of disease spread, we’d have the rationale for (e.g.) imposing mandatory mask use on the non-public areas of businesses, governments, and other organizations where people are still “coming in to work” in person.

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The groundswell for mandatory mask laws for essential businesses.

(Moved to a separate post).

 

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Conclusion

Finally, this all links back to the WHO report on China.  The WHO report said that almost all transmission was due to close proximity to symptomatic individuals.  As I said in an earlier post, I am coming to suspect that the disease transmission section of the WHO report on China may have strongly reflected the fact that the Chinese population routinely masks up during epidemics.  And that transmission routes in a largely non-masked US population might therefore be quite different.  Masks not only stop large droplets, my assertion is that they reduce spread of aerosol-sized (5 micron or smaller) droplets by reducing the velocity of your breath as you breathe or talk. (Those small droplets have far too small a Reynolds number to act like projectiles — they are more-or-less stuck to the air mass that they are in.)

With a mask, you don’t spray somebody with aerosol just by talking to them.  Without a mask, you do.

And the original pictures for “flattening the curve” don’t really tell the correct story about the long end-game of this.  Those flatten-the-curve graphs may reflect what has gone on in Wuhan.  But with our far-less-restrictive changes, they grossly misrepresent what we’re looking at, for the intermediate term.

Wrong:

Original graph source:  NPR.  Red X is not part of original graph.

Corrected:

 

Some references:

February 24, 2020
Characteristics of and Important Lessons From the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in ChinaSummary of a Report of 72 314 Cases From the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Zunyou Wu, MD, PhD1; Jennifer M. McGoogan, PhD1
Author Affiliations Article Information
JAMA. 2020;323(13):1239-1242. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.2648

https://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/2762808/incubation-period-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-from-publicly-reported

 

Source:  Clipart-library.com

Our masks

Starting to look like most folks in the TOV are getting it, regarding masks.  Not all, but most.

Yesterday we got take-out from Skorpios/Maggios.  As did, apparently, about 10% of the town, judging by the crowd.

That’s owing to the fracas that had occurred there earlier.  As I understand it, believe it or not, there was someone in the Commonwealth of Virginia who did not realize that it is illegal for restaurants to offer anything but take-out.  And Skorpios/Maggios was unlucky enough to have them land on their doorstep.  And they made an ugly scene, because they couldn’t eat in.  And as I understand it, were arrested for it.  And so a lot of people apparently decided yesterday would be a good time for takeout from there.

But I digress.

The important message is that my wife saw a lot of people, and 100% were masked.

At the Giant today (I’m no longer shopping at Safeway), I believe that every employee I saw was masked.  But I could not swear to it.  And I’d say 85% to 90% of the customers were masked.  Going without a mask was a rarity, and I could not help but say to myself, what an idiot, every time I saw one.   And people were taking great pains to maintain that 6′ distance.

All of that was good.  Shopping-wise:

TP was fully stocked.  Beans and rice were good.  Frozen vegetables were there, but quite skimpy.  All the milk and eggs you could want.  A few specialty items were still unavailable, e.g., still no bread yeast and/or I was looking in the wrong place.

Giant had a half-hearted attempt to make the aisles one-way, which, upon reflection, is probably a good thing from a public-health perspective.  Fewer people passing close to one another.  But at the expense of a longer overall time in the store.  Didn’t really much matter, because it was not being enforced.

Overall, I do believe people have gotten the message.

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Source:  Amazon.

My masks.

Separately, I got my first shipment of masks today.  Unbelievably cheap pieces of crap.  Rest assured, I did not deprive a hospital of anything suitable for medical use.  I’ll be working on them over the weekend, and will start up a systematic give-way by Monday.

I may have misjudged, and maybe the best thing I can do is just give these away as single-use disposables.  I’ll know after I stress-test them a bit.

In the meantime, anyone who is making cloth masks, knows someone making cloth masks, or had a cloth mask with a filter pocket, if you want some pieces of Filtrete (R) — I think what I have is MPR 2400, which is the good stuff – email me and I’ll either mail or deliver it to you.

To understand why you probably want to incorporate that into your mask, just search Filtrete (r) here and read.  Filtrete is one of the few materials you can get that is both breathable and has some ability to filter out tiny aerosol-sized (5 micron or smaller) particles.  It should, in theory, greatly enhance the performance of a home-made cloth mask.

