Interesting Article On Combating Misinformation

And probably useful for than just coronavirus misinfo -

https://www.axios.com/what-experts-say-works-for-combating-coronavirus-misinformation-146084b8-1312-403d-b948-3e190f16b7f3.html

First Wave, Cont.

I figured I ought to explain a little bit more about what I meant when I said we shouldn't be focused so much on New York numbers.

As before, most of these are coming from this site.

So here's the national graph, in logarithmic format, for the United States. I went with the 'new cases, averaged weekly' graph because it smooths out some of the daily fluctuations, so it's easier to see trends. I went with logarithmic for similar reasons.

Here's the same graph, but for New York alone:

The New York graph is very similar to the US graph, because New York currently makes up the bulk of our cases. Of course, New York is now trending lower whereas the national rate is... not.

For comparison purposes, I pulled up a graph for another state, in this case Arkansas.

As you can see, it's still trending up. Actually, it just made a rather big jump up. You can play with this site and look at the trends in various states, some of which are winding down. Others are plateauing. Still others are still going up.

I also want to note that these pretty graphs are only as good as the data behind them. Some states are testing more than others, so their results will be more accurate. It raises the question of what an outbreak would look like if the state isn't testing, and isn't acknowledging it.

I think... well. Many people are asymptomatic, so it's hard to say, but you would probably seen an increase in fevers. Then, prob, a few people that need hospitalization... but it could be tagged as 'pneumonia', or something other than COVID-19. If you could compare the typical death rates to current death rates, you might see discrepancies worth investigating, but I don't have access to that sort of data. I'd definitely be interested in seeing it though.

What I have found, though I'm not sure how useful it is, is the Kinsa Health Weather Map. It's apparently a company that makes digital thermometers, so they get data on when people use their thermometers and have a fever, and can compare current fever rates to past. Again, just because it's a fever doesn't mean it's COVID-19, but an unusual number of fevers at this time does sound like a potential indicator.

Illinois has generally been pretty good, other than Chicago, ofc. Though I've started to notice some yellow spots in places like Coles County:

Which is interesting, because all it really has is Mattoon, which is a town with fewer than 20K. In other words - mostly rural.

I've been keeping an eye on Florida of late, though I'm not sure whether there's anything of significance to note yet.

Here's a screenshot from the John Hopkins University map, showing a map of Florida by county of confirmed cases. Data should be from yesterday:

And here's the Kinsa heat map for the same:

I don't think Miami is any surprise here, though I'm not sure what to make of the grey area in the center. I can't say I know Florida that well. It's interesting to note the dark red county on the heat map (which is apparently Orlando? Idk, I thought the county just below it was Orlando County, but upon further investigation I was prob wrong.) It's not showing that badly in the official coronavirus statistics from John Hopkins. 

Does that mean it's facing a bad outbreak, but not testing/reporting? Who knows? The Kinsa heat map showed quite a bit of red in northern Florida for a while, and if I'm remembering it correctly I hadn't seen a corresponding rise in confirmed cases there until recently.

As usual - I'm not an epidemiologist, and there are a lot of unknowns here. Like I said before, I'm just writing my own perspective here.

I have questions, though, and I'd love to have someone look at these sorts of things. Maybe check out that county north of Orlando, for example, and find out if there's an unusual number of fevers for any reason other than COVID-19.

The First Wave

So as I’ve said repeatedly, I am not an epidemiologist. This is just me making my own personal guesses at what may or may not be coming, so take it with a grain of salt.

I guess first thing’s first – everyone is acting like we’re all free and clear. That the ‘first wave’ is over, and we just have to worry about loosening restrictions and creating a second wave. I just… I’m not so sure I believe that.

Consider this screenshot – to capture what I’m seeing right now – from this site:

It’s logarithmic, so it shows more the rate of change than actual progression, but it’s holding fairly steady. Maybe, maybe, a slight downward trend. Then again, we haven’t really ramped up testing… so how many of these new cases are just reflecting our current capacity to test rather than our current number of cases.

Btw, the linear progression looks more like this:

We seem to have some weekly trends – fewer cases on the weekend, a bump when everyone comes back to work, so it’s sometimes nicer to smooth it out with a rolling weekly average:

The downward trend does look a little more clear here, but would I say that the first wave is over?

Not really. These are “new cases per day”, it’s not the accumulating number of cases. We’re still adding a lot of new cases on a daily basis. Heck, we seem to be hitting another 100,000 every three days.

So we’ve slowed the exponential growth, but we’re still having a pretty steady rate of infection. Or rather, our tests are finding that. Who knows what’s happening with the people who aren’t being tested?

And here’s the thing. The United States is large enough that we’re not going to have one story of infection. Many of our states are the size of entire countries, so the story of California or Washington or New York might reflect the story of Italy or France, but the nation as a whole? We’re too big, and the responses have been too varied for that.

I use my own personal city as, idk, sort of a benchmark for this. I’m in Illinois, and Chicago got hit pretty hard.

But I’m downstate from Chicago, and the rest of Illinois is rural farmland with various sized cities and towns. (And I should count St. Louis, I suppose, since it straddles the border with Missouri.)

When our governor called for a lockdown, we hadn’t even seen our first known case of COVID-19.

We now have had 103 cases, 6 of whom are currently hospitalized, and 5 dead.

