Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1849: Virginia still collects COVID-19 case data? Yep, sure does.

 

There is no new big surge of COVID-19 cases in Virginia.  We don’t have to guess about that because Virginia continues to gather the same benchmark PCR test data that it did all throughout the pandemic.

At present, Virginia is showing 10 new cases (new positive COVID-19 PCR tests) per 100K population per day.  That’s up from our normal summertime minimum of around 2 / 100K day. And is a level we saw off and on throughout the pandemic.

But the point is, it’s normal.  In so far as anything about the post-pandemic U.S. can be considered normal. Continue reading Post #1849: Virginia still collects COVID-19 case data? Yep, sure does.

Post #1848: Housing market data.

 

It’s funny how catastrophes linger in our collective memory, but near-catastrophes fade.

Fifteen years ago, the “housing bubble” that developed during the Bush administration finally collapsed, and almost took down the U.S. banking system with it.  To the point where the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ran a negative fund balance, due to the wave of bank failures (below).

Source:  FDIC, , courtesy of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), s

By now, most have forgotten how crazy housing prices were in some parts of the country.  And what extraordinary measures the Federal Reserve took to avoid a complete collapse of the U.S. financial system.

We’re still dealing with the fallout from the  2008 near-catastrophe.  In particular, that led to more than a decade during which the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. Lower than the underlying rate of inflation, in fact.  As I see it, the Fed recapitalized a bankrupt U.S. banking industry on the backs of U.S. savers.

But that era of below-zero real interest began to end a couple of years ago.

And nothing much has happened.  Yet.

Yesterday, a friend pointed out that some economic analysts see the U.S. housing market as once again ripe for a collapse in prices.  Given that I own a house, I thought it was well worth taking the time to look at current U.S. housing market data.  And while I was originally skeptical, I’d now have to say, he has a point.  There’s not a lot of sunshine in the current housing market data.

Continue reading Post #1848: Housing market data.

Post G23-059: Copper soap versus citric acid for powdery mildew, copper wins hands down

The is a followup to Post #G23-054, dated September 2, 2023.  But if you want the details, you have to go back to last year, when I first tried to test this, but Mother Nature did not cooperate (Post G22-040).

The point of this is to test citric acid solution (home-made) versus copper soap solution (Bonide Copper Fungicide) as protectants against powdery mildew.  So this isn’t about killing an existing infection (a.k.a., eradicants).  The question is whether either of these sprays will prevent the onset (or maybe onset and spread) of powdery mildew. Continue reading Post G23-059: Copper soap versus citric acid for powdery mildew, copper wins hands down

Post #1846: Vienna Market, a grim and dumpy place.

 

Edit 10/28/2024:  I walked past there yesterday and the situation is unchanged.  The token retail space remains empty.  The orange traffic barrels are still in place.  It’s weirdly desolate and trashy-looking, given that they finished building this three (?) years ago. 

Original post follows:

Vienna Market is one of many “mixed use” developments that you should expect to see along Maple Avenue in the future.  Most will likely be “stumpies”, that is, stumpy little apartment/condo buildings with first-floor retail and underground parking.  But Vienna Market is a development of townhouses, with some vestigial retail space along Maple.

In theory, in exchange for rezoning that part of Vienna’s commercial district into a housing area, citizens of the Town of Vienna were to have been given a pleasant new quasi-public gathering space.  As a quid-pro-quo. 

This space, per the plans submitted to the Town of Vienna, below.  Note the couple enjoying the day at one of many tables, set in a large, level green area.

Artist’s conception, Vienna Market common area

Other imaginary views show it as a substantial open, level green space.

Artist’s concept, Vienna Market common area
Yet more artist’s conception of Vienna Market common area

What we actually got looks like this, from some pictures I took while on a walk a couple of days ago, below.

You may notice a few things.

