Science of COVID-19

September 10, 2020

Well… it’s become very clear what I need to write about if I’m trying to get a reaction. Little anecdotes about my life are fun to write and people seem to enjoy them. Bashing on Trump seems to get the usual reaction from the usual people, but to be honest, it’s died down… either because they’ve come to their senses or have decided they don’t like arguing with me.

But when I try to state some simple facts… like hey, here are some numbers, and here’s what they mean and what they imply… wow. Some people whose minds are already made up sure don’t like hearing alternative points of view. Like it’s all some big conspiracy. To be clear, while there are certain things that are opinions or theories, some things are just blunt facts. At the end of the day, when you take away all the vague hand-waving, certain things are not up for discussion. They’re not “opposing opinions”.

Indeed, when it comes to debunking conspiracy theories, there’s usually a “backstop” fact that really should put things to rest, at least for any reasonable person. All the little nit-picky out-of-context details of “proof” to confirm some outlandish claim are easily put to rest by one “umbrella” fact that’s indisputable.

Obama born in Kenya? There are birth announcements in the Hawaiian newspapers at the time. All of the copies, michrofiched versions, scanned, digitized, etc… over the decades, all indisputably in agreement. Set aside the long list of BS claims, forged birth certificates and bribed doctors and nurses… just explain that.

Moon landings faked? The technology to fake a moon landing simply didn’t exist in 1969. The ability to seamlessly film hours of footage and then play it back in slow motion… how? With what?

The holocaust was a hoax? The numerous census numbers at the time, including Germany’s, all agree… and all imply a European Jewish population of around 9.5 million in 1933. That number was found to be around 3.5 million by 1945. The simple math begs a simple question: Where are all those people?

Similarly, the great Covid-19 pandemic will ultimately fall back to a simple number: Excess deaths. Tests per million, positives per test, deaths per positive… etc etc.. I know all these numbers, ratios and percentages well. Many of you evidently disagree with those numbers, as published and verified as they may be. I find myself answering lots of questions after yesterday’s post.

But let’s take a big step back from all of the nitty-gritty numbers… which, to be clear, are presently being used to figure out what happened, what’s happening today, and what’s likely to happen in the future. It has nothing to do with today’s numbers, as if they’re a frozen statistic. Statements like “the flu kills more people” are foolish because this virus hasn’t finished killing people. It was being heard at the start of the pandemic… and sure, a month into it, the flu annually kills more people. Except people kept dying, and still keep dying. We’re at 5x the annual flu deaths, and counting, yet that particular statement keeps popping up. At what point do even the most die-hard Covid deniers finally, grudgingly admit that maybe this is more serious than they thought? 10x the flu deaths? 100x the flu deaths?

At this moment, in the U.S., close to 196,000 Covid deaths have been reported. Also, at this moment, the U.S. excess-death count is somewhere around 220,000. That discrepancy might be attributable to Covid deaths that weren’t recorded as such. Or someone’s heart attack brought on by the stress of the pandemic. Or illness that didn’t get treated as a result of the pandemic. Or suicide. Whether that latter list counts as a Covid death is a separate discussion. What’s not up for debate is that at this moment, and at a continuing rate of 1,000 per day, people are dying in the U.S. that otherwise wouldn’t be.

Also, a separate discussion… if this pandemic were to magically end today, were the steps taken worth it? Here’s the thing…. “Was it worth disrupting the economy to save 200,000 lives” is only a valid question, in hindsight, when you have the right number to plug in there. Unfortunately, 200,000 isn’t the number… and we’re still pretty far from knowing what that number will ultimately be.

And if you’re still calling bullshit on all of this, as per my “umbrella backstop” questions of above, here’s a simple one… if Covid-19 didn't kill these 200,000 people, what did?

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September 7, 2020

Greetings from Whistler… actually, the drive back from Whistler… which will end up taking twice as long as usual. Maybe an accident ahead… there was a serious one a few days ago that sent 6 people to hospital, involving a Lamborghini. Yesterday, a Ferrari was impounded for going 189 km/h in an 80 zone on the same stretch of road.

