Virus

August 5, 2020

The plot device known as “deus ex machina” was invented by the Greeks, ages ago. It literally translates to “god from the machine”, where back in ancient Greek theatre, the actors playing the role would be hanging from ropes, or some sort of machine, sweeping in to save the day, in whatever context was needed.

From a literary/artistic point of view, this has its detractors… for obvious reasons. It has the potential to wreck an otherwise excellent story with a convenient miracle to undo the entire struggle that led to that point. William Golding was criticized for this in “Lord of the Flies”… after building up an incredible narrative with intriguing and insightful and though-provoking ideas… suddenly, in a just a few pages, a ship arrives, rescues the boys, The End.

It’s not always that blunt, but you get the idea… and it fit well with the narratives of Greek Tragedies (and comedies)… and since then, it’s appeared all over the place. H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds”… big, powerful aliens have the technology to travel across the universe with a battle fleet ready to destroy earth… until they themselves are destroyed by bacteria. Actually, almost identically, Will Smith’s aliens in “Independence Day” – and a computer virus.

You get the idea; it’s when something appears out of nowhere, just in the nick of time… to save the day, like divine intervention.

There are a few versions of this these days to consider. One, of course, is Donald Trump’s hope that this is what will resolve the giant mess his country finds itself in, much of which is his responsibility. Numerous times, he’s stated how it’ll just go away, like a miracle, burn itself out, vanish overnight, whatever. Unfortunately for him, the real world doesn’t operate that way; even the ancient Greeks knew that.

More recently, Trump did an interview with Jonathan Swan on HBO, and the entire thing is now available on YouTube. It is an astonishing 40 minutes of incoherent, delusional nonsense. And great kudos to Mr. Swan who, unlike pretty-much every other reporter, didn’t acquiesce to Donald Trump’s bullshit. He called him on it, repeatedly… though, as expected, when DT has no answer, he deflects away, onto the next incoherent, irrelevant point. The end result of it was asking yourself… what did I learn from that? The answer will be… not much. There was nothing factually useful in Trump’s responses, other than confirmation that he actually doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. You can’t accuse him of actually lying when he doesn’t actually get it. That much was made obvious when the problems with his fist-full of printouts were explained back to him.

Donald Trump has had a hovering “deus ex machina” all his life. First, it was daddy Fred who handheld his inept narcissist of a son through childhood and adolescence, paving and smoothing-out what otherwise would’ve (and should’ve) been a dead-end path.

Then it was Trump’s problem solvers, many of whom are now in prison, having themselves acquiesced to illegalities to keep their guy happy.

Then it was the Republican party and the White House and all the “yes-men” he could gather… and, as we’ve seen with textbook narcissists, once the “yes” turns into anything but… even a “maybe”, let alone a “no” – you’re out of there. The best people, tremendous people, beautiful people… exit stage left, with a knife in their back and a grade-school cheap insulting nickname to be Twittered about incessantly.

During the interview, you could see Trump looking around at his people. “Help”, his eyes pleaded. Help me. Rescue me. Where’s my DeM? It wouldn’t have been too presidential to stand up, rip off the mic and make a scene, like so many celebrities love doing when they’re asked a question they don’t like… no, The President had to sit through it, very uncomfortably in parts, and hang himself just a little bit more with every astonishing, baseless, irrelevant word.

There are no machines big enough, ropes strong enough, storylines believable enough… that would have a Deus sweep in to save the day for him. His mistakes will follow him into eternity, where maybe he can have a discussion with Deus Himself. That’s Who it’d take to make him understand.

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By |2020-10-08T01:10:32-07:00August 5th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Space & Astronomy, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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July 11, 2020

Greetings from Whistler… where… good news! The pandemic is over! We went for a walk last night in the village… lots of strangers hanging out, having a great time… no social distancing needed! No masks! It’s amazing, eh… a short drive up Highway 99 and it’s a whole other world!

If you ever get depressed about Vancouver weather… and I’m guessing today is as good an example as any, because it can’t be too different from Whistler, where it’s pouring rain… you know, when you open up the Weather App and it’s just a long row of rainclouds for the next week… you know what I mean… ugh.

So… what you do… is check out the weather in San Pedro de Atacama… and pretend that’s our forecast. That’s the place I’ve previously mentioned where it never rains. All you’ll see is an endless row of smiling sunshine. Isn’t that great? Once in a while, a little cloud will show up 5 days from now, wrecking that perfect visual streak. Poor silly little cloud; it’s just lost. Soon, mommy and daddy cloud will find it and take it up north, to B.C., where it belongs.