There are no tables.  Actually, there’s not even enough level space to put a (one) table.  There’s no green gathering space.  Actually, there’s no gathering space, period.  There’s a broad brick sidewalk, a stairway, and some utility paths for residents of the development.  There’s the building’s electrical transformer, which will eventually be hidden by shrubbery.  And all of the electric meters for the building, which may or may not get hidden by shrubbery.  Inexplicably, there are some construction cones stored where the couple was sitting in the first picture.  Which is OK, because that’s a walkway at the bottom of a stairway, not someplace you could sit and sip your coffee.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter anyway.  Maple Avenue is typically so noisy from passing traffic that the whole idea of a pleasant daytime pocket park, directly adjacent to the roadway, is just kind of silly.  At least, not one that you could have a conversation in, at any rate (see this post for sound level measurements.)

But that was the solemn promise the last time Town Council tried to rezone Maple.  It just has never come to pass.  Not for the Chick-fil-A car wash, where the builders provided a broad sidewalk, terminated by a drive-through exit and two large electrical transformers for the building.  Not in any sense for the new old folks’ home, where the residual green space on the lot is less than it was for the prior building.  And not for Vienna Market.

This, despite how spacious and inviting those spaces looked, in the materials developers used to sell the development to Town Council.

I doubt we’ll see anything in the form of a pleasant public outdoor area from the last of the MAC buildings, still to be built.  Nor, I predict, will the postage-stamp plaza streetside of the new glass-and-steel Patrick Henry parking garage and library get much use.

Directly-adjacent-to-Maple Avenue is just not a nice place to hang out during the day.  Never was.  Likely never will be.  Route 123 is an arterial highway, for goodness sake.  And it’s the only east-west non-Interstate through crossing for a roughly five mile stretch.  It’s going to be jammed with vehicles, most days, most of the day.

Source:  The Traffic Legacy of the W&OD Railroad.

In general, Vienna Market has turned out to be a rather grim-looking development, in my view.  Maybe it was just the low cloud cover, the day I walked past it.  I guess it reminds me too much of Chicago.  This, despite the best efforts of the Board of Architectural Review to salvage something after the original ornate Georgetown-style building plans they approved were somehow swapped for a dull, plain brown brick building.  Before Town Council passed it (see this post for my epitaph on Marco Pologate).

It does at least look relatively energy-efficient, with (by modern standards) a relatively small area devoted to glass, in the townhouses.

All the retail there remains dark (un-rented).  Judging from Fairfax County tax maps, those townhouses began to be purchased in late 2021.  And it’s more than a year since title on the retail spaces was transferred, again per the tax maps.  So we’re well past a year, I think, since the building was essentially finished.

Again, it doesn’t matter.  Based on my earlier analysis of the economics of such housing developments for Vienna’s MAC zoning, it really doesn’t matter whether or not the retail space is rented.  If they can manage to rent it, it’s icing on the cake.  This development’s value is in the housing, not the retail.  New “mixed use” with significant dark (unrented) retail is the new normal in the suburbs.

Consistent with the vacant retail, every expense was spared for the entrance to the parking garage.  Luckily this is something that drivers along Maple will likely not notice.  Only if you walk past it will you be treated to this view.   I may be confused, but at some point I thought there was supposed to be a mural of a train on that wall, to lighten things up.

So why build this way?  The only new land on which you can build stumpies and other high-density housing, in the fully-built-out suburbs, turns out to be the old retail districts.  Slap some shops along the street edge of the first floor of the parking garage, and you can build high-density housing in the rest of the space, and term it “mixed use” development.

Fig-leaf retail, maybe that’s a better term for it.  It’s the fig leaf that allows the Town to convert the commercial district to a housing district.  Under the rubric of “mixed use development”.

So there you have it.  It’s kind of grim and unfriendly.  But so is much of the rest of the future.  So this is just a sign of the times.  I question the wisdom of building significant “mixed use” development along a skinny, typically half-block-wide strip of land, directly adjacent to a thoroughly congested urban highway.  No matter how trendy mixed-use may currently be, the plausible social benefits of mixed-use development aren’t going to happen in a linear strip like Maple Avenue.  But the increased traffic?  Yeah, we’ll all deal with that.

As an economist, part of my job was to compare the actual end result with the prediction.  That’s good science, and good public policy.  Here, this is clearly not the building that was planned.  Aside from more tax base, any promised benefit to the general public, from that rezoning, in the form of a street-side pocket park area, has failed to materialize.