Indeed, Whistler was flooded with luxury cars this weekend, as part of a charity luxury supercar weekend. No problem with that, but you Ferrari/Lambo/McLaren people might want to keep the speeds down to where you’re not likely to kill yourself, and take others with you.

The other thing Whistler was flooded with was… tourists. From all over the place… and I do mean, everywhere. Every continent, nation, ethnicity and language was well-represented, just like any other year’s final weekend of summer.

Yeah, I thought the border was supposed to be closed too. It certainly is, to most road traffic. It certainly isn’t, to airplanes. There’s never been a better indication that this will only really be over once there’s a vaccine. There’s no version of “here’s the right thing to do” that will get through to enough people. No social distancing, no masks, crowds in enclosed spaces.

The best we can hope for is that the message is getting through to enough people… so that things are manageable if they get bad. Given the nonchalance and self-centeredness and lack of regard for others I just witnessed, we might be in for a long homestretch.

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By |2020-10-08T01:09:07-07:00September 7th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19, Sports & Gaming|Tags: , , , |13 Comments

September 6, 2020

There’s a virtual triangle that applies to many things in life… especially when it comes to actually creating or building something. Any project, really… and it’s a basic triangle where the three sides are labelled: Time, Quality and Cost.

Typically, you can pick any angle… and that’s what you’ll get; what those two sides offer – at the expense of the opposite side.

Want it quickly and cheaply? No problem, but don’t expect quality.
Want quality and want it soon? Sure, but be prepared to pay for it.
Want quality without spending too much? It can be done, but you’ll have to be patient.

It’s interesting trying to map this to the development of a vaccine. Everyone is throwing lots of money at it, so the only thing that’s sliding around is quality versus time.

On the one hand, you have a conglomerate of responsible companies who’ve signed a pledge not to rush anything to market until it’s ready, which means every step of a rigorous scientific process. Many of those are currently in phase 3… which is one step before early or limited approval.

On the other hand, you have President Trump promising a vaccine any day now, completely contradicting the head of Operation Warp Speed… and you also have a few places who’ve rushed a vaccine and knowingly are throwing it out there, having side-stepped phase 3, and/or doing it in unison. It’s also relevant that those places are Russian and China, where political statements and optics often outshine what’s in the best interests of the greater population. It’s pretty much the message that Trump is trying to shove down the throats of anyone who’ll listen, but it’s heartening to see scientists banding together in solidarity rebuking it.
The scientific world is well-aware what it takes to properly develop a safe vaccine. It’s a process. Like making a baby… that’s also a process. That one takes a man, a woman and nine months. You can’t throw nine men at it and hope to have the baby in a month. You can’t throw money at it. If you want to do it, there’s exactly one way to do it right, no matter what the president says.

And, fortunately, in the U.S. and Canada and many other places around the world, that’s what’s happening… there are presently 24 vaccine candidates in phase one, 14 in phase two and 9 in phase three. Many of them will probably hit the finish line around the same time. Getting them out there to everyone is a different issue, but first things first.

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September 5, 2020

No local numbers today, so just some local observations.

On some particular Friday evening, the Canucks played a valiant game 7… but unfortunately, came up short, and got knocked out of the playoffs. The following day, Saturday, was the running of the Kentucky Derby. The weather outside was sunny and pleasant, but not too hot.

The preceding paragraph could’ve been mapped to any typical first weekend in May of the last 50 years. But, of course, this year is anything but typical.

The Friday in question was last night, and this year’s Kentucky Derby was run today, on the first Saturday… in September.

From that point of view, we’re exactly four months behind… which sort of lines up with the way I envision the near future. Just like March seemed to last about 79 days, this year is probably going to feel like it lasted 16 months.

If you ask me when I think things might start looking like any sort of normal again, I’d be guessing exactly that… 4 months into 2021… which coincidentally is the beginning of May. When the weather will be getting better. When the Canucks will get knocked out of the playoffs (hopefully not, of course), and the Kentucky Derby will go back to being run on its normal day (hopefully, of course), like it’s been for the last 145 years.

