Category: COVID through 2022

All my various postings tracking the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of 2022.

Post #830: Outdoor seating?

Yesterday, in Post #829, I analyzed the impact that heating outdoor dining areas areas might have on risk of COVID-19 transmission.  My conclusion was that it wouldn’t make the dining area any less safe.  And that it would improve the public health if it would keep people from dining in enclosed indoor spaces, because that’s where the real risk of transmission occurs.  The unrestricted air flow of outdoor spaces makes them much safer than equivalent indoor spaces.

That posting was prompted by an email exchange with a friend.  As part of that, I started my discussion by stating something that I thought was obvious:

Let me assume that to qualify as "outdoor", they can't roll down the sides of their tents. So that "outdoor" is synonymous with no walls. (For sure, they should not be allow to roll those tent sides down, because that defeats the whole purpose. But you never know what the lawyers are going to think of next.)

And so, what should arrive in my inbox today, from that same friend, but a link to this article that came out today in the Patch.  The gist of that is that, yes indeed, Fairfax County is considering allowing restaurants to enclose their tents, and still call it outdoor dining. Continue reading Post #830: Outdoor seating?

Post #829: COVID-19 cases, weather, and heated outdoor restaurant seating.

Source:  Calculations from NOAA temperature data for Reagan National Airport, COVID-19 case counts from the Virginia Department of Health.

This post take the place of my normal posting on trends in new COVID-19 cases in Virginia.  It really an opportunity to gather together a few bits of information about heat, humidity, and transmission rates of COVID-19.

The quick upshot is that the environment that maximizes your risk of transmission of COVID-19 is cold, dry, stagnant air.  In short, for avoiding COVID-19, the warmer, the wetter, and the windier the better.

But what about using heaters to extend the outdoor dining season?  Electric heaters will reduce the relative humidity of the air.  Doesn’t that raise the risk of COVID-19 transmission. 

My answer is no.  I’m almost sure that extending the outdoor dining season with heaters provides a net benefit in suppressing spread of COVID-19.  The “almost” there isn’t due to the behavior of the virus, but to the behavior of diners.

Details follow.  If your sole interest is in outdoor restaurant dining, skip to the end.

Continue reading Post #829: COVID-19 cases, weather, and heated outdoor restaurant seating.

Post #827: Yeah, this really is the vaccine I want

Source: Safety and immunogenicity of the Ad26.COV2.S COVID-19 vaccine candidate: interim results of a phase 1/2a, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial.  Jerry Sadoff, Mathieu Le Gars, Georgi Shukarev, et al., medRxiv 2020.09.23.20199604; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.23.20199604

Four days ago, in Post #824 , I stated that the Johnson and Johnson (J and J) COVID-19 vaccine is the one I want to get.  That was based on my reading of the initial research findings on monkeys, and some oblique hints dropped by US public health officials.

Friday’s news strongly reinforces that conclusion.  J and J tested the vaccine on hundreds of healthy people, and 98% of them developed “neutralizing antibodies” four weeks after vaccination. You can see popular press reporting of this at these links (The Independent, Reuters), and can read the original research at this link (medRxiv, hit “download pdf” to see full research paper.)
 Continue reading Post #827: Yeah, this really is the vaccine I want

Post #825: Have we stopped being stupid yet? Part III

  1. Source:  zippythepinhead.com  This image is copyright Bill Griffith, and is used without permission.  But with the notation that “Are we having fun yet??” in fact originates with Bill Griffith/Zippy the Pinhead, but has been so frequently copied that many people incorrectly believe the source is apocryphal.

 

 

 

I think by now you know the answer to this one.  Not even close.  Not even if it allows a few ignorant souls to put our children’s welfare at risk.

What set off this rant was the news, yesterday, that the Governor of Florida has identified a new fundamental freedom, the defense of which is crucial to the Nation.  And here, I am of course talking about the newly-identified “Right to Party”.  Continue reading Post #825: Have we stopped being stupid yet? Part III

Post #826: Vote by mail

I deposited my mail-in ballot at the Vienna post office yesterday.  And by yesterday evening, it had gotten as far as the Merrifield sorting center.  Which I was able to tell via a simple on-line query on the Fairfax County Board of Elections website. 

My wife, by contrast, left hers out for the mail carrier to pick up.  And she reports that hers, too, is already at Merrifield.

For any election, you have to have faith that the parties involved will perform their roles in a fair, competent, and legal fashion.  As long as you don’t wait until the last minute, I think the USPS is the least of your worries. And this ability to track ballot status just gives you that much more reassurance that you ballot is on its way to being counted. Continue reading Post #826: Vote by mail

Post #824: This is the vaccine I want

Source:  Figure 5 from:  Mercado, N.B., Zahn, R., Wegmann, F. et al. Single-shot Ad26 vaccine protects against SARS-CoV-2 in rhesus macaques. Nature (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2607-z

I admit to being an unabashed fan of Johnson and Johnson (J and J).  That’s an informed opinion, having worked as a technical consultant to numerous Fortune 500 health care companies.  From what I could tell, in my limited perspective as a consultant, they were, with one possible exception, the best and the brightest of US health care manufacturers. 