On the plus side, it’s not a partially-vacant lot.  So that’s a good thing.  But you wonder whether or not the promise of profit from the rezoned parcel is what kept it under-used for so long in the first place.

What it’s not, for sure, is what was depicted in those final plans.  And it just doesn’t matter.  Sunk cost, water over the dam.  Pick your metaphor.  As long as promises like that aren’t used going forward, to sell the idea of yet more high-density housing along Maple.

All we can ask for is reality-based rezoning.  Anything but wishful thinking.

Post G23-058: Solar tomato drying fail.

 

A few days back I set up a batch of tomato slices to dry in my tote-based solar food dehydrator.  Without perfect weather, it was a race between sunlight and mold.

Mold won, as shown above.

At the minimum, this convinces me that I need an indirect solar dryer, as described in the just-prior post.  My little plastic-tote dryer just doesn’t have enough power to dry tomatoes in less-than-perfect weather.

The interior of the tote seemed to get pretty hot, in full sunlight.  As in 130F, loaded with just two small trays of tomato slices.  So I’m not quite sure why this failed so badly.

One possibility is lack of direct ventilation of the tomato slices.  I had a computer fan pulling air through this tote.  While that did in fact exhaust the humid air in the tote, there was nothing blowing on the tomatoes to disrupt the  “boundary layer” of air directly adjacent to each tomato slice.  I would then guess that the air directly adjacent to each slice stayed quite humid, thus encouraging mold growth.

A second possibility is the lack of sterilizing UV radiation inside the tote.  I believe the clear Sterilite tote is made of polyethylene, which is a reasonably good absorber of UV radiation.  UV strongly inhibits mold growth, so the presence of warmth without UV was less than ideal.

Yet a third is the level of cloud cover.  Depending on the day and the hour, the summer sky in Virginia can be quite cloudy.  This power-ventilated box is going to cool off pretty rapidly in any extended period of cloud cover.

My bottom line is that if the weather is good enough to use this tote-based direct solar dehydrator, I’d be better off just sun-drying my tomatoes the traditional way.  Lay them on a screen, cover them with netting, and expose them to the breeze and the sunlight.

 

Illustrations in this post are from Gencraft.com and Freepik AI.  The only real picture is the first one, of blackened tomato slices sitting on drying trays.

Post G23-057: Solar food drying, a better understanding

 

Upshot:  Direct solar food drying — putting your food out in the sun (with or without some clear cover) — is an inherently low-powered and slow way to dry food.

By contrast, indirect solar food drying — connecting a solar heat collector to a box full of food to be dried — can be much, much faster.  That’s because you can increase the power of the device.  Mostly, you can greatly increase the efficiency of the solar collector, relative to direct solar drying.  Secondarily, you can also make it larger, if you choose — there’s no necessary relationship between solar collection area and the area covered by food.

And faster drying means lower taxes!!!  Uh, no, I meant, faster drying means fewer days-in-a-row at the mercy of the weather.

The key, to all this new-found wisdom?  Figuring out that a “box-with-clear-lid” food dryer is, technically speaking, a flat-plate solar collector.  Then realizing that flat-plate is really inefficient, relative to other things I could make.

I need to make an indirect solar food dehydrator.  And it only took me two or three years to figure this out.

In the interest of reducing TL;DR, I’m breaking this into two posts. This post is just the setup.  Next post should be the actual construction and use, if any. Continue reading Post G23-057: Solar food drying, a better understanding

Post #1845: What’s left of COVID information?

 

Yesterday, a friend asked about recent news reports of an uptick in COVID-19 cases.  How serious is this, really?  She is in somewhat fragile health, so it’s not an idle question.

My gut reaction — based on the reporting I had scanned — was, not.  It’s not a big deal.

But my second reaction was, I’m not sure what information is still available.

So that’s what this post is about: The current state of information on COVID-19.  Because COVID, like flu, is seasonal, with an end-of-year peak.  And we will eventually get to the end of 2023.

In a nutshell:  The only remaining consistent and timely information is on inpatient hospitalizations for COVID-19.

Still no shortage of 🐴💩

Weirdly enough, we still have plenty of COVID disinformation and misinformation circulating.  You’d think we’d be over it by now.  But, thanks largely to the Republican presidential candidates, there’s still an active market for being angry about COVID-19.