And the vaccine situation will be greatly clarified, with numerous options, most of them available to the majority of people.

And the American election furor, whatever that might look like, will have died down.

But who knows. Here’s one last, accurate observation… I was wrong about who’d win last night’s hockey game… and I was wrong about who just won the Kentucky Derby.

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August 2, 2020

Island living… island schedule… the fact that this post is on time is quite an achievement.

Another incredible achievement was today’s return of those two SpaceX astronauts who spent 2 months on the ISS, and who splashed down safely back to earth this morning.

This pandemic sort of has us all on “island time”… certainly, it felt like March had about 79 days in it, and I’m sure that more than once, we all woke up wondering what day it was. Whatever, “island time”.

I wrote about those astronauts (among other things) the day they blasted off, May 30th… I just went back and read what I wrote, and it’s pretty good – if you didn’t read it the first time around, here’s a convenient link:

https://kemeny.ca/2020/05/30/day-75-may-30-2020/

But what’s interesting… as per “island time”… it feels like I wrote that 6 months ago. So much has happened since.

And one of the things that’s happened is the slow and steady increase in daily new cases in B.C… back on May 30th, that whole week was just single-digit increases every day.

We have data up to Friday, and those last three days… the last W T F were… +39, +29, +50. WTF indeed.

Let’s try get back to earth… safely, like those astronauts. As rough as the ride may have been… and from 27,600 km/h on the ISS, down to 26 km/h when they hit the water on splashdown… as bumpy as the ride may have been, they made it.

It takes thousands of hours of training for them, and many others, to achieve that… and a lot of it was listening to instructions and following them.

Here’s 10 seconds of training that’ll help get us all to a safe splashdown; socially distance and wear a mask. It’s not rocket science.

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July 28, 2020

A lot of discussions these days – the ones where you ultimately have to walk away, or at least agree to disagree because you can’t actually believe what you’re seeing/hearing/reading… end like this:

“Where on earth did you get that idea from?”

“I researched it.”

The “researched it” thing gets thrown around a lot these days, and as per the famous quote from The Princess Bride… “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Unless you compiled a literature review, and wrote (or at least, read) abstracts of the articles you read… and/or collected a random sample of sources and performed an independent analysis of their credibility… and, if not, at least looked into the sources of those articles (authors, publishers and, most importantly, funders) and dug into that… for fallacies, distortions or just plain-old, flat-out lies… you didn’t really research it.

And even if you didn’t do any of that, did you at least think about the source of the article and why the aforementioned list (author, publisher, funder) might have been motivated to distribute it? What about the people who refer or promote the article; what might be their motivations? This wouldn’t be research, but it would be at least a semblance of critical thinking that might serve to possibly justify your opinion with respect to the credibility of your sources.

To be clear, clicking a link to a video or an article from your finely-tuned, curated feed on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok or whatever flavor-of-the-day social media platform serves as your de-facto news source – no, that’s not research. In fact, given the way with which that information is making its way to you, it’s perhaps as opposite to research as you can get. It’s spoon-feeding you exactly what you want to hear, because then you’ll click on it and generate some revenue for someone far down the line. And, in doing so, pad your conformity-bias just a little bit more because something new agrees with it… and set you up to click the next related thing.

Digging around the internet is the place to do research these days, but what exactly you’re doing makes all the difference. There’s a lot of good stuff out there; it’s just a question of wading through the crap to find it, and using some methodology to achieve that.

Incidentally, Wikipedia… a relatively good place to find a pretty good summary of anything within the entire body of knowledge of human history — can be easily downloaded. As crazy as it sounds, it’s only 10GB (compressed)… which is 42GB uncompressed, ie plain text… which means all of it, like all of Wikipedia – every single article – fits easily onto a $15 64GB USB thumb drive. You can carry around with you the entire knowledge base of humanity on your keychain, with lots of extra room for pictures and family videos. Not a bad thing to carry around in case you’re shipwrecked in the middle of nowhere with your solar-powered laptop. Or abducted by aliens.

Yeah, aliens… they’re here, living among us. It’s true; I researched it.

