Tag: coronavirus

Time for another check-in.

First up: we need to accept that this is not going to be over in a month. Unless we develop an affordable, effective, mass-producible vaccine within the next 6 months, it’s going to run its course through the entire globe. During that time, we’ll have to continue social distancing. We may get some relief during the summer as we enjoy sunlight and fresh air, but it’ll be waiting for us again in the fall and winter.

If you haven’t already, talk to your parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles – anyone in your life over the age of 50 must be distancing themselves – ideally self-quarantined. Make it clear that this is not something to be trifled with.

As the World Health Organization adviser Bruce Aylward clarified last week, a ‘mild’ case of COVID-19 is not equivalent to a mild cold. Expect it to be much worse: fever and coughing, sometimes pneumonia—anything short of requiring oxygen. ‘Severe’ cases require supplemental oxygen, sometimes via a breathing tube and a ventilator. ‘Critical’ cases involve ‘respiratory failure or multi-organ failure.’

– James Hamblin at The Atlantic

We must adopt a collectivist mindset. It’s not about what you or I want, but what WE need. This is an opportunity for our country to grow. Overnight, millions are facing unemployment – in a matter of days and weeks, they will not be able to pay rent or buy food. How will we take care of them? GoFundMe and Patreon are not going to cut it this time. We have to take care of each other. No one left behind.

As the social scientist Arthur Frank reminds us in The Wounded Storyteller, the body in illness is not a ‘monad’—meaning a unit of one—although our entire health-care system is built on this notion: the individual hospital beds, the sense of isolation. Rather, it is inherently “dyadic,” because the body is never not in relation to others, especially in cases of contagious illness. The sick body is always in dialogue with the medical system, with spouses, and so on. Research showing that diabetic patients with empathetic doctors have better outcomes than those with brusque doctors, for example, highlights the material and corporeal reality of Frank’s point: The body is a social encounter, not just a vessel for our hyper-individualism.

– Megan O’Rourke at The Atlantic

Look at how China, Korea, and Taiwan have handled this: mass mobilization. All hands on deck. Strong central planning. Can you imagine doing that here?

But change is afoot. Millions are working from home for the first time – potentially changing the workplace forever. Personally, I found remote work to be very empowering and returned a lot of control over my life away from my employers. This could be a huge power shift back to workers and communities.

There will be silver linings throughout this disaster. We have to find them and use this opportunity to make our country a place worth living. Look at what’s happening already: mandatory paid sick leave! The first bump to unemployment in years! Think of how much more we can do. Now is the time to strike.

Lastly: squash the conspiracy theories! So far I’ve already seen:
* The CIA engineered it to tank China’s economy (more popular a month ago, for obvious reasons)
* Democrats did it to win the election
* Trump did it to close the borders

I can’t wait to hear more. The truth is not hard to find: it came from a Chinese “wet” market where many types of wild animals are kept in extremely poor conditions. This video does a good job explaining this (as well as the origin of SARS) without xenophobia.

Time for a coronavirus check-in.

I don’t talk about work much, but my job is in health care. I build software that serves particularly frail elderly folks – in other words, the most vulnerable population in the coming pandemic. I am NOT an expert, but I do work with a variety of people whose job it is to stay informed. As this thing spreads, so will misinformation and confusion, and the best defense against panic is preparation. So I want to share the information I’ve seen so far.

This is happening. Over the course of this pandemic, somewhere between 40 and 70% of us will be infected. Many of us will not show symptoms, and many more will not experience any serious harm. It’s the ~10% who do experience major complications that we must be concerned for. That’s the elderly (or even middle-aged), folks with respiratory problems, immune-compromised, or anyone that’s already sick with another disease (see this).

What matters is the rate of infection. Yes, we’re all going to get it – but if those infections are spread out across months and years rather than days and weeks, far fewer people will die. Good personal hygiene (washing your hands, not touching your face, coughing into your elbow) isn’t just to protect yourself: it’s to protect others and slow the spread (see this).

Quarantine is the best protective measure. Current estimates suggest that the infectible area is within 6 feet: basically, if you’re sharing air (mask or otherwise), you’re at risk. Duration of exposure increases risk. Think about the cruise ships: most of those people never touched each other, but they all got infected together (see this).

Don’t buy masks. Sorry, but health care workers need them far, far more than you do. Production capacity is far below demand, and it’ll remain there for many weeks or months. Their main virtue for the general public is to stop you from touching your face anyways and there’s other ways to accomplish that.

Our health care system is going to be overloaded. It’s a treatable disease, but up to 10% of cases require a lengthy hospital stay. We’re going to run out of hospital beds and ventilators – optimistic estimates place this around late May. We’re going to run out of masks and other protective gear to keep health care workers from getting sick. When this happens, far more than just the infected will begin to suffer. (see this and this).

Nobody knows how bad this will get, but the prognosis is grim. The solution is not to panic, but it’s not to continue business as usual, either. We need to enthusiastically support strong, decisive responses: canceling events, closing schools, mandatory remote work, and self-quarantines. This means we need to be thinking about the members of our community that will suffer when people stay indoors. Anyone working paycheck-to-paycheck, whose jobs are in the service industry, whose businesses depend on putting lots of people in small rooms. They’re going to be hurting.

China got through the first wave by instituting some of the strictest quarantines modern society has ever seen (see this piece for a great perspective from Wuhan). But they – like Japan and South Korea – also already have a strong culture supporting this response.

We don’t have this on any level. Our health care system intentionally leaves many people without access to care. Our government doesn’t have the power to institute serious or swift reform. Our culture and habits around hygiene are under-developed. Half of our media is committed to framing this as a hoax because the president decided this, too, should be a political battleground, goddamn his miserable soul.

But it’s also an opportunity to grow as a society. It’s kind of inspiring, in a weird way, to see that we’re still capable of reacting to bad news, to see people take this problem seriously in a time of numbness amidst bad news. Our individualistic ways are going to cost us, in the coming months. Maybe we’ll learn some of the behaviors and values we need to tackle other societal challenges, like climate change. Who knows.