As of two days ago, you could still purchase Filtrete (R) air filters at Lowes, but having every person purchase one for mask-making would be wasteful, as you only need a small piece of a filter material to provide adequate filtration for a face mask.

chogan@directresearch.com

I have been asked to focus on the Town of Vienna again for a posting or two.  This request comes from a friend who would like to get the Town to take some simple steps to help Vienna businesses.  So, today I’m back in my role of hectoring the Town government and other public actors.

Caveat:  I have not directly verified the facts in any of these anecdotes below.  So this may be unfair rumor-mongering.  And quite one-sided.  But in the main, I believe my sources to be reliable.

As I only have two hands, the rating scale for today’s actions goes from two thumbs down to two thumbs up.

Let me illustrate with a two-thumbs-up action by a Vienna resident.

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GoFundMe:  Pay it Back to Vienna Business

You can read the key details in Post #609.  Better still, you can donate at this link.

But I’m not here to tug at your hearstrings.  But, seriously, at least read the story at the donation link above.

I’m here to make sure you fully understand the situation.  That GoFundMe lists eight businesses.  Of those:

• Four are closed by law until at least 4/24/2020, and depending on how things go, that might be for the indefinite future (dentistry and similar, pools).
• One is reduced to streaming services only (fitness).
• One is open for delivery, but is having difficulty getting product (florist).
• Two are take-out only (restaurants).

In other words, in this sample of small businesses in Vienna, half are shut outright, by law, and the rest are able to offer only a reduced set of services or products.

On restaurants, a lot of their profit comes from alcohol sales, and I note that the Governor specifically allows them to sell mixed drinks, to go, during the shutdown.  That’s a business-friendly step, and I think that, separately, deserves a thumb up, particularly from a state that is otherwise fairly conservative about alcohol laws.

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Chillin’ Parkin’ on Church

When I heard about this one, I literally could not believe it.  I haven’t gone down there to see that the situation remains as it was described to me.  But for a Town where the Powers That Be make such a big deal about Church Street, I was floored to hear this.

I’ll just repeat the story as it was told to me.

Two weeks ago, some merchants on Church asked the Town to put up temporary signs designating some “5 minute pickup only” parking spots along Church. For the obvious reason that a) restaurants can only do takeout, b) the business model is now curbside pickup, and c) that means you need a curbside, to do that.

But also, that’s another attempt by these businesses to remind people that they are open and operating, to the extent possible.

Still hasn’t happened yet, last I heard.  Edit:  Just drove down Church, on my way back from grocery shopping, and that sure appears to be true.

Two thumbs down, for two reasons.  One, this isn’t a big deal.  You know those signs that DPW puts up to announce street sweeping?  As I hear it, they’d settle for something like that. Two, they are entirely at the mercy of the Town to get this done.  The businesses can’t do that themselves, because this is about the road, and only the Town has the right to post signs and such in the public right-of-way.

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Parking again:  Anita’s zoning violation.

Again, I’m just passing along what I’ve been told.  And again, I had a hard time believing it.

As with all restaurants in Virginia, Anita’s can only offer take-out.  To be crystal clear, nobody can drive up, park, and come in and sit down for a meal.  So the parking lot, as it was painted, is all-but-useless.  And if you hope to do a lot of curbside pickup, then you want to have an orderly way to get people onto and off of your property, rather than let people scramble around and figure it out for themselves.

Anita’s, please note, is one of few Vienna businesses that does not have convenient front-of-store parking.  They’re sort of shoehorned into that lot, compared to the typical Vienna business.

So they took it upon themselves to re-stripe their parking area, so that customers would know how to get in and out with a minimum of risk.

And the Town promptly cited them for a zoning violation.  We have Rules about Parking in this-here Town.  The mere fact of a global pandemic and likely economic depression to follow is no excuse for violating them.  This is no time to allow people who own a property to figure out how best to use it.

I’m only giving one thumb down for this one because I don’t think the Town has the right to shut them down for a temporary violation of Town code regarding parking standards.  So they could, if they chose, just keep on doing what they are doing, trying to keep that long-standing Vienna business from going under.  Ultimately, if the Town persists in this, it will be, at most, a matter of dealing with the hassle and maybe paying a fine.