I recently read about a leading Republican candidate for president railing against  “federal lockdowns” for COVID.  I found this bizarre for two reasons.

As for “federal”, this appears to appeal to the collective amnesia of Republican voters, who apparently have forgotten that restrictions on commerce were imposed by the Governors of the States.  For example, restrictions in Florida were imposed by … wait for it … the then-governor of Florida. Who is currently running for President.  In part, by railing against those “lockdowns” … wait for it … that he himself imposed.

As for “lockdowns”, I can’t speak for other states, but here, I was always free to go about “essential” business, such as going to work, buying groceries, and so on.  The list of essential businesses open to the public was long.  None of which were ever shut, here in Virginia, during the pandemic.  I find it hard to characterize what happened here as “lockdown” when I could run out to the liquor store for a fifth of Jack any time I chose.  (As opposed to what happened in Communist China, for example.  They had real lockdowns.)

That isn’t to say that there weren’t restrictions.  But to my eye, they were, by and large, rational, and as fact-based as possible.  In many states, bars were the first thing to close, and the last thing to re-open.  In Virginia, bans on large public gatherings essentially shut down in-person church service, for those churches who obeyed those bans.  (Near as I can tell, nothing happened to churches who ignored that).  And, after a few well-documented super-spreader events in church services, somehow, passing on large church gatherings for the duration seemed reasonable.  Particularly in the pre-vaccine portion of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the Surgeon General of Florida has gone from recommending that healthy children not get a COVID-19 vaccine (reference, 2022),  to outright Looney Tunes claims that getting a COVID-19 vaccination causes you to contract  COVID-19 (reference, of a sort, 2023).

In short, even now, the horseshit keeps flying.

So, is there any hard data on COVID-19 any more?  Or do the political opportunists and the crazies now own the field entirely?

News Flash:  Temperatures are falling …

… as we move toward winter.  That means that the incidence of new COVID-19 cases should start rising.

Source:  Potential impact of seasonal forcing on a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic DOI: https://doi.org/10.4414/smw.2020.20224 Publication Date: 16.03.2020 Swiss Med Wkly. 2020;150:w20224 Neher Richard A., Dyrdak Robert, Druelle Valentin, Hodcroft Emma B. Albert J.

Cases for most coronaviruses reach a minimum sometime mid-summer.  This was known well before COVID-19, and is shown in the graph above for Stockholm, Sweden.

I have many prior posts looking at seasonality of COVID-19, but the gist of it is, COVID-19 does the same thing.  It’s not quite so clear, as the rapid mutation of during the pandemic, plus the introduction of vaccines, gave peaks and lulls that were not related to the seasons.

But abstracting from those, COVID-19 does the same thing as most other coronaviruses.  There were some oddities early on, such as a mid-summer peak the first year, in very hot-climate states, suggesting that the move into indoor air-conditioned spaces lead to greater spread.

But once things had settled down, the pattern was mid-summer low, year-end peak.  Which is, for that matter, the same as most acute respirator illnesses, such as flu.

After the mid-summer minimum, well, what do you think minimum means?  Cases will rise.  Reporting on the fact that COVID-19 cases were rising is not exactly the worst of journalism, but certainly in the neighborhood of that.

Upshot:  We should expect COVID-19 cases to be rising now.  And they’ll probably continue to rise, right on into the new year.  So the mere fact that they are rising is hardly a news flash.

Do we have adequate information to detect a big winter surge?

Information on the number of COVID-19 cases never was much good.

A good chunk of cases (call it 16%) were asymptomatic.  (Roughly the same proportion as for flu, in a typical season).  So those individuals themselves didn’t even know they had it.

A good chunk of cases (half) were never reported, because individuals were not formally tested with a PCR (DNA) test.  Back when the CDC still tracked this via testing blood draws (a sample of convenience), the ratio of likely true cases, to officially-reported cases, was about 2 to 1.

As over-the-counter (antigen-based) testing became widespread, a large fraction of cases was not officially reported because there was no way to report positive antigen tests.  At some point, the ratio of likely true cases, to officially-reported cases, rose to about 3 to 1.