Yeah, of course, you’re fooling yourself. But maybe it makes you feel a little better, albeit briefly.

Indeed, if you like sticking your head in the sand… it doesn’t need to be in the sand of the Chilean Atacama desert… it can be a lot closer… Florida or Georgia or any of the 50 minus 5 states where case counts are increasing daily. Or, apparently, it can be Whistler too.

One thing has become abundantly clear; this pandemic will not end – truly, end – until there is a vaccine.

There’s a whole other discussion that emerges from that; the vaccine will probably only be X% effective. Many people, especially south of the border where health is a political statement, will refuse that vaccine. So let’s say only Y% of the population gets vaccinated. You end up with X times Y percent of people who are immune, and certainly that number will be far less than what’s needed for herd immunity. And so, this damn little virus will persist… much like the ridiculous outbreaks of measles… for which there’s no reason, other than the insanity of anti-vaxxers. It actually does feel like making one stick their head in the sand. At least it's warm, and not raining.

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By |2020-10-08T01:21:25-07:00July 11th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Science of COVID-19, Life in Vancouver|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , |16 Comments
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July 10, 2020

We’re heading up to Whistler today, so this space may be emptier than usual for the next little while…and I’ll update the charts and graphs to the proper size eventually…

In the meantime, a couple of somewhat-related words that come to mind as I watch the world, and its contents, spinning around me…

Sonder (noun) The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Onism (noun) The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.

It’s kind of mind-bending when you try to step outside your “existence” – in other words, to truly try to visualize things from any other point of view, other than your own. I don’t just mean trying to understand someone else’s opinion; I mean literally, through their eyes. Stop and consider that every single experience and memory you have is from your own, unique point of view. But it’s more than that; all of reality is only what you’ve experienced. There is literally nothing of existence outside of your experiencing it. If you’ve never seen it or heard of it, until you do, it doesn’t actually exist.

Elon Musk thinks we’re all living in a simulation, and the longer it all goes on (life, in general), the more I get the idea that it’s true. The complexity and vastness of the universe, in both directions… infinitely big or small, feels a lot like the way these vast worlds of online games work… there’s a big map (like our universe), but until you actually need to go somewhere, it doesn’t exist… the game just creates that place when it needs to. It would take way too much memory and disk space for it all to be there. What’s the point of generating all of that for some distant galaxy we can barely see? We’ll create it when we get there… which we never will.

Closer to home, as per the words above… this vivid version of reality you hold in your mind; 7.8 billion other people have their own, unique version of it. It’s mind-blowing to think about, and it’s cool that there are words for it. I have this sonder every time I feel onism.

And if this is a simulation, I get the impression someone found some cheat codes and is trying them out on us. Threat of nuclear war? Killer hornets? Pandemic? Massive political upheaval with the world’s biggest superpower? Something new pretty-much every day. Today it’s a new virus in Kazakhstan, potentially worse than COVID-19. Gee, I wonder what this sequence of buttons does…

This unfortunately has the feel of when someone gets bored with a game. You spent some time building villages or planting crops or whatever… you’ve been doing it for a while, but the game has gotten stagnant or boring… so you throw the crazy at it. Storm the villages, burn the crops. Let’s hope that’s not what we’re dealing with… let’s at least hope that if whoever is running the show got bored, there’s that guy behind him watching… and now, saying, “Wait.. wait… seriously, wait… I got this… here, give me control.” Let’s hope… because then we should be good for another 65 million years… before that guy gets bored and sends a big meteor. Or whatever he needs to deal with his own onism at the sonder he sees on earth.

 

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By |2020-10-08T01:21:25-07:00July 10th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Interesting Words, Humour, Sports & Gaming, Space & Astronomy, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |17 Comments
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Day 100 – June 24, 2020

And on the 100ᵗʰ day, he rested. Well, not quite… but let’s see where we’re at…

Precisely 100 days ago was St. Patrick’s Day… March 17ᵗʰ. On that day, the number of cases in Italy was spiralling out of control. The case numbers had doubled in less than 5 days, to over 30,000. In the U.S., the case numbers were at 6,500… but had doubled in less than 3 days. I had seen a chart of that, and graphed it. Then I’d adjusted it, to a common starting point. And then, I added in Canada (whose case count was 600, having doubled in about 3 days as well). We were a week behind the U.S., and around 2½ weeks behind Italy. Huh… interesting… I bet other people might be interested in seeing that. So… I posted it. And that generated enough interest that this became a simple exercise of updating those graphs every day, hoping like mad that we wouldn’t be following the U.S., who in turn hopefully wouldn’t be following Italy.