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July 27, 2020

When I was a kid, there were like 13 TV channels (instead of today’s 1,300), but most of it was crap and/or not interesting to me. But one thing that was never to be missed… Saturday morning cartoons.

One day, I will write about the revolutionary avant-garde music that accompanied many of those cartoons. Pull up any Tom & Jerry cartoon on YouTube, close your eyes and just listen to it. There should be graduate-level courses taught about it. Even without the cartoon, the sounds tell a story of their own, with an incredible, vast range of musical styles — and noise — all crammed into a few minutes.

Anyway, that’s not what this is about… this is actually about Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

Wile Ethelbert Coyote (yes, really… don’t say you never learn anything reading these…) is an interesting character; both genius and stupid, rolled into one.

Here’s his schtick… he comes up with an idea to catch the roadrunner… some ideas are simple, some are super-complicated. Recall the complicated blueprints… and vast array of parts he orders from ACME. He puts together some very sophisticated contraptions, which of course inevitably fail… but here’s the thing… he never follows up on his initial idea. He gives up and moves on to the next one.

Like, think about it… a rocket-powered helmet for forward thrust, and roller skates… and it almost worked… he almost had the roadrunner… until the bird took a sharp turn, right in front of an enormous wall of rock… which the coyote hit with about 500 g of force.

But he’s a cartoon, and he brushes it off, and moves on to the next idea. Hey coyote… come on, man… it almost worked! Don’t give up on it. You know, like next time, fire up the rockets and roller skates somewhere else, when the roadrunner is on a 20-mile straightaway.

Or that catapult that looked so good on paper, but fired you straight into the ground… you know, modify it… put a limiter on it. Put something on it that ejects you at the optimum part of the swing. Fiddle with it. Do something. Don’t abandon it. Don’t just let the roadrunner stand there and laugh at you. Meep meep!

This bothered me more than anything… and if I, a seven-year-old-kid, could come up with the rudimentary mechanics of the scientific process just by watching a silly coyote keep “killing” himself, you’d certainly, these days, expect better from an army of “intelligent” adults who have the entire knowledge base of human achievement at their fingertips.

This is the way science works. This is how it progresses. And experimentation is a key part of it, because you’re rarely right the first time.

As a computer programmer, I can count the number of times something worked straight out of the gate. Exactly twice.

I remember the first time it happened; I had a program I wanted to write… I had it all figured out in my head. I sat down at the computer and banged it all out; it took about 3 hours. And then, I hit the [Build] button for the first time. But instead of the inevitable long list of warnings and show-stopping errors, it was zero warnings and zero errors; all I got was a program ready to run. And I ran it, and it worked perfectly. Any other programmers… please feel free to chime in with your opinions as to how often that happens…

We are, today, living in a huge science experiment, and since we’re immersed in it, it’s important to understand the process. There are mistakes all the time, and we learn from them and we course-correct them. The insanity of the sorts of arguments that say things like, “Dr. X, several months ago, said masks were not necessary. Now the doctor is saying they are. The doctor was clearly wrong back then, so how can we trust anything the doctor says?”

Brix, Fauci, Tam… even Henry. Pick your doctor; that statement applies. All of them have made statements which, at the time, agreed with the science. Then, through experimentation and observation, the science changed. And so did their opinions and corresponding directives. That’s how the process works.

Elon Musk has treated us all with first-row tickets to this process. If you’ve been following SpaceX from the start, you’ll have seen countless attempts at recovering a booster rocket by landing it vertically on a ship. Some blew up. Some missed the ship and fell into the ocean. Some landed and tipped over. But these days, they routinely simply fall from the sky, perfectly vertical, and perfectly hit a bullseye on some ship in the middle of nowhere, and, in gymnastic terms, stick the landing. It’s astonishing. As per a previous article, closely indistinguishable from magic.

But it’s not magic; it’s countless iterations of making mistakes, adjusting, trying it again, over and over and over, till you get it right. A couple of times in my life, I’ve hit that [Build] button and it’s just worked. Several thousand other times, I’ve had to hit that [Build] button several hundred times for a single, simple little program. That’s how the world typically works.