Our case history looks something like this:

We had a huge spike in confirmed cases around the 1^st of April, though the infection was probably a few weeks before that. If the chart to the right - cases by the day people started showing symptoms - is showing a lag of about a week for the incubation period, then many of the people who created that spike were infected around the 15th of March.

Right when our governor ordered a lockdown.

But here’s the thing, then. Chicago got it’s first reported case at the end of January, so it took what – two months before we started seeing cases here?

It’s spreading, but slowly. Or, at least, it takes a while before people notice there's an outbreak.

From what I know of the small towns around here, there may be a similar lag. Oh, in normal times we prob get people coming in to shop or dine or entertain themselves on a daily basis, but with the lockdown in place we’re probably seeing it happen less often. Someone might come in for a big shopping trip at Sam’s Club or something, and stock up for a month.

So the charts I showed for my town… well, that’s probably comparable to other small cities in states that called for a shelter-in-lace in the middle of April. The ones that didn’t are probably seeing (or would see, if they’re testing) more exponential growth.

I don’t know the impact of our collective decisions to shelter-in-place. It seems like a lot of Americans have voluntarily chosen to do so, even when their governor and/or mayor hasn’t asked them to.

That’s pretty awesome, actually, and keeps the picture I’m painting from being as grim as it could be.

Still, I don’t think we’re finished with the first wave. 

I think it’s ebbing in the major cities (and how much of the slight decline is because New York, the bulk of our cases, is gaining control of their outbreak?), but that same first wave is only just beginning to reach the smaller towns.

I wish our news wasn’t so focused on the coasts. I’ve seen one, maybe two articles talking about exactly this… but everyone else seems to be breathing a sigh of relief, purely based on what? New York’s numbers?

What do I know, though? As I’ve repeatedly said, I’m not an epidemiologist. And even though some states were slow to react, quite a few Americans were staying home on their own.

I just wish we’d seen a more definite decline, rather than a plateau, before people started talking about opening back up.

Social-Distancing vs. Deployments

I saw something a couple of weeks ago that stuck in my mind. A fellow veteran commented that deploying was great practice for quarantine...


So off and on I've thought about that. About the experience of being deployed, and how it compares to (over five weeks) of working from home and social distancing.


There's a lot of truth to that. I remember my first deployment,to FOB Danger near Tikrit. I can remember feeling kind of stir crazy, a few months in. It wasn't very big, and there wasn't a lot to do, and you never really realize how much that matters until you spend months confined to a small area.
My second deployment, as a civilian, was to Camp Slayer. That was a bit easier, in that it was part of the Victory Base Complex, so whenever we started to get stir crazy we could use the team vehicle to drive to one of the other connected facilities. You don't realize how much you obsess over food, until you're in a place where the dining facilities rotate the same dang menu... and you don't have access to a kitchen, and have very limited options for eating out.


Afghanistan was similar, I suppose. Camp Leatherneck was co-located with a British base, so for the sake of variety we'd sometimes head to the British side.


I do attribute my experiences there with making me a bit more introverted, I suppose. I don't know how well you believe in Miles-Briggs personality tests, but at one time I tested as borderline introvert/extrovert. I think it was Camp Slayer, really, where I started leaning more towards introversion. The friends I'd made early in the tour all returned home, one by one, and it didn't seem worth the effort to make new ones. I learned to keep myself pretty well entertained, whether with books or movies or tv shows or whatever.


Mostly books, though.


I've come to like spending time on my own, generally find quite enough to do, and sometimes find that I do need to unwind after too much socializing. (I still seem more social than the introverts further on the scale, though.)

Anyways, I was thinking about the differences between social isolation and deployment, and social isolation is better by far for the following reasons.


I have my own bathroom. I don't have to put on flip flops and walk through gravel to get to a bathroom trailer or shower trailer. (One of those bathroom trailers, btw, was unisex. Which gives me an interesting perspective on this whole transgender thing I guess. Who cares about stupid stuff like that, anyway? It's still a heckuva lot better than using those bags that you place over a toilet stand, and wrap up and throw in a burn pit afterwards.)


I have my own kitchen, too. I can cook whatever I want, if I have the ingredients on hand. Sure, I miss eating out. Ordering delivery or take-out just isn't the same. But those are also options, so there's definitely better eating choices here.


Not only do I have access to all my beloved books, and the ability to order ebooks if I decide my long 'to-read' list isn't cutting it, but I also have a bunch of streaming video options. And better internet.
Oh, and I have my cats and dogs for companionship.


So really, all told - this is much better. I can do this for a looooooooooooong time.


Hope it ends soon, of course. I may be lucky enough to still be working, but I have friends and family who are affected right now... and that's not even going into who might or might not get sick, and might or might not make it.


Then again, I hadn't really realized how stressed I'd been, overseas. Not until months after I came home and started to unwind. I don't want to talk as though I was some sort of front line soldier or anything. Really, it's been so long and I so rarely needed to use any of the basic training I got that I'd probably embarrass myself if I tried. (We all tended to go out and gape at the smoke from VBIEDs and the occasional mortar fire, sort of like how we mid-westerners like to stand on a porch and watch during a tornado warning. Horribly unsafe, but we do.)


And tbh, the stress I felt while job hunting (especially after I graduated a year and a half ago) was bad in a different way. Which is also why I sympathize with everyone who lost their jobs because of this.


I, personally, am in a better position right now... this isn't nearly as stressful as all the things I've experienced before.


