All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.
Seasonality of common human coronaviruses (other than COVID-19) in Stockholm, Sweden. Source:
Part 3 of my hard winter postings is about, well, winter. You’re probably starting to see some newspaper coverage of the recent up-ticks in cases here and in Europe. People are speculating that this may be due to the change in the weather. Continue reading Post #861: Getting ready for a hard winter, part 3.
This is just a brief followup to Post #853, where I noted that Governor Chris Christie seemed to have dropped out of the news cycle. He was hospitalized last Saturday, and was discharged to home, from the hospital today, after a seven-day stay.
Near as I can tell, the White House did not, in fact, offer the standard pro-forma “thoughts and prayers” statement of concern for his well-being. (Although I may have missed it). That was one of the things I was looking for, in tracking this story. And I guess, unfortunately, I got the answer I expected. Continue reading Post #860: How is Governor Christie doing?
Source: “Variation in False-Negative Rate of Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction–Based SARS-CoV-2 Tests by Time Since Exposure:, Kucirka, Lauren M, Lauer, Stephen A, Laeyendecker, Oliver, Boon, Denali, Lessler, Justin doi: 10.7326/M20-1495 Annals of Internal Medicine, May 13 2020, https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-1495
The standard test for COVID-19 involves a nasal swab that gets sent to a lab. It’s a test that look for genetic material specific to the COVID-19 virus, and typically is termed a “PCR” test (for the method used to replicate the DNA found on the swab).
Here’s something that I didn’t realize until today: Those PCR tests have an extremely high false negative rate. Something on order of 30 percent.
Continue reading Post #859: High false negative rate of COVID-19 PCR tests
T o c o n s e r v e i n t e r n e t b a n d w i d t h, I a m t y p i n g t h i s v e r y s l o w l y.
P l e a s e d o y o u r p a r t, a n d r e a d i t s l o w l y.
T h a n k y o u.
/s Continue reading Post #858: Getting ready for a hard winter, part 2: Nerd nostalgia.
At some point in the recent past, you probably saw some monster headline about the huge plunge in US Gross Domestic Product, due to COVID-19. Like the one at the left. (Source: CNBC).
That, in turn, was based on the numbers as calculated by Bureau of Economic Analysis. When graphed, they looked like this. (Source: BEA.)
In this post, I’m going to explain why that’s hugely misleading, as presented. (Hint: They took the actual drop, and multiplied by four). And then look at other sources of national data, to get a handle on the average impact of COVID on the economy as a whole. So far.
The picture isn’t sunny. But it’s not (yet) the disaster that is (or, really, appears to be) pictured above.
Continue reading Post #857: Getting ready for a hard winter, part 1.
In short, no change. There was an apparent spike in the count of cases today, but that was a data reporting issue. The excess cases were left over from the prior day, and should have been reported yesterday.
Aside from that, there has been no significant change.
I don’t track social media, but apparently the sum total of the Town of Vienna’s approach to guidance for Halloween has been to re-post the Virginia guidelines. Which are the same as the Fairfax County guidelines. Which are the same as the CDC guidelines. Continue reading Post #855: Trick-or-treating guidelines: The Town punts
On September 12, 2020, I suggested that a box fan, some duct tape, and a 3M Filtrete ™ air filter was the best and cheapest approach to safe indoor dining in the COVID-19 era. That’s Post #810.
I am not alone in figuring out that an air-curtain approach is the best possible method for separating individuals, once we all acknowledge that aerosol transmission is possible.
I’ve already voted, so I’m not tracking the debates. But my wife thought it was worth quoting the NY times in this regard. Because the fan-filter-duct tape solution is now slowly entering common knowledge.
"'A box fan, an air filter — and duct tape to attach them. With four such cobbled together devices, at perhaps a total of $150, the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday night could be made much safer, according to experts in airborne viruses."
"Dr. Milton and his colleagues have contacted the debate commission, as well as both campaigns, to recommend purchasing plug-and-play air filters — excellent models cost just $300 each — or four box fans and air filters taped together. Each debater would have one device positioned to suck up and clean the air exhaled, and another to produce clean air.
In research conducted with singers over the past few months, Jelena Srebric, a mechanical engineer at the University of Maryland, found that this so-called Corsi box — named for Richard Corsi, an air quality expert at Portland State University — can significantly decrease the number of aerosols."
We will eventually figure this out. Apollo 13 came home on the basis of duct tape and quick thinking. America will eventually get through this crisis. In part, perhaps, on the same basis.
Source: NJ.com.
We’ll probably never see a count of all the COVID-19 cases generated by the White House Rose Garden cluster event. The White House won’t allow CDC to do contact tracing, nor will the White House itself do contact tracing.
I lost count somewhere around 19 persons directly infected, the last of which has now caused the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to go into quarantine.
"It's not clear how (Adm. Charles) Ray was infected, though he did attend a White House ceremony on Sept. 27, just one day after President Trump introduced Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee. Multiple people at that event contracted COVID."
Source: NPR
But the one infected person I’m keeping in mind is the former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie. He is a high-risk individual, due mainly to severe asthma and a degree of obesity.
And so far, it looks like he’s following the classic rule of reporting on the health of a politician: No news is (probably) bad news. (See Post #846, and bottom of Post #848).
Now, we can’t be sure of that. But as these things go, any good news tends to be publicized immediately. And so you have to infer that a lack of news at the minimum means a lack of good news, and in all likelihood means means bad news.
It appears that the only coverage of Governor Christie is in the New Jersey press. He “checked himself into the hospital” on Saturday. He had a 10-minute conversation with a reporter on Monday morning. And nobody has heard from him, via any means (voice, text, tweet), or has gotten an update on his status, since that time.
Based on Medicare data, the 50th percentile for hospital length-of-stay for Medicare-paid COVID-9 cases is 7 days. (Which is actually seven nights in the hospital, as these things are counted.) Governor Christie has now been hospitalized for four days. So, absent any hard information, the next marker comes this Saturday. If he hasn’t been discharged by then, the reasonable assumption would be that he’s pretty severely ill.
At this point, the national news media seem to have forgotten Governor Christie. Has the Trump administration done the same? Will anyone in the Trump administration, unprompted, mention his name, publicly wish him well, publicly express some degree of concern for him or his family, and so on. Will he even merit a pro-forma “our thoughts and prayers are with you”? Or, if he is seriously ill, will they do their best to toss him down the memory hole? That’s the second thing I’ll be keeping an eye on.
Source: William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard, downloaded 10/6/2020.
Starting a month ago, I did a handful of posts on press coverage of COVID-19 and students’ return to college campuses. (Post #786, Post #788, and then sporadic mentions after that. Ending with a discussion of the absolutely nutso “Right to Party” proposed by the governor of (where else) Florida (Post #825).
The gist of all that is that a) newspapers make it their business to report only the bad news and the outrageous actors, so you don’t ever hear about the success stories, and b) the success stories have a few, simple, obvious things in common. Continue reading Post #852: College re-openings that are succeeding.