And so began an interesting journey of analysis, introspection and observation. What was intended to be a brief analysis of the numbers and graphs… quickly turned into my ramblings… you know… while I’m here… maybe I have something to say… so now that I have a little soapbox to stand upon, let’s make the most of it. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep up this pace of an entire article a day, about some eclectic topic that may have possessed me… but let’s go with. I’m pretty proud of hitting 100 days in a row… not a single day missed. Even I’m surprised I had so much to say.

This is starting to sound like a goodbye, but it’s not… but just like the frantic nature of this virus in its early days, around here it’s slowing down… and so am I. I’ll continue to post the daily numbers and graphs, because there are actually some people who are viewing this just for that… but the quality and quantity of posts… like what you’re reading right now… will diminish, especially in the near future as it’s summer and I’m making every effort to unplug as much as possible. I will still endeavour to post… whatever I end up posting… consistently at 5pm… but, you know… it’s summer.

If you’re missing the daily fix, it’s interesting to note that many of these articles have aged well. Not that they’re that old to begin with, but I’m happy to announce that these 100 posts… as well as whatever else I write in the future… will also be available on my own web site… which launched about 10 minutes ago. The advantage of reading there is that the posts are searchable… something that after 100 days, I myself have made use of… (“Didn’t I already write about that…?”). If you visit www.kemeny.ca and click on the seal (the red, waxy kind… not the marine animal that can balance a ball kind), it’ll take you to a beautifully formatted version of these 100 posts… and whatever comes after. It’s very trippy reading back on some of these; it reminds me where my brain was at, on those specific days.

Here’s another one of those cool words:

Jouska: (noun) A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

This blogging thing is kind of fun. Actually, it’s a lot of fun… I guess more than anything, it’s because it’s what that word alludes to… but actually spelled out. A compulsive jumble of thoughts becomes a lot more coherent when you sit down to write it out, word by word, in a form that others will understand. Who knew. It’s given me an urge to write something longer… maybe a book, ideas for which are already brewing. If I mange to get around to it, you will all be the first to know.

Until then… hey, I’m still around… some hopefully interesting content will show up here in the future… I promise… just not every single day. In the meantime, allow me to quote my favourite provincial health officer… whose words should always apply — not just in the midst of a pandemic: Be kind, be calm and be safe.

 

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By |2020-10-08T01:40:10-07:00June 24th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Follower Favourites, Interesting Words, Travel Stories, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , |34 Comments
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Day 98 – June 22, 2020

The numbers don’t lie. They can be twisted into statistics, which certainly can… depending how you paint them. But the raw numbers don’t lie.

Cases per million

Tests per million

Deaths per million

Deaths per case

Deaths per test

This list of malleable statistics is informative, but at the end of the day, there are some hard numbers that make up what feeds all these different angles of looking at the same thing. In my opinion, when all is said and done, excess deaths will have to be the numbers that get broken down. Those are not difficult numbers to pin down. Every jurisdiction knows, or should know, how many people die every day, week or month. That’s easily compared to the same period last year, whether as raw numbers or as a percentage of the population. These little graphs are showing up all over the place, and, as expected, show bumps starting in March.

The retro-analysis of these numbers will yield results that will get argued about, but those arguments will start falling flat the year after a vaccine shows up and things are fully back to normal. Certainly, they’re not all COVID deaths… but once you weed through cases of people who avoided the hospital out of fear and things like that, there won’t be another explanation.

In the meantime, we can only gauge where we’re at with numbers we can try to make as current as possible. Test positive cases is one. Virus-attributable deaths is another. Yes, we’re not testing enough. Or, as The President might suggest, we’re testing too much. Yes, some old people would’ve died anyway. Or, believe it or not, some old people can survive common colds or flus. Arguments on both sides, for now… but it’ll be hard to dispute ultimate deaths.

One number that we’ve all gotten used to is now changing… which is the average age of test-positive cases. How serious that turns out to be remains to be seen, but a lot more younger people are getting this. It’s no real surprise the Florida is turning into its own micro-disaster zone. Their governor (falsely) announced the curve was flattened, and things should head back to normal. Now we’re seeing the effects of what happens when you do that. The message that hasn’t been hammered home enough seems to be that until this thing is gone, it’s here. It ain’t over till it’s over. And I suppose the one thing about the presentation of this virus that makes it so difficult is how it skirts the line of “very serious” and “no big deal” so effectively, catering to both sides who’ve chosen what to believe. It’s at least 40x more lethal than a common flu, but it’s not 1,000x worse.