It's funny, though. If there's one thing military service teaches you (and there's a lot it does), it's understanding how we react to stress. How different things can seem, based on how much sleep we've had or how much food we've had or what stresses we're dealing with at any particular moment.


How to appreciate the little things, how to keep on going when the future seems big and complicated and uncertain, and know you'll get through it.


One of the hardest things about leaving the service is realizing just how... well, spoiled, so many Americans are. I don't like using that word because of all the connotations there, but there's something different about people who've always known when their next meal was coming, have only been short on sleep if they're cramming for tests or working hard, who generally worry about mundane things like getting the kids somewhere on time and fixing dinner.


Now? Now I think a lot more Americans understand those sorts of things. Which is not something I ever actually wished for, since who would ever wish on anyone the type of hardship that teaches such lessons?

Continued

I think of public, private, and non-profit organizations as a category that covers the bulk of our socio-economic organizations...

And I'm not giving any 'one true way' to organize them, in part because... well.

It's like this. If you keep a 'servant-leadership mentality', or a 'shepherd taking care of their flock' mentality, then your focus on the general welfare of your people will guide you to whatever answers you need. And those answers may change, depending on the time, place, and circumstances.

Although it's quite funny, there's an element of truth to the old SNL skit:

People don't always know what the 'best' way of doing things are. They just know that something isn't working, and they want you to fix it.

That's a strength and a weakness, ofc. All sorts of people are offering their solution to the problem, and some of them are pretty awful as far as solving the problem. Or they come with long term consequences. Whatever.

I think that's part of why history has shown, repeatedly, creative solutions to the problems of the day (which can then play a role in creating the problems of tomorrow, often as not). All our norms and institutions, all the rules and 'proper' way of doing things, can get swept aside in an emergency as people demand 'fix it!'

Whoever rises to power at that time generally has to find some way of tying their reign to the earlier precedents. Hence Augustus calling himself "first among equals" even as he changed Rome entirely. Charles Martel initially served as a 'power behind the throne', didn't claim the throne after the official ruler died (but was pretty much too powerful for anyone else to take over), though he set the foundation for his son and grandson to rule.

Anyways, point of all that was this. Don't get too hung up on what 'should' be done via the private sector, or public sector, or non-profit. If something is an issue, people will scream 'fix it', and maybe (eventually) someone will step up to the plate.

The government ends up taking on a lot of things because when something isn't working, someone generally says "there ought to be a law", and lo and behold a law is passed.

Take OSHA for example. Businesses showed (yet again, and repeatedly) that they cared more about profits than creating a safe and secure working environment for their people. People died, or lost limbs, or eyes, or were poisoned by radiation or black lung or brown lung or any number of ills. So someone said "this isn't right, there ought to be a law", and now we have OSHA.

There are other ways of handling this, ofc. I'd be willing to consider 'cutting the red tape' and simplifying things... but my way would prob be even more harsh.

Basically, I'd say there's just one law. One regulation.

"Provide a safe and secure working environment for your people."

And there would be a website with guidelines on what is considered the industry standard. It could even be run by the private sector, or a non-profit... if they showed they actually cared about employee safety.

But here's the thing... if anyone, any single employee, is hurt or injured on the job because the company didn't create a safe working environment, I would want Every. Single. Person. in that chain of command fired, and the company slapped with a fine so big that it actually hurt. None of this 'slap on the wrist' stuff that they can make up in a few hours of sales. Because here's the thing - if you care that little about your people, you shouldn't be in business.

And if the managers know so little about working conditions that they're unaware of those conditions?

They shouldn't be managers, either.

So no OSHA inspections. No miles and miles of safety regulations to skim through. But if you get it wrong, if you don't bother to look up proper safety guidelines and don't implement them?

You're out of a job, and your company might be out of business, too.

So whatever. Private sector, public sector, non-profit, I don't care. If you're not making sure your company is providing a safe working environment - Fix it.

That's the overarching thing to keep in mind for all my future posts.

Well, that's unexpected

https://apnews.com/4f0a4ca93cc2fee94d386efb13db31a0

A Start

I don't know that there truly is an 'ideal system'. There are systems that prioritize certain things over others, and they'll be better suited to some things and less suited to others.

There are definitely certain touchstones to American life - the American Dream, the Protestant work ethic - but there's also a strong support for local community. For helping those small mom and pop stores, for taking care of our own. (And there's a sense of sadness for how big box stores have pushed out those locally owned businesses, even as everyone still goes to shop there.)

There are people who point out the problems with these, ofc, but I wanted to focus on something else.

Namely - that we've grown so large and populous that it's hard to feel like our federal (and even state) government is truly ours any more. At the local level, sure... it's still "government of the people, by the people, and for the people"... but most of our national figures are too distant for us to truly know, evaluating their performance is time-consuming and difficult, and it's hard to feel like they really represent us.

Which is a problem, because that's part of how government stops being 'what we've decided we want to have happen' and starts becoming 'what that group over there is imposing on us'.

Some of the support for 'small government' is, I think, a reaction to that.

But we do still need government, on some level. Or rather, we could get rid of government... and then decide that we really do need great roads, and interested parties might get together to build a road... and decide on some sort of structure for making decisions on where to build the roads, and how to fund them. And maybe insist on a membership fee, or have some sort of administration to decide on tolls and hire some people to enforce those tolls...