And that’s the world we’re presently in; where scientists are making decisions with the best information they have – at this moment. Certainly in hindsight, it might change. But for the moment, who exactly are you going to trust? A scientist with decades of experience? A former reality-show star? An Instagram influencer who has like, omg, so many followers?

It was always amusing to see the coyote go off a cliff… and hang in the sky until he made the mistake of looking down, realizing where he was… and then have gravity kick in… like, if perhaps he hadn’t noticed, things would’ve been ok. Unfortunately, that’s not how the real world works. The bad things — in that case, gravity — will tug at you as soon as you give them a chance.

I think, collectively, it’s best not to have approached the edge of that cliff in the first place. But if you find yourself there, as is the case for many people these days, be careful who you listen to.

Just like what the roadrunner was so good at doing to the coyote… some of them will send you flying off that cliff. Meep meep!

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July 26, 2020

Sounding a bit like a broken record, but no B.C. numbers today, so it’s just a guess to go with yesterday’s guess… I’ll fix it all tomorrow, and I’m more than a bit curious to see what it’ll look like. Until recently, Mondays were just “more of the same”… a different sort of broken record… but we will see if the troubling new trend has continued over the weekend.

In fact, I just got back from a bike ride, some of which was on the seawall… all the way from Kits beach, around Science World, and to the edge of Stanley Park. As you might expect, very crowded. As you may not be too surprised to learn, not many masks. Not a lot of social distancing. Yeah, I know… I’m yet-again sounding like a broken record.

At least – Vitamin D. We can all agree on that. Yet another study has emerged, this one from Israel, heaping praise on the benefits of Vitamin D. It will statistically significantly avoid you getting C19 and/or at least make it an easier ride if you do get it. There is correlation between serious cases and Vitamin D deficiency.

On a day like this, if you’re from around here, there is zero excuse. Go outside for 10 or 20 minutes and soak it in… and.. heh, yeah, one more broken record you’ve heard all your life, but it’s a good one: Use sunscreen if you’re going to be in direct sunlight for more than a little bit. The idea is to soak in the sunshine to the point of healing and energizing… not to the point of sunburn.

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July 23, 2020

You walk into some high-school test. You’ve studied, but maybe not enough… you could’ve studied more. You should’ve. Maybe it’ll be one of those miracle days where the teacher is sick or someone pulls the fire alarm or it’s just postponed for some reason.

Oh well, no such luck… but… well, maybe it’s ok. You didn’t answer all of it, but you got to maybe 70% of the questions… should be ok. And of the questions you answered, you got most of them. Maybe. Yeah, it’ll be ok.

So, later in the week, you get the test back…. and indeed, you answered 70% of the questions. And of the questions you answered, you got about 70% correct…. so, all good… right?

Well, 70% of 70% is 49%. So, no… not so good. Indeed… Epic fail.

That’s the way math works, and that’s the way it’s going to work with three independent variables:

A: what percent of the population needs to be C-19 immune for there to be herd immunity?

B: what percent effective will a vaccine ultimately be?

C: what percent of the population will get vaccinated?

The unfortunate reality is that B x C will likely never exceed A, so this thing is going to stick around for a very long time. The lunacy of the sub-group that makes C anything less than 100% is particularly aggravating. It sincerely makes me wonder… if smallpox hadn’t been eradicated by 1980, would it be celebrating some sort of re-awakening these days, thanks to a bunch of “enlightened” individuals who’d never “poison” their kids with the vaccine…?

“Do you know what’s in a vaccine?”, they’ll ask you… and list off a bunch of poisons… “If it’s so healthy, try drinking it… you’ll probably die.”

Yeah, you know what else is healthy? Broccoli. Try injecting some into your bloodstream… you’ll probably die.

I no longer have any interest in arguing with anti-vaxxers. It makes my thoroughly-well-vaccinated blood boil. And I really wouldn’t care as much, were it not for the fact that their insanity has the potential to affect us all. There are those who wish they could take the vaccine, but for other health reasons, cannot. Those are the people who’d benefit most from herd immunity.