You may have noticed that my graphs and data have changed. I’ve removed Italy and South Korea. Both have been there from the start, because the entire reason I started writing was to track the path we (Canada) were on, as compared to others. There’s no longer much to learn from those two, because in three months, we’ve clearly defined our own track, both nationally and provincially. Thank you Italy and South Korea for providing us with data with which to compare, and congratulations on flattening your curves effectively.

What’s left now is the U.S to compare against. There was a time we were following them lockstep; fortunately for us, that deviated a while back. But what’s going on south of the border is still very important to us, so I’ve not only kept the U.S., but I’ve also added in the same level of detail as the Canadian national and provincial data. I’ve also removed the Time To Double (TTD) of 2 and added a TTD of 20. Indeed, things have flattened beyond the initial crisis. But as we’re learning, things can change. Numbers don’t lie.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:24-07:00June 22nd, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Science of COVID-19, Travel Stories, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , |2 Comments
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Day 94 – June 18, 2020

Everyone has heard of Schrödinger’s Cat, but there’s a subtlety to that famous experiment that needs to be clarified… which is… it’s not that when you look into the box, only then do you know whether the cat is alive or not. It’s that until you look into the box, the cat is both dead AND alive. If that has you scratching your head, it’s because of course it’s a non-sensical scenario.

The issue has to do with mapping behaviour in the quantum world… to our visible, relatable world. And I’m not talking about the pseudo-scientific vibration energy healing quantum whatever… I’m talking about actual quantum physics, where things work differently at the subatomic level… and one of those things is that some particles, which can exist in one of two states, seem to exist in both… until you observe them, at which point they pick a side. For example, an electron… it has two levels, spin-up or spin-down. When you observe the electron, you can tell which state it’s in. But until you look at it, it’s spinning both ways. Or the polarization of a single photon… vertical or horizontal. And until you observe it, both. In simpler terms, imagine a coin. You flip it, and it falls to the ground. Now try to imagine that until you look at it, it’s both heads and tails… but the moment you look at it, it’ll pick one or the other. Bizarre.

There are problems with this sort of interpretation, and it’s one of many… but the thing is, this behaviour does exist, and it’s the foundation of the science that takes advantage of quantum mechanics. In a typical computer, data is stored in bits… and each bit is a one or zero. In a quantum computer, you have a Qbit… which can be a one, a zero… or both, simultaneously. A simple example, in a normal computer, a Byte is 8 bits, which can represent 2⁸ different numbers (from 0 to 255). But if that is a QByte (8 Qbits), you could theoretically evaluate all 256 versions at once, which on the surface implies a computer 256 times faster. And now imagine there isn’t just one QByte… but many.

Schrödinger had a problem with that, and came up with his famous thought experiment… which led to years of arguments with the greatest minds of the day, like Einstein, Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg (the theoretical physicist, not the meth cook).

At the end of the day though, what’s clear is that while these are all interesting theoretical discussions, and quantum effects can be exploited down at that level, as baffling as the experiments are (and there are trivially simple experiments you can do to actually see quantum effects)… the real world just doesn’t work this way. The “alternative facts” model of reality doesn’t allow for two things to be true at once, as much as some people would hope. The world’s issues aren’t waiting around for us to observe them before they tip in one or the other direction.

At present, depending how you wish to observe it, you might interpret this pandemic to be over. Or, of course, you realize it’s still very much going… and we need to be cognizant of that and respect it. You can’t have it both ways, but this seems to be what’s going on, depending to whom you listen. Schrödinger’s virus.

"If you look, the numbers are very minuscule compared to what it was. It's dying out.” — said Donald Trump, this morning. “No, it’s not”, says everyone else.

I guess it’s a good thing we’re not all subatomic particles, waiting to tip one way or the other. It’s good that while we understand there are indeed two (or more) sides to every issue, many of those sides don’t actually exist on top of each other. There’s some certainty to the fact that we’re still in the midst of a pandemic, and there’s no version of political/pseudo-scientific hand-waving that’s going to change that… and we’ll see that in rising numbers as things open back up. Today, Canada went over 100,000 known cases. Let’s hope we’ve all learned something and stick with it… the idea was to get it under control, which, around here, we’ve done. The important thing is to keep it that way. Or we’ll have bigger problems than trying to figure out if some theoretical cat is dead or alive.