And you've pretty much just reinvented government. You've given it a different name and, perhaps more importantly, you've done it in a way that makes you feel like you have control. Since you voluntarily joined your 'Organization for Highways and Byways', and voluntarily pay the membership fee. Maybe you grouch about some idiot that you think shouldn't be in charge of the organization, or dislike the decision to build a highway in a specific place, but it was still something you've voluntarily agreed to participate in, and you willingly pay your membership dues.

This is, I think, the first and most important point. Government is meant to serve us, and it should help us do what we want it to do. We, as a society, have to decide on what that is. What laws we want it to enforce, what benefits we want it to provide (or not), what budget we want it to have.

It's not the only way of making things happen, of course. Some things can be handled quite well by the private sector, and non-profits can take care of people without any sort of rule or legislation.

We've got a lot of tools in our kit bag here, so I kind of want to discuss the pros and cons of them.

For example:

Non-profits can do great work, however... their aid can be inconsistent (one organization refuses to help homosexuals, for example. Another only serves another segment of society), and people can and do fall through the cracks.

Many of them are also wasteful, spending other people's money on things that don't actually support their stated mission, which means they can donating to them can be more of a vanity act that actually funds con-artists and grifters.

Plus, some of them aren't really effective at what they're trying to do. There's an entire book talking about how aid to Africa often made things worse.

But perhaps the most important issue is that non-profits rarely have the level of resources they need. If we, as a society, want to have non-profits handle all the things we don't want government to do... if we want them to help people get the training they need to find a good job, or help them out during a period of unemployment, or fund the arts, or whatever... then people need to fund them in large enough levels to make a difference. If you don't want your tax dollars going to a government food stamp program, then you either are okay with people starving or you'd better step up to the plate.

Apparently that's part of why many religious organizations wanted the government to help during the Great Depression. The need was so great that they had no chance of keeping up with it.

That doesn't mean that government is always the right answer, btw. When you have the power to give, you also have the power to take away, and you have to think carefully about how that could be abused. Consider, if you will, the complaints that the federal government is playing games with the ventilators and PPE everyone needs during this pandemic. That governors who flatter the President enough (and are generally of the same party) tend to get more of their requests filled, and the ones who don't are left short-handed.

Do you really want the government to be able to deny you ventilators, or PPE, or food stamps, or whatever... because someone in charge has decided that certain people don't deserve it? Maybe they think homosexuals don't, or Christians don't. Or people who use drugs. Or people who speak out against the Republican party. Or people who don't kowtow enough...

In some ways, having the government provide grants and aid to non-profits is a fairly clever way of diffusing that power. It helps given non-profits the resources they were lacking, while preventing the government from having as much direct control over who gets the aid and who doesn't. Of course, there's still problems with coordination, keeping people from slipping through the cracks, and it still gives some of the non-profits the exact same potential for abuse that the government had. It's just that if there are multiple non-profits serving a community, the chances are better that someone denied aid at one can find help at another.

You can do the same sort of analysis for the private sector. Corporate philanthropy is great and all, and I do wish they weren't so short-sightedly focused on stock prices and other things, but when companies start getting into housing, or transportation, there's great potential for abuse. Like the company towns of old - do you really want to give businesses that level of power over you?

Most of this post may sound rather pessimistic, at first. I'm not trying to say that they're all bad options, so much as pointing out things to consider when proposing alternatives.

I think there are alternatives, plenty of them. We just have to be aware of some of the complexities involved, and things to look out for when designing them.

What it Is - What it Ain't.

Another week of quarantine - I think it's been five weeks now since I started working from home.

I thought about writing, yet again, about some of the issues with things as they currently are, but I think I've written plenty on that. I want to play around with ideas on what could be.

A lot of this is tied up with values, of course. And priorities. What is the ideal system? What do we owe each other? Lots of metaphysical questions like that. But I'll skip over the underlying assumptions, for the most part.

Or rather I'll drastically oversimplify things by repeating what I'd said in an earlier post - we should have a system that enables people to become their best self.

Our Founding Fathers had this idea that the ideal system was to have a lot of self-sufficient people. They focused on small family farms, ofc. Part of the thinking behind the Louisiana Purchase was to help ensure our population was primarily small farmers for another generation or so (and they wanted an estate tax to help prevent the growth of an aristocracy)... but most people in the States are no longer farmers. I suppose the modern equivalent, in terms of independence and self-sufficiency, are the small business owners (i.e. 'mom and pop stores'), free-lancers, and self-employed.

More and more of us are, well... the term 'wage-slave' may be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

This has consequences.

Aside from the challenges of having a true 'marketplace of ideas' when so many people are afraid of speaking out for fear of losing their jobs, there are also all the problems people absolutely hate about corporate culture.

That is to say - most of us constantly have to deal with large, impersonal, bureaucratic organizations that make us feel like we're not valued as a person. As an individual. Every time we get told that something is 'company policy', no matter how irrelevant it is to the circumstances at hand, it gets frustrating. Companies like to talk as though we're all valued employees, that they have these great programs for finding and keeping talent...

But overall, the message is that we're all just unwanted expenses. Companies are more concerned with the bottom line, after all, and people are one of the biggest expenses of all.

We've had decades, honestly, of management reducing the workforce, and piling on more and more work on the few they've retained, and the ones who remain are often too afraid of losing their healthcare and reliable income to really protest much. (That, and our powers-that-be have done a helluva job of breaking unions and so on and so forth.)