As vaccines were introduced, the severity of contracting COVID-19 dropped precipitously.  Instead of being a near-death-sentence for older, frailer individuals, likelihood of death was reduced roughly 10- to 20-fold by vaccination.  So the count of cases in the post-vaccine era reflected far less burden of serious illness compared to the count in the pre-vaccine era.

Don’t forget that at the peak, COVID-19 increased U.S. deaths about a million a year, from roughly 2.6M to 3.6M deaths per year.  It was the largest increase in deaths — and largest reduction in estimated U.S. lifespan — since the 1918 Spanish flu.  It was, in certain months, the leading cause of death, and for the entire year, I believe it was the second leading cause of death.  (And people who naysay that have no clue how death certificates are filled out.)

Finally, the widespread presence of re-infections means that it’s hard to count much of anything at all.  But those re-infected are like those vaccinated — the likely health consequences per case are much reduced from what they were at the start of the pandemic.

The only remaining consistent and timely information is on inpatient hospitalizations. 

If there’s a big surge in cases in the community, how will we know?  Conversely, if the news media are making a mountain out of a molehill, how can we tell that, objectively.

I’ve seen a lot of conflicting, shoot-from-the-lip opinions about that, so I decided to do something this morning to set myself apart from the Average American.  I’m going to take a few minutes to do my homework before I form a firm opinion about this issue.

Rather than go through the TL;DR detail, you’ll have to trust my judgment on this.  Near as I can tell, we probably do have enough information to be able to spot any truly large surge in cases.  But that’s based almost entirely on the rate of inpatient hospitalizations.

Short answer on the COVID information that is still available:

  • Deaths:  Good, not timely.
  • Inpatient hospitalizations:  Good, timely.
  • Outpatient hospital visits:  Not clear.
  • Test positivity:  Not clear.
  • Total cases:  Probably not.

The real eye-opener to me is that, while you still see case count data from the states, you have to read the fine print.  For example, Virginia continues to maintain case count data, based on reported tests.  But … it’s possible, based on the wording of the footnotes to the data, that they only do that when they track cases for public health purposes, e.g., for outbreaks in prisons, schools, and whatnot.

That said, the Federal government continues to require hospitals to report admissions with COVID-19.  In prior posts, I already worked out that this is almost entirely admissions for COVID-19.  That is, the vast majority of cases included in those counts were in fact hospitalized for symptoms of severe respiratory infection.  And then there is a small minority of cases hospitalized for something else, and found to have COVID upon testing.  I cannot be sure, but I’d bet that cases hospitalized for respiratory infection are all still tested for COVID-19, just as they would test for any other common pathogen.

The upshot is that we’ll know, in a timely manner, that there is a surge in cases, when we see that occur in the data on daily new COVID-19 hospitalizations.  The time lag there is short, and the severity of illness is roughly constant over time (e.g., sick enough to require an inpatient standard of care).

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, annotations mine.

The downside is that this is almost entirely the oldest old.

Luckily — from a data perspective — any broad-based surge in cases in the community will likely kill off a lot of old folks.  (Which is why, in part, that failing to vaccinate children in the heart of the pandemic was not very smart.)  And those folks will get hospitalized on their path toward death.  Thus giving us timely warning that there is a surge in cases.

In any case, if you’re worried about a resurgence in cases this winter, keep your eye on the hospitalization numbers.  It’s not like that’s ideal.  It’s more like that’s all we’ve really got.  But that should be enough to raise a red flag if there really is a big surge in COVID-19.

Post G23-056: Yes, you can make sun-dried tomatoes in Virginia. Who knew?

 

This is the obvious followup to my just-prior post.

The answers are:

Yes, you can.  All it takes is four or five consecutive good drying days.  After four days, most of the batch was dry enough to be put in a jar and put on the shelf.  A small — but distinctly different — residual will get a fifth day of drying.

The catch is that it’s rare to get a string of good drying days in a Virginia summer.  You ideally need the weather to be consistently sunny, hot (85+ is ideal), breezy, and dry (relative humidity below 60% mid-afternoon).  So you can air-dry, if the weather is right, but you can’t count on being able to air dry, the way they can in a Mediterranean climate.  You can occasionally air-dry.