The only thing I can liken it to is being hit with a hurricane, and finding out that the government’s main response is to ticket people for littering.  In any case, this isn’t anything I’d call “business friendly”.  And it suggests a government that is, at best, still  on autopilot.

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The Great Banner Kerfuffle of Ought-Twenty

Somebody on Team Majdi got the bright idea of helping out Vienna businesses by buying them “Grab and Go” banners.  These would signal to the passing traffic (such as it is) that these restaurants are open for business.  Figuring that, a) at that time, nobody had stepped up and provided those, and b) cash-constrained businesses might not be willing to shell out for them.

And they put their first names, in small letters, at the bottom.  And then the shit hit the fan.

The Town’s appointed business muckety-muck, and apparently self-appointed enforcer of decorum, went on a rampage against those offending businesses.  Harassed them and got her in-group to harass them as well.  Apparently, incorrectly told them that the signs were illegal under the Virginia CFDA.  (Not true, see post #612.)  And basically hectored them until they took those banners down.

And lo and behold, what happens next?  The Vienna Business Association gets the great idea of providing reduced-price Grab and Go banners … wait for it … featuring the tag line of Team Colbert.  Not the VBA logo.

Now that they’ve been called out for that on various forums, I hear that they’ve had a change of heart.  The are doing something to replace the Team Colbert tag line with something else, under the claim that they were simply unaware that (e.g.) every speech and tweet featured that tag line.

So I’ll settle for one thumbs-down for this one.  And one thumbs up.  Because, in the end, it looks like this has encouraged VBA into a positive action.  Anything that helps businesses is good.  Even if it advertises a politician that you may or may not favor.  So that’s a good outcome.  And it would be a good outcome even if VBA weren’t taking the extra step to take the Team Colbert tag line off their signs.

Hey, Team Majdi: Duct tape.  Don’t let those banners go to waste.  Tape over the offending part and give them to businesses that want them.  Unless the mere fact that you dug into your pockets to help Vienna business makes them toxic?  I wouldn’t think so, but I’m clearly having a tough time understanding what passes for pro-business behavior these days.  If it were me, I’d let small businesses know the story, and let them decide for themselves whether hanging those banners, less your names, would help more than they would hurt.

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Suspending the rules about temporary signage a.k.a. banners.

The Town of Vienna had the good sense to do that (.pdf).  I’m assuming that every locality in the nation is doing the same.  I’m just giving credit where credit is due for the Town to get on board with that.  Rules still apply, but you don’t have to go through the permit process now.

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Conclusion

We all know that, to some extent, the Federal government has stepped up.  The recently passed relief bill has, among its many components, some degree of help for small businesses.

And we know we can do our bit.  Mostly that takes the form of just spending money if and as you are able.  Stock up on consumables.  Change your habits (I’ve eaten more take-out in the last four weeks than I did in the last two years.)

And keep thinking of ways to support local businesses.

Yesterday my wife and I realized that we can accelerate any car maintenance that might reasonably be coming up.  This was prompted by the gi-normous signs in the windows of Just Tires (which is where we get our tires).  So my wife just took our  our elderly car there from some much-needed rehab.  Like a car day spa.  Buff out the haze on the headlights, change all the fluids that need changing, and so on.

Stupid as it sounds, this didn’t even occur to me until I saw that sign.

As a guy who actually went through the heartbreak, frustration, anxiety,and fear of having a business in which I was an owner go bankrupt, I’m going to offer some really straightforward advice.  From the heart.  Because if you’ve never watched a business go under, up close and personal, you have no clue what some of the folks along Maple and Church are going through right now.

The stress piles up one day at at time, one bill at a time, and one hassle at a time.   The longer this lasts, the higher the pile.  Or deeper the hole, whichever you prefer.   I was a mere silent partner (investment only) in my bankrupt  business.  The operating partner had a heart attack in the middle of going bankrupt.  I believe it was the stress that brought it on.  Once you get to the point where you owe everybody money, and they’re all asking for it, it really takes a toll on you.  Only thing I can liken it to is have a good friend slipping away, one day at a time.

So this really isn’t rocket science.  Here’s a simple rule:

Right now, anybody who does anything for struggling Vienna business is doing right.  Anything that works.  And anybody who makes it even one bit tougher for struggling Vienna businesses is being an asshole.  Now might be a good time to figure out which of those you are.

And mask up if you’re going out in public and will be near others.