Right now, I'm not writing all that as an attempt to persuade those powers-that-be that they're wrong. I don't know how to convince the people benefiting from the current system that it actually sucks.

It's just... I understand why so many people want to find someone willing and able to fight for them. It's part of why so many young people found Bernie appealing. It's also part of why Trump's persona appealed (though I am constantly amazed at how many people fail to notice that he never delivers on that promise.)

There's a sense, as well, that our media is compromised. They're more concerned with keeping access than holding anyone accountable, too buddy-buddy with the same uncaring powers-that-be that benefit so disproportionately from our current system, so they're part of the system (and problem), too.

Which, again, I generally understand and agree with. And yet they still at least *try* to verify information their sources give them, and fact check... so they're far better than unfounded rumors and conspiracy theories that have absolutely no basis in reality. (I'll take the mainstream media over OANN any day.)

All of this is, like I said, superficial. I'm not talking about deliberate disinformation campaigns, and I'm glossing over a lot.

If you're happy with the system as is, if you don't see the problems with a Senator who believes that the coronavirus is bad enough to sell a large quantity of stock... but isn't willing to speak out publicly, and actually try to do something about it... I don't know what to tell you.

Tucker Carlson has gone back to being the wrong-headed pundit we all know, but at least he cared enough about American lives to speak up to Trump. It's sad that more Republicans didn't do likewise.

So enough of all that. You either believe already, or don't. Whatever.

I want to play around with what some of the other possibilities out there.

Update, Terrorism vs Insurgency, and Other Topics

California, Washington, and Oregon have apparently announced a pact, and the eastern states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are creating a regional working group to help coordinate their efforts against COVID-19.

Which is not unreasonable. (This, btw, is why I'm skeptical about efforts to get rid of government. You might get rid of whatever you currently call government, but the need for coordination/administration etc generally doesn't go away, and will take on the same form, albeit under a different name. Maybe you have a private 'mutual aid organization', which you all pay some membership fee to. Whether you call it 'mutual aid' or 'government', a 'membership fee' or 'taxes' it all tends to act the same in the end. But that's for a later discussion.)

But it sets the stage for quite an intense and uncertain future, because Trump (who apparently is now claiming he has 'absolute authority', after declaring "I don't take responsibility at all", and at other times claiming that the federal goverment was just a stopgap to states) is probably not going to take that too well.

Weird, that you can't have it both ways, isn't it? You can't neglect to do your job and then get upset when other people step in to fill the gaps.

But this is Trump, and every time he's been faced with a challenge he doubles down. He's petty and vindictive, and I have no idea what sort of crazy response he'll come up with, but I'm sure it'll be a doozy.

Right now... this has the potential to be a nothingburger, or to be a Very. Big. Deal. Indeed.

I'm not sure which way it'll go, though.

So anyways, here's the thing. The conversation I want to have has more to do with which sorts of things we would want, at what level. Like... public goods vs privatization, county vs. state. vs. federal. That sort of thing. My overall principle is to 'support the lowest level possible' and enable them to come up with their own solutions, but there's a heckuva lot of room to play around in that... and there are reasonable arguments to be made for placing certain things at a national level. (For example - as mobile as Americans can be, it makes sense to have some consistent education standards so that a kid transferring from Arizona to Connecticut - or vice versa - won't be on a completely different academic level.)

But I've got plenty of time to dig into that. Before doing so, I wanted to talk a little bit more about something else.

It's a mishmash of things I've come across over the years, and I'm not going to try and look up every little reference, so please excuse any mistakes.

Almost a decade ago, we were asked "what is the difference between terrorism and an insurgency."

It's a complicated question, hinging on how you define terrorists and insurgents, and I will leave aside that terrorism is a strategy or a tactic that may or may not be used by an insurgency, so it's not exactly a fair comparison. Here goes.

When you have a society, there are many decisions made... about who gets what. How resources are allocated, what laws are passed, and so on and so forth.

And there are always people who don't get what they want.

In a free marketplace of ideas, and a democracy, they can try to work within the system to make the changes they want. They can create a platform, run candidates, try to drum up support (and funding)...

But some ideas don't really catch on. (And - in systems that have ossified too much, or are too autocratic, the system may not be capable of changing, either.)

If this represents a genuine grievance, more and more people may join in... and an insurgency can grow. (In a democracy, it would show in candidates running on certain platforms, winning primaries and political positions at the expense of the establishment candidates. In the absence of a legitimate way of doing this within the system, if the issue is severe enough you may see an insurgency... a competing force for the resources of a government. They won't just be trying to fund military forces, they'll also be taking taxes from areas they control, and trying to take care of the people under their jurisdiction. Just like a government would.)

Terrorism... terrorism starts because their ideas weren't popular enough to catch on. They don't have the numbers. Don't have the support.

So they are trying to build support beyond what they otherwise would have. By doing attention-grabbing attacks, to draw in supporters who may otherwise not know they exist.

And by doing horrific attacks, so that when the government overreacts (and rounds up innocent people in a dragnet operation to capture the guilty), people who were perfectly content to go about their business realize that they can't afford to... and get radicalized, and (they hope) turn to the terrorists.