Achieving leathery versus crispy with open-air drying?  So far, the best I’ve gotten is “leathery”.   And I suspect that’s the limit of open-air drying here in USDA Zone 7, Northern Virginia.  Whether or not “leathery” is shelf-stable, absent further preservation steps, I’m going to find out.  (Near as I can tell, “crispy” keeps for at least a year.)

As a snack, I’ve already gotten the feedback that crispy beats leathery.  So for best end-user value, I’m probably going to stick most of these in my electric dehydrator, for a finishing step to get them all the way to crispy.

Does the low temperature of “sun-dried” tomato production result in a product superior to properly electrically dried tomatoes?  No. For sure, the sun-drieds are processed at a low temperature.  But I think the 135F limit for electrically-dried tomatoes was chosen specifically to avoid degrading the flavor of the finished product.  Bottom line, other than the leathery texture, neither my wife nor I could tell sun-dried from heat-dehydrated tomatoes

Leathery versus still too wet:  Listen to your inner “ick”.  It turned out to be remarkably easy to tell when the tomatoes were dry enough to be called “leathery”.  For some, it was obvious because they were still visibly wet.  For the rest, pick them up, and if the flesh of the tomato still moves when you rub it, it’s still too wet.  I say “ick” because that’s the sensation it gave me.  Like a gummy worm, but less firm.

 

A better rule for cutting tomatoes for drying.

One nice thing about air-drying is that you can cut your tomato slices thicker, and so pack more tomatoes into a given tray area.  (You can’t put really thick slices in a Nesco dryer because the space between the tray surfaces is only about a half an inch.)  In fact, traditional Italian sun-dried tomatoes are literal tomato halves, and so are quite thick in the middle.

For this batch, I aimed for 1/2″ thick slices, versus the 1/4″ slices typically recommended for use in an electric dehydrator.  Some of the slices did not dry fully in four days.  But that wasn’t due to their thickness.

All of my tomato slices that failed the “leathery” test had tomato skin on one side.  And conversely, all the slices with skin on one side failed the “leathery” test at four days.They were either slices from the end of the tomato, or cherry tomatoes that I had simply cut in half.  And I’m pretty sure that makes sense.  The skin is going to be nearly impervious to water. 

I’m far too lazy to skin the tomatoes before drying, so my new rule is to cut very thin (1/4″) slices off the ends, and thicker (1/2″) slices in the middle.  That way, all tomato flesh is at most 1/4″ from a surface through which water may evaporate.  I’m still not sure what I’m going to so for cherry tomatoes.

Summary.

Yes, you most certainly can sun-dry tomatoes in a humid climate. I dried most of a batch of tomatoes to a stable, leathery state in four days.

You need to have a string of good drying days.  The most common rule is that you need considerable time with air temperatures 85F or higher and relative humidity 60% or lower.  Plus sunlight and a breeze.  In my case, the past four days have been brutally hot (flirting with 100F), sunny, and reasonably dry.

You can predict afternoon relative humidity based on morning conditions, and the use of an on-line relative humidity calculator.  (That’s at the end of the prior post).

In my case, the slices that failed to dry in four days were the same as the slices with tomato skin covering one side.  (E.g., from cherry tomatoes, halved).  I had no problem drying 1/2″ slices, as long as there was raw tomato on both sides of the slice.

Otherwise, just follow standard guidance.  Cut and salt the tomatoes.  Put them in the sun, with some sort of netting to keep off bugs.  Bring them in at night and flip them.  Dry until leathery.

The only thing I can’t seem to achieve is drying tomatoes to the point of crispness.  But crisp is preferable for snacking.  So I’m going to have to use a bit of electricity to get them to that point.

By far, the hardest point for me was getting over my aversion to having sliced tomatoes sitting around at room temperature.  But, as a matter of logic, everybody says this takes about four days.  So for most of that time, those tomato slices are going to be quite wet.  And that’s normal.  Ideally, the high acidity of the tomato (and maybe the salting), plus the sterilizing effects of the UV in sunlight, all combine to keep mold at bay long enough for the tomatoes to dry.