There’s no vaccine yet, but it’s coming. Many groups are making great strides. But if we think our problems are solved when it gets here, not quite.

Apart from the logistics involved in creating 7+ billion doses and distributing them… comes the issue of who gets them first. It’s an interesting discussion. The first thought is obvious – doctors, front-line medical practitioners, etc. They should certainly be near the top of the list, but those people have PPE and good habits and access to medical care. From a humanitarian point of view, it should be those at highest risk for numerous reasons, and if you think it through, you wind up with an interesting conclusion.

Here’s a list of risk factors… age, overall health, access to good medical care, and liberty to exercise social distancing. Ethnicity is not irrelevant, though socioeconomic factors play into it too… like in the U.S., twice as many Black people are dying from this than white people. That may or may not map to other places around the world, but either way, we can all agree it’d be better to ride this out in a first-world country as opposed to somewhere in the third-world.

Put it all together and what do you get? Somewhere in Mogadishu, there is an aging diabetic Somalian pirate, rotting away in a crowded cesspool of a prison. That guy needs the vaccine more than I do, but he’s unlikely to be offered it anytime soon. He’ll get his shot long after some enlightened local anti-vaxxer scoffs it away. Epic fail.

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July 22, 2020

It doesn’t get much more West-Coast-B.C. than Stanley Park’s Third Beach Tuesday night drum circles. Every version of Vancouverite is usually represented, if not as a participant, certainly as an observer. These things have been going on for years, typically May to September, always on sunny Tuesday nights. But the thing with these sorts of somewhat-organized events is that even when the organizers pull the plug on it, not everyone is convinced. Such was the case last night. The people claiming to speak for the event, back on March 19th, announced the thing is on pause till further notice. Sounds good.

But somehow, the “we’ve had enough of this crap” crowd decided it was time… and out went the word, and a lot of people showed up. Social distancing? Masks? Haha.

On sunny summer Tuesday nights, I often time my evening bike rides to wind up down there. It’s a really cool atmosphere, great energy and all the rest of it. But that was last year, and knowing what that space turns into, I wouldn’t consider it these days… because given the space and the crowd, it’s impossible for it to take place under the existing guidelines. And I don’t just mean participating… because when it’s going on, it’s crowded and difficult to walk (let alone, cycle) by on the seawall. The whole thing spills over wherever it can, just like it did last night; What’s been seen and described from last night is pretty-much exactly what you’d expect… especially some of the related attitudes, which are also very West-Coast-B.C…. “Whatever.”

That “Whatever” attitude partly led to today’s unscheduled news conference, which served up some not-so-great-numbers… and new restrictions.

Dr. Henry made it very clear, but here it is in my words: People need to understand and obey the spirit of the rules, not just the technical “here’s what’s written”. Yes, genius, you can get a group of 12 people to reserve two tables of 6 near each other and then table-hop… ohhh, aren’t you clever, being all technically law-abiding and everything. No, actually… you’re not. I feel bad for the servers in these situations, trying to enforce these regulations among people who are clearly too deserving and entitled to follow along like everyone else.

The whole idea of how many people with whom you’re in close contact has everything to do with exactly that… the risks of contact, and… contact tracing. There comes a point when contact tracing goes from manageable to impossible. This is happening in other parts of the world, where things suddenly and so quickly get out of control, that it’s just impossible to follow every lead.

Come on people, we need the vast majority to cooperate, because if we can’t get this under control now, we all know Vancouver weather… come September… back to school, back to grey skies and rain, back to the cold and indoor spaces. And, at this rate, back to Phase 1 lockdowns. Nobody wants that.

Socially distance. Wear a mask if you can’t socially distance. Follow the one-way arrows when you’re shopping. Wash your hands a lot. Don’t be a dick about any of that just because you feel you’re special or whatever. If you want to try to convince everyone that this is a conspiracy or a giant hoax or a Bill Gates 5G world-dominance control thing, that’s just great… do us all a favour and do it from home. Comfortably tuck yourself behind your computer, and watch all those videos, and comment to your heart’s content… and stay the hell away from the rest of us, who are simply trying to get to the finish line by doing the right thing.

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