If they do build that level of support, they can become an insurgency... so there's a lot of crossover. The line between the two isn't always clear (and, well... you can have an insurgency without terrorist tactics, so it's not like this is 'the one and only path' a movement can take. Heck, there are also options for non-violent tactics, or insurgency targeting 'legimate' targets like government offices and military personnel, rather than civilians.)

What I wanted to talk about, though, was about the mindset leading towards terrorism. Because that is also a choice, and it's almost always tied to arrogance.

That is, in a free marketplace some ideas are just not going to catch on. Certain Christians believe that dancing is bad - had a whole movie on that - and yet dancing is still pretty popular, and it's unlikely that there would ever be enough popular support to ban it. Not on a large scale, at least.

But the people who believe this are not going to say "the vast majority of people don't agree with us, so maybe we're wrong."

Nope. They truly believe, in their heart of hearts, that they're in the right. And so they are faced with a choice - privately live their beliefs, and accept that the rest of society will never share them...

Or try to change society. Mayhap even try to force society to do 'the right thing', where 'the right thing' is 'that which I'm absolutely certain I know is best for you.'

Arrogance.

Compulsion. I do think that the Koran had that right, btw - that "there is no compulsion in religion."

If there is a God, I'm fairly sure He (or She) is more offended by attempts to compel people into doing what you think is best, then He is by people doing whatever it is in the first place.

But I digress.

The point is, there's a choice. A point where people either accept that they'll always be some weird minority (of which we have plenty. Amish that drive horses and buggies. Hasidic Jews with their particular styles of dress. Christians who decide to ban dance in their local city or county. Each able to live how they think is best, in their private life... but not trying to impose those choices on the rest of society), or decide that they're right and everyone else is wrong.

And when they - arrogantly - decide the latter, they have to explain away why they're not succeeding like they 'should'. And they'll argue that it's because their opponents are cheating, or lying, or whatever it takes to show that they're right and would win in any reasonably fair contest.

And so it's easy to start justifying doing whatever it takes to put their beliefs in practice.

Deliberately, knowingly, lying? Justified, if it helps defeat those nasty fill-in-the-blank, who have blocked you and opposed you and prevented you from building that perfect world you dream of.

There was a book, some while back, talking about the Wisdom of Crowds. About how, collectively, we can be wiser than we are individually. I think it's somewhat true, with caveats. Further studies showed how people could mess with that 'wisdom of crowds'. Could deliberately try to feed it false information, or skew things in one way or another.

Some do it just because it's fun to mess with people, ofc. Others do it... well, because they have a pre-determined answer that they're trying to force the crowd to choice.

Again, arrogance.

I went into all that because most of what I want to get into... well, it presupposes that fair and open marketplace of ideas, which I think tends to be allow the best ideas to come forth.

But we do need to be aware of the types of things that undermine it.

Of attempts, whether it's terrorism, disinformation, lying, bribing, blackmailing - anything other than a open and honest debate, that is used to arrogantly push a certain answer on the rest of us.

To use my previous pizza analogy, it's that one person who his absolutely certain their favorite pizza choice is the only possible pizza choice, and is willing to do whatever it takes to force that decision on everyone. 

Update, and More on Decision Making

News has been - mixed.

Still an awful lot of illness and death, though it does appear that enough of us have been staying home to help flatten the curve. I really like the graphics on this site, as I can play around with linear vs. logarithmic, as well as looking at the nation as a whole, specific states, and rates as adjusted to the population. (Speaking of, New York sucks up most of the attention - for good reason - and a bit on Louisiana, New Jersey, and follow up to Washington and California, but I don't seem to hear much about states like Connecticut or Massachusetts? Which seems to be getting hit rather hard for the size of their population?)

Anyways, yes... the logarithmic graphs do show that the rate of growth in the US is slowing. So of course we already have people who want to say it's all over, and asking when we can open back up.

Going back to the 'learning from other people's experience' bit I'd mentioned in a previous post, it looks like every state that starts relaxing their countermeasures has immediately had to tighten them back up. That is, if it's not accompanied by mass testing in order to know which areas are safe to ease restrictions on.

Basically, I won't believe it's time to open back up  until a) we have a vaccine or effective medical treatment b) enough people have recovered from the virus to give us herd immunity or c) we have widespread and easily accessible testing to catch any outbreaks and isolate them before they spread any further.

None of which seems to be happening yet, so whatever.

I do find it amusing, though, how state governors are stepping up to the plate and making it crystal clear that the presidency isn't actually as powerful as we make it out to be. I mean, Trump talks about ordering the country to open back up... but he only really ordered it to (partially) shut down after most of the governors had already done so. I guess he's doing a great job of shrinking the federal government and turning the clamor for states' rights into a real possibility. I just never expected that from an administration that has shown such authoritarian tendencies. I feel like there's a lesson there, somewhere? Something about incompetence empowering anyone willing to step up to the plate?

I don't know, we'll probably be years sorting out all the consequences of these last few months... and the next few, as well.

Anyways, I did want to add a little bit more to my analogy yesterday... on stakeholders, and pizza choices, and decision making.

I deliberately used the term 'stakeholders'. It came from a book on managing healthcare organizations that we used in school a decade ago, and I thought the material was applicable to all sorts of organizations. (That's the same one that talked about the problems with creating a blame-based culture, and how removing blame made it easier to fix problems. Like changing the coloring and/or size of pills so that it's harder to mix them up and give the wrong dose.) The book discussed how a good quality organization would take into account the needs of all the stakeholders - doctors, nurses, administrators, insurance companies, and of course patients and the medical needs of the community at large.