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By |2020-10-08T01:22:25-07:00June 18th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Science of COVID-19, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , |9 Comments
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Day 83 – June 7, 2020

Air travel has obviously been radically affected by this pandemic, but before everything went all to hell, it’s interesting to note that typically, there are so many planes (tens of thousands) flying around at any given moment, that it’d actually be impossible to ground them all; there’d be no room to park them. We caught a glimpse of that post 9/11 when, for a week, all air traffic over North America was stopped. Airports turned into giant parking lots — YVR was one of them, the taxiways and runways littered with an eclectic collection of livery. Another one of them was Gander, Newfoundland… a town with a population of around 10,000 people… and an airport that’s well-suited to emergencies, being the closest point between the U.S. and Europe… so when the call came in to every plane, “Get down now… anywhere… closest airport… NOW.” — every plane over the Atlantic, headed to the U.S… or every plane that had just departed, heading East… all of them set a course for Gander. The population of Gander almost doubled, for a week, when 38 planes carrying 6,700 people suddenly showed up.

And for a week, the air was clear — far clearer than it’d been for many decades, and it was an opportunity for scientists to gather data… to gather data that otherwise would never have been available. That was a very steep price to have paid for that data, one nobody would have wanted to pay. But since the opportunity presented itself, it obviously made sense to take advantage of it.

There’s the old saying… today is the first day of the rest of your life. And these days, until there’s a cure for this virus, today is also always the beginning of these rolling “5 to 14-day windows” where we get to see the after-effects of our activities.

We’ve come to learn a lot about the transmission of this virus, and how enclosed spaces for prolonged periods of time are a much bigger issue than being outdoors, being distant, and picking up the virus off a contaminated surface. Not to say that some of those things don’t pose a risk; they all might, but it differs… and effectively, the more exposed you are to the virus, both in time and volume, the worse it is.

The numerous protests going on around the world are a good example of these rolling windows, and everyone is keeping a close look at the outcome. It’s not an ideal experiment, but there’s plenty of data that’ll be made available; possibly very expensive data, as per the post-9/11 air quality numbers. In this case, the guinea pigs aren’t air particles… they’re human beings who decided to throw caution into the wind. While there are Covid-responsible ways of protesting… masks, outdoors, socially distanced… many people said to hell with it. We’ve of course seen many maskless crowded protests already anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Well — there will eventually be answers to that rhetorical question. George Floyd was murdered on May 25ᵗʰ, coming up now on two weeks. It’s hard to judge what effect the protests around the U.S. (and Canada) have had, especially south of the border where numbers weren’t slowing down to begin with. So, to be sure, they’re still rising… but are they rising faster than they otherwise might have? And to throw more variables into it, openings have been taking place in many different cities and states; how much is that contributing? Washington State was doing pretty well, but they had a significant spike a couple of days ago… a week after many new openings. Coincidence? Just a spike, not a trend? Time will tell.

Around here, time will tell as well — for now, it’s two straight days without real data… tomorrow’s update will backfill Saturday and Sunday.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:05-07:00June 7th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Science of COVID-19, Travel Stories, Humour, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |4 Comments
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Day 75 – May 30, 2020

Let’s start with the vastness of how incredibly big the universe is, like indescribably impossibly, unimaginably big. I’ve written about how our brains lose scale the bigger and more unrelateable the numbers get. But also, if you go the other way, things get unrelateably small. We think we can conceive of how small an atom is, but it’s way smaller than you imagine… and the building blocks that make up the nucleai of atoms… protons, neutrons…and other sub-atomic particles… way smaller… and quarks beneath that… it’s a long way down, all the way to the down to the Planck length… which is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects take over. This is the “quantum of length”, the smallest measurement of length that has any meaning. It is roughly equal to 1.6 x 10^-35 m or about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000th the size of a proton.

It is estimated that the diameter of the observable universe is about 28.5 gigaparsecs (93 billion light-years, or 8.8×10^23 kilometres or, well, let’s spell it out… 550,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles), putting the edge of the observable universe about 46.5 billion light-years away.

If you look at the numbers in metric… I’m going to normalize these things to a unit we’ll define as a tenth of a millimetre… let’s call that unit… I dunno… a Kovid.

Why that particular length? Because it’s the mid-point between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. The universe itself is 8.8×10^31 Kovids wide… while the Planck length is 1.6 x 10^31 Kovids… which means the width of a human hair is the half-way point in size. Take the width of the universe… average it with the smallest width we can measure… and you get the width a human hair. It blows your mind no matter which direction you approach it from. We, here, in our 3D existence, are right in the middle of a scale that’s vastly incomprehensible, no matter how you view it.