And consummate business people.  I’m a fan, as I said.

And so, just to prep you for the conclusion here, if J and J thought that Moderna (the officially anointed US vaccine manufacturer) had some sort of amazingly effective and patented approach to producing vaccines, they’d have bought them already.  Or at least bid for them, up to what they believed the value the firm was worth.

To me, in this circumstance, the fact that J and J didn’t try to buy them speaks volumes.  It tells me that J and J thought they’d do better, relying only on expertise within the J and J family. Not that this is some point-of-pride thing, but merely adhering to a least-cost make-or-buy decision.  Just the way that is taught in business textbooks.

Understanding that I’m an economist, and not an expert on the science, let me try to read the tea leaves, on what’s now being reported on the J and J vaccine. Continue reading Post #824: This is the vaccine I want

Post #822: CDC: Just kidding, we take it all back

Source:  CDC

Just this morning, I posted the new CDC guidance to citizens on COVID-19 (Post #820).  The CDC finally mentioned aerosol (airborne) transmission of the disease.

Half-jokingly, I said:

In particular, I would not be surprised to see this language disappear, once those in power do realize the implications.  Hence the snapshot, above.

Well, as of about 1 PM, the A-words have been tossed down the memory hole.  I’m not holding my breath, waiting for them to return.

So, for one bright shining moment, CDC told the entire story to Americans.  Until somebody got wind of it, and put a stop to that.  Sometimes it’s hard to believe what a total crap show our Federal government has become.

In memorium.

Source:  CDC, but long longer posted.

Post #820: The CDC finally says the A-words.

Source:  US CDC. I added the red lines.

The A-words would be aerosol and airborne.  The difference being that, up to this time, the CDC had only said COVID-19 was spread by droplets.  Droplets are (conventionally) larger than 5 microns, rapidly fall out of the air (so-called “ballistic trajectory”),  and are the basis for our 6′ social distancing rule.  By contrast, aerosols are small (under 5 microns), can hang in the air for a long time, can travel far more than 6′, and can be inhaled.

The news here isn’t that aerosol transmission matters.  The news is that, as of last Friday, the CDC is (finally) explicitly saying that.  And that, in turn, has a lot of implications for Federal, state, and local policies for dealing with COVID-19.

You can read some news writeups at MSN, or CNN.  Someone in those organizations must have been keeping an eye out for this, because I don’t see this being reported elsewhere.  Yet. Continue reading Post #820: The CDC finally says the A-words.

Post #818: Well, turns out, this *is* as good as it gets.

Three days ago, the head of the US CDC said, more-or-less, that you’re going to get more protection from wearing a mask than you are from the forthcoming US vaccine.  He’s had to recant, publicly, since then.  But my guess is the he got it right the first time.

I summarized that in Post #815, What if this is as good as it gets?  With the title being my take on that testimony.  We’ve been expecting a vaccine to make a radical change in the situation.  But, taken at face value, the US CDC director basically just told us, that’s not going to happen.  Presumably, the implication of what he said is that it’ll do no more than mask wearing and social distancing have done.

Today I stumbled across a recent interview with Dr. Fauci where he said that if we adhere to all the current public health measures, and we get a “good” vaccine, we might be able to return to normalcy as early as the end of 2021.  Apparently, he’s been saying 2021 for some time.  This is the first time I’d seen it stated as the end of 2021.  And seen that conditional on having a “good” vaccine.

So, twice in the last couple of days, responsible public health leaders have told us that this is about as good as it gets, for the time being.  Vaccines really won’t alter the situation in any material way, for quite some time.  Even with a “good” vaccine, the situation we are in right now — with the shutdowns and social distancing and all of that — that’s as good as it gets, until at least the end of 2021.  And that’s only projected to end if we have a “good” vaccine, and everybody adheres to the other public health measures like social distancing and mask use.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been sleepwalking through this.  I need slap myself across the face, wake up, and start listening to the people who know what they’re talking about, and plan accordingly. 

The smartest people in the room are trying to tell us that we’re going to be in this semi-lockdown, socially-distanced, mask-wearing limbo for … a year or years to come.  Vaccine or no vaccine.

And now that I’m waking up, I realize just how many things I’d let slide because I unconsciously assumed that there was a chance that we could return to normalcy soon.  Particularly with numerous vaccines on the way.  No sense in doing things that incur a risk of COVID-19 infection if US society is likely to be COVID-free in the near future.

Should I list a few?  I’ve been slacking off on exercise, thinking, well, I’ll be able to get back to the gym soon enough.  Nope.  No I won’t.  So I’ve been putting on weight accordingly, but you know, that’ll come off when I can get back to the gym three days a week.  Nope, that’s not going happen any time soon.  I’ve put off seeing the doctor, figuring, it can wait until things are back to normal.  No sense being around a lot of sick people during a pandemic.  I’ve put off a major home repair because I don’t want workmen in the house, figuring things won’t have rotted out completely by the time we’re over this COVID thing.  Again, wrong, wrong, wrong.  And so on.

So I think I finally am getting my mind around this.  This really is as good as it gets.  For quite some time, anyway.  That’s what the smartest people in the business are telling us.  If you try to live your life in a reality-based fashion, plan accordingly.