This stakeholder concept is important, I think. To bring it back to my pizza ordering analogy - every member of the group has a stake in the decision, and should be treated accordingly.

I consider certain strategies threatening to the whole, because they undermine that decision making process.

To continue with my pizza analogy, it's like if the majority of the group decided to 'screw the vegetarian, they can either eat what we like or starve' and insist on getting the meat lovers and supreme pizzas.

Or if one person said "Pepperoni is by far the superior pizza, you all are wrong. I'm going to make sure the order is pepperoni, because I know what's best."

It's not so much the policies or desires themselves, you see. It's the lack of empathy, the willingness to accept that anyone else's wishes matter. And it's the arrogance.

There are numerous examples, from both parties, but the most recent ones that spring to mind were the Republican attempt to create a coronavirus relief bill that did nothing to people who didn't pay any taxes. That is, people living off Social Security, disability, or just plain didn't earn enough to pay taxes that year - like college students - would get nothing.

I have heard people claim over the years that Republicans think the poor are lazy, and other such things, and I had sort of dismissed it as hyperpartisan hate. Or rather, I'm sure there are some isolated rich people who live in so much of a bubble that they honestly believe that, but I had thought it was just a small and isolated fraction and that the people forming policy would know better.

If there is nothing else the last few years have proven to me, it's that our system is far more fragile (and there is far greater rot) than I ever had believed.

It's not just about the bill itself, you see. It's that in the midst of the global pandemic they were seriously trying to save comparative pennies (when you consider how much they were willing to give to corporations and big business) by stiffing the least among us. Like they don't have any empathy at all, don't even see these people as human.

"Whatever you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me".

I guess the Republicans would stiff Jesus, too.

The second one? The second one was when the North Carolina Republicans seriously tried passing legislation on 9/11 while the Democrats were out. I mean, it's not just the short-sightedness of the strategy...

It's that when you get so focused on defeating the 'other', when you start demonizing Democrats or Republicans and acting as though they are somehow unAmerican, you are forgetting that at least a third of your fellow citizens agree with and chose to elect these guys.

Like, there are clearly politicians and policies I don't agree with, and I definitely think some of them are BS-ing and conning their constituents, but I acknowledge that there are many Americans who see something worth voting for... and that we have to take their concerns seriously, and address them.

Their concerns may not be what the politicians claim they are, of course. I don't think Trump, for instance, would have gotten the support he had if the Democrats and Republicans hadn't shown they were in the pockets of our growing oligarchy, but that's a whole different story. The point is that catering to one third of the American population, and acting like another third is somehow the devil... is NOT a good thing for the free marketplace of ideas, or negotiating amongst stakeholders, or much of anything beyond the short term satisfaction of riling up your base and scoring a few cheap victories.

Maybe you get the sausage pizza of your dreams, but the cost and long term consequences are too high.

Some Thoughts of a Socio-Economic Nature

The news is, yet again, pretty darn awful. Nothing dramatic enough, I suppose, but it also means the same old tired squabbling on social media. (Wasn't there some sort of quote, talking about how some people are able to learn from other people's experience, and others just have to experience it for themselves? I'm not sure how much of it is that, and how much of it is good old fashioned denial, but there are a lot of people that still, still, seem to think we're all overreacting.)

Anyways, I figured I'd write a bit more about my earlier topic, and I figured I'd start with something to show just how complicated all of this.

Someone once discussed how (lack of) access to credit and loans and things can have a negative impact on people trying to get out of poverty. Just think of how bad black communities were hurt when banks flat out refused to provide any mortgages to their communities, and how hard it made it to buy or maintain a home.

So lending can be important, and people don't want to lend you their money if they're not going to make a profit on it... so we have calculations of 'risk', and it effects the interest rate that you get. High risk people get higher interest rates, so that the people willing to lend them money actually get some sort of benefit out of doing so.

That's all pretty standard economics/finance, whatever. And since access to credit is so important, for a variety of reasons, this can be a good thing.

But there's a flip side to this. Consequences that ultimately make this a less palatable solution. Because the result of that policy is that someone living in poverty, with low credit, will often have far higher bills than someone who can easily afford it.

For example, I know someone who bought a used car. One worth far less than my brand new (at the time) Ford Escape... but because of her credit history, the interest rate was enough to make her car payment almost the same as mine. And she was working two or three jobs just to make ends meet, and struggling to get by.

Oh, and since her car was used, it was less reliable. Which meant she also had to worry about whether an issue was covered by warranty, and getting it to the shop, and possibly not being able to make it in to work and keep those two or three jobs. All while paying almost as much as I was.

There's a wide swath of research that talks about similar problems. How someone who is homeless, for example, might wind up staying at a hotel for a week or so... which ends up costing them even more than rent or a mortgage.

If we think about it from a capitalist point of view - well, they generally don't talk about in terms of human cost, do they? Still, it doesn't change the major point, which is that if you try forcing people to limit the interest rate to something 'reasonable' one side effect will be that credit will dry up entirely for those who are considered the most risky.

I'm not throwing all this out there to provide an answer, yet. I wanted to show how complicated each and every issue can be, and that there are valid points to be made for various different perspectives.