This is the sort of coincidence that either means a lot, or means nothing… sort of like how if you observe the cosmos, you will notice that everything is moving away from us. Like, if there was a Big Bang, visualized as an explosion from a central location, we are right in the middle. That sounds profoundly meaningful until you realize that the Big Bang was not that sort of explosion… it was an explosion of time and space, and it’s expanding uniformly everywhere… like, everywhere in the universe looks like the middle of it, because everything seems to be moving away from it.

Interesting duality with both of those things, depending on how you look at it… either we, humanity, is really incredibly important in the grand scheme of things… or we’re an insignificant, irrelevant part of the bigger picture. It’s probably a bit of both, again… depending how you view it.

All of this came to mind this morning while watching a rocket launch — the first manned launch for SpaceX and their Falcon 9 rocket. It’s fantastic to see the new technology, which, if you’ve been following the evolution of SpaceX, is a slow and steady progression of very impressive engineering. I am in awe of these guys being able to take the exhausted first stage of a rocket, and recover it perfectly, landing it on a ship that’s waiting for it in the precise spot. And the space capsule itself, all operated from touch panels… no endless maze of confusing knobs and switches. It’s crazily impressive what mankind can do when it puts its mind to it.

It’s also tragically horrifying what mankind can do, as evidenced by the events that triggered the present evolving meltdown in the U.S. We make such progress on one hand, and it’s like we haven’t evolved from barbaric cavemen in others. Rocket fuel burns, taking mankind literally upwards, on a 19 hour journey to another technological marvel, the International Space Station… while on the ground, cities burn in protest and recognition of just how far other parts of society need to evolve. The vast spectrum between those two things seems as vast as my Kovid scale.

Shoutout to the two astronauts, Bob and Doug (how’s it going, eh…), and may they have a safe journey to the ISS — and back. And it’s interesting… for those guys, when they look out the window, they can see it all… the entire earth below them. The place where everything that’s ever happened… entirely in their field of view. How small we all are in the grand scheme of things, but at our scale, how large and important things seem. I bet if we could all see that view — take a huge step back… or, up, really… 400km up to the ISS… and look down, I wonder if we’d realize that we are all very much the same.

It’s suggested that everyone, especially when they’re young, go somewhere… else. Like, vastly different. There are plenty of places that need schools built and fresh-water wells dug and English classes taught… they need the help, and some people around here need a vastly different perspective. You certainly appreciate what you have here and what you take for granted when you see things through a different lens. I’d like to think that in the future, space travel will be so accessible that everyone might have the opportunity to at least spend a few hours in orbit, looking down. The grade-12 trip won’t be 2 weeks in Guatemala… it’ll be a trip to a launchpad, and then upwards… far.

Perhaps a few laps of the planet would make people realize that from up there, there are no visible borders and that the people below, whose cultures and skin colours can’t be seen from so far above, must also all be part of the same big picture. And maybe that’ll lead to less people being murdered, asphyxiated with knees to their necks. Or less people playing victim and trying to get someone arrested (or worse) because they’re offended at being told to leash their dogs.

Look at this godforsaken virus. It’s doesn’t care. It doesn’t differentiate. White people in Italy, Black people in New York, Asian people in China. It’ll infect and kill us all indiscriminately. But you can’t blame it. It has no brain, no consciousness, no empathy, no compassion. We humans have all of that, and if we can use it to advance humanity the way today’s launch implies, we can certainly use it to fix the rampant and evident ongoing societal inequalities that persist.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:08-07:00May 30th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Travel Stories, Humour, Space & Astronomy, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |8 Comments
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Day 70 – May 25, 2020

Yesterday’s post was met with a wide range of reaction, and the questions and comments lead me to think a bit of clarification and more detail would be appropriate. Some of those comments came from Swedes themselves, a little bit upset at being painted somewhat ruthlessly; to clarify, I’m speaking about leadership and their policies; not the general population, many of whom don’t agree with the official policy in the first place. And to also clarify, I’m not implying their leadership and epidemiologists are evil. They simply came up with a strategy, and it’s not working as they’d hoped. So, här är del två…

I first wrote about Sweden on April 10th… more than 6 weeks ago. I welcome you to scroll down and find it — it’s a pretty good summary of where things stood at that point, what measures where (and weren’t) in place, and what I thought of the whole idea. And sure, “What do you know?” is a fair question to ask of me… especially 6 weeks ago. We’re all continually asking the question of each other, and hopefully learning something. That same article also mentions a famous letter signed by more than 2,000 Swedish doctors, scientists and professors… the contents of which can be summarized succinctly as it relates to government policy (which hasn’t changed): “They are leading us to catastrophe”.

First of all, let’s clarify exactly what is meant by herd immunity.

Herd immunity is where enough people of a population are immune to the extent that the infection will no longer spread within that group. The more infectious a disease, the higher that percentage has to be. For example, mumps is very contagious. It has an Rø of 10 to 12, meaning every infected person will infect, on average, 10 to 12 others. Left unchecked, this would lead to 95% of the population getting infected. After that, the population can be considered to have acquired herd immunity, and the other 5% will inherit the benefit of that… because at that point, there’s no one left to catch it from. Measles has similar numbers. That particular herd-immunity threshold is very high, and can only be reached via vaccination because allowing everyone to catch either of those horrible diseases is not an option. And these days, completely preventable.

With the way the math works, the higher the Rø, the higher that herd immunity threshold. For COVID-19, estimates seem to run between 1.4 and 3.9. Both of those numbers seem extreme, but for the record, they imply a range of 29-74% to achieve herd immunity. An Rø of 2.3 seems to be generally accepted, implying herd immunity could be achieved with 57% of the population having become infected.

Is that likely in Sweden? Anywhere?

Before we answer that, it’s worth noting that the policy-makers in charge in Sweden have been backing away from claiming this was the idea in the first place. It’s a mixed message for sure, and it’s changed over time. I think it’s reasonable to assume it was the original intent; shelter those most at risk (an impossible task, but that’s also a different discussion) and then let the virus do as it may. But, to confuse things a bit, while businesses were to be open, a vast number of Swedes, not too different from Americans in some confused places, said to hell with what the government tells us; we will take our lead from others, perhaps like those 2,000 who signed that letter.

That’s intelligent on their part, but certainly affects the plan of “get the virus out there”. You can’t have it both ways, and perhaps you end up in a purgatory of sorts… where there’s too much illness to be handled properly, but nowhere near enough to be even close to establishing herd immunity. Indeed, by an order of magnitude, nobody on the planet is even remotely close. What do we need? 70% 60%? I’ll give you 50%. What’s Sweden at? Maybe 9%. More likely closer to 7%. And let me clarify… I am in no way blaming Swedish society for not doing their part; I’d have done the same thing, isolating myself and not frequenting crowded places. Even without any sort of lockdown, achieving herd immunity was not going to happen. Even if it were possible, it’d take years. To be sure, there are a lot more people who’ve been infected than we know… but still… that Stanford study that implied infection rates 50 to 85 times higher than thought… there are problems with that study, but let’s take it at face value… where are we at with that, near San Francicso? 2%. Nobody is even close to herd immunity, and it’s likely nobody will get there. Of course, a vaccine achieves that instantly, and that’s why we’re diligently aiming in that direction.

That sad thing about Sweden is that they could’ve seen it coming, but did nothing to prevent it. The U.K. tried this strategy… shelter the weak, keep things open, weather the storm… and bailed on it around March 17th. The U.K. was only at around 2,000 cases, but it was the drastic nature of growth that led them to quickly understand how bad this could get. Sweden had seen its 1,000th case by then, but it wouldn’t have been too late to re-evaluate then. Or the next day. Or any of the 40+ days since.

There is a discernible and not-too-surprising pattern emerging around the world; here are the worst three countries… for total cases, and daily new cases. In other words, not only have they seen the most cases, but they’re all still growing — faster than anyone else: U.S., Brazil, Russia. What do they have in common? Here’s a hint: Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin. Try changing those minds.

The Prime Minister of Sweden, Stefan Löfven, is no renegade populist. He’s a social democrat. And he’s dealing with a population of only 10 million people. It’s not great now, but it’s not too late. I wrote recently about the joys of being wrong, and the opportunities it affords. Perhaps it’s time for Sweden to give it some thought.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:10-07:00May 25th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Politics, Science of COVID-19, Life in Vancouver, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |7 Comments
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Day 69 – May 24, 2020

No updated numbers for B.C. today, so, as usual… I’ll make an intelligent guess and fix it tomorrow.

So let’s talk about yesterday’s numbers, and let’s begin with the old “5 blind guys and an elephant” parable. The premise of it is straightforward… these 5 guys have never encountered an elephant, and each reach different conclusions about the different parts of the elephant that they touch. The guy who grabs a leg describes it like a tree trunk. The guy who grabs the tail describes it as a rope. The guy who grabs an ear describes it as flat and floppy. The other two guys… one grabs a tusk, the other grabs the trunk. Their interpretation and discussion with each other is outside the scope of this post; we’ll leave Freudian experts to discuss their conclusions.

The moral of the story actually changes, depending on what lesson you’re trying to teach. Maybe that vastly differing opinions are all justified when talking about the same subject, like someone else’s opinion is just as valid. Maybe that sometimes, we’re fighting about the same thing. Maybe that we need to question our method of questioning. In some versions, the guys aren’t blind; just in the dark. But once they’ve “seen the light”, they all agree.

Let’s go with something like that… the guys aren’t blind, just initially blindfolded… but were convinced by their first impressions, especially because they went around telling everyone, and in doing so, convincing themselves that their version was “the most correct”. Indeed, even after the blindfolds were lifted, and they could see the big picture, they still clung to their beliefs… perhaps since they were already so invested. And, to add a bit more to it… once they could see, they realized that they were actually in an elephant park… with lots of different elephants. And, all of the elephants had been given names… of places, like in that series “Money Heist” (side note: watch Money Heist, and watch it in Spanish, with subtitles… incredibly good.. it’s on Netflix).

So these elephants… there’s one off in the distance… her name is New Zealand. She’s tiny, but looks very healthy. There’s one called Canada, who is really big and, for the most part, looks ok — parts of him looks much healthier than other parts, but he’ll be fine. There’s an elephant called United States… poor thing is really beaten up and needs to rest, but some trainer has a rope around him and is literally trying to drag him onto his feet.

But the elephant these guys had all initially touched and reached wildly different conclusions about… his name is Sweden.

Let’s pause here and be perfectly pragmatic. Without any opinion yet, here are some numbers, and a bit of comparison… of two places in the world where lots of people insist things are going really well: Sweden, and British Columbia. Starting points can be arbitrary, but for what it’s worth, both places had the same number of known cases (7) on Feb 27th. Sweden accelerated upwards far quicker than BC, and here’s where things are at, as of yesterday:

Population: BC 5.1M, Sweden 10.2M (2x)

Testing rates: BC 21.6 people out of 1,000, Sweden 20.8 (~same)

Known cases: BC: 2,517, Sweden 33,459 (13.4x)

Deaths: BC 157, Sweden 3,998 (25.5x)

Active cases: BC 303, Sweden 24,490 (81x)

Resolved cases recovery: BC 92.9% recovered, Sweden 55.4% recovered

Resolved cases deaths: BC 7.1% died, Sweden 44.6% died

Last 3 days: BC +40 positive tests, Sweden +1,665 positive tests (41.6x)

Last 3 days: BC 7 deaths, Sweden 161 deaths (23x)

I was chastised for stating somewhere that Sweden is letting their old people die. OK, I will clarify… they’re not letting their old people die; they’re letting everyone die. And by that, I simply mean they’re letting the virus run its natural course through the population, taking down whoever is unfortunate enough to contract the serious symptoms that might show up. The demographic profile of who’s actually dying is similar in both places, it’s just that for every elderly BC resident that passes away, 25 pass away in Sweden. That is the cost they’re willing to bear to keep the economy going, and there are undoubtedly people who’ll look at all of that, the same elephant I’m looking at, and come to a completely different conclusion as to what’s success and what isn’t. At some point, this is purely about opinion. The numbers speak for themselves, and you’re free to interpret them however you wish.

Yes… the measuring sticks of success are different, for different people. I don’t like to dwell in the purely pragmatic world, because it leaves out many things I consider very important and are part of my core values. Purely pragmatically, if you’re worried about economics, letting old people die makes sense. Same for sick or disabled people. The moment that the carrying-cost of someone’s existence outweighs the benefit, economically, to society, we’re throwing money away. Care homes? Wheelchair ramps? Braille on signs? Feeding into old-age pension plans? Think of all the money we could save.

A little over 80 years ago, around 1,000km south-west of Stockholm, there emerged a madman with that sort of agenda. Off he went, trying to rid his society of who and what he deemed undesirable, in the name of his version of the greater good. I wonder if perhaps the deep personal attachment I have to that particular historical event skews my objectivity, but on the “lives vs. economy” scale, I am very heavily tilted towards the “lives” side. Notwithstanding that without lives, you don’t have an economy anyway.

The few family members who managed to survive The Holocaust came out of it with very little, except each other, and that’s what I keep thinking about when this discussion comes up. Lives and family first, economy second. Elephants never forget… and when it comes to this, neither do I.

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By |2020-10-08T01:23:10-07:00May 24th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, The First 100 Days, Business & Economics|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |0 Comments
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