Oh, and btw, I find it interesting that usury was a big thing in the Bible, one that most Christians really ought to care about, and yet nobody ever really talks about it anymore. Just further proof of how far the most politically active have fallen from the core of the New Testament (i.e. social justice, helping the poor and needy, etc).

This is not me advocating to reinstate laws against usury - multiple religions have banned it, and yet it somehow keeps happening in some form or fashion. Probably for the economic reasons I layed out earlier.

I lay the problem out there like that, because this is pretty typical of any challenging issue. There are multiple perspectives, multiple stakeholders... And also multiple potential answers. Each with varying strengths and weaknesses.

It's part of why I focus so much on decision making, and the processes we use in order to resolve issues.

It's a bit like, well... ordering a pizza for a group of friends. One person is vegetarian, one prefers meat lovers, another likes Hawaiian pizza, and a fourth prefers a supreme. Or sausage and mushrooms. Whatever.

Each group will negotiate their pizza order differently, and come up with different solutions. Maybe they order two or three smaller pizzas, maybe the person who prefers a supreme isn't that attached to their choice, and is okay with the meat lover pizza. Maybe they get one large pizza, and make half of it cheese and half meat lover.

What's decided on tends to depend on a variety of factors - how much money people are willing to spend, how attached they are to their preferences, and so on and so forth.

I mostly went with the 'nice' options, where this group of friends is trying to find a solution everyone can accept. Which means the negotiating process can take a ridiculously long time, and people may not get things exactly the way they want, but in general everyone's preferences are taken into account. 

You could also have someone say "I'm paying for it, so we're getting what I want. You can take it or leave it."  You can also have one (or two or three people) dominate the decision and refuse to accommodate the others. Maybe they decide to get half Hawaiian and half meat lover's, and screw the vegetarian.

To bring this back to loans, interest rates and usury... you can have people say "it's my money, I'll loan it to who I want, and if you put a cap on the interest rate I just find another way to make a profit off my capital." or you can have others say "making people who are already struggling pay ridiculously large interest rates is wrong, we don't care about your side of things. We're making it illegal to charge more than 10% interest."

Either way, it doesn't really fix the problem. Just means one side or the other is able to dominate the debate, and push the option of their choice.

I suppose this is where I should throw out some brilliant answer that gives the best of both worlds, but again... I'm writing more about the process. The answer can be different for different places, it's the process that really matters.

I'd rather see about facilitating discussions between those stakeholders, and various levels of community, so they can find their own answer. Maybe the residents of one city refuse to cap the interest rates, but decide to come up with their own non-profit program to help those with poor credit. Or maybe they do cap the interest rate, but offer some sort of incentive to lenders in their community to make up for it.

Empower the lowest level possible to come up with their solution.

These solutions, and discussions, can honestly be any mix of public, business, and charity... the point is that the community as a whole comes together to craft their own.

There's a lot more to it than that, but I've written enough for one night. Stay safe, and stay home as much as possible!

Pandemic Cooking

Since I pretty much live by myself, cooking...

Well, normally I might make something special on the weekend, that lasts well as leftovers and I can eat over the next week. Since my work office is next to a park, I generally brought something I could grab and go (and play pokemon during my lunch break. Except Friday, when I went out for lunch with some of my coworkers). And dinner was thus either the leftovers from whatever I made on the weekend, or something quick and easy I could alternate with it. See - here's the thing. When you live alone, well. It's a lot of work (and dishes) to make food for just one meal, so I'm more likely to cook a lot... but I can't eat all of that, so I tend to have leftovers. So I mostly try to pick foods that do well as leftovers. Like chili, which tends to get better as the flavors meld. 

Now, because of the pandemic, I'm home all day. I had seen posts discussing homemade sourdough bread, and initially resisted the idea of making my own, but the more I kept seeing the topic the more it sounded like a good idea. I didn't have any yeast (I think. I might, but I couldn't find it when I checked, so it might just be hidden away somewhere. Probably got old and bad by now, too) and the store was all out, but no worries! The internet shows you how to start your own. I happened to have a small thing of raisins, so I just had to get them wet and add some flour and patiently wait a day or two and voila! Yeasty bread starter.

I had been worried the first day, 'cause it clearly wasn't acting like it had any active yeast in it. Looked more like a flour paste, without any of the rising or bubbles it's supposed to have. But later on the second day I could definitely see the yeast in action. I went ahead and made some bread (not sourdough - sourdough has to be fed and maintained for a while, to get all the flavorful soury yeasts more time to produce), and put the rest of it in the fridge to slow the growth. I can only eat so much bread at a time, and one loaf was going to be plenty. I'll bring out the refrigerated one and start another round when I'm ready.

Bread was tasty, and turned out pretty good. Not perfect, but good.

Anyways, I normally do a weekly grocery trip, mostly for the fresh fruits and veggies since they just don't last all that long. Or, these days, I do a weekly order for delivery...

But I decided not to do that this week. It feels like this is a good week to take advantage of the stuff I already had, you know?

It's kind of interesting trying to figure out what to make with what I already have on hand... normally when I do decide on something big, I'll run out to the store to get whatever I don't normally stock, and so there's things that have been on my shelf or in my freezer for quite a while.

Like, this weekend I decided to make a chicken broccoli macaroni bake, and use up the half a box of macaroni. It turned out pretty nice, though I made two pans and froze the second one for later. It also makes for something quick and easy I can heat up for lunch, though I don't really need anything 'quick' when I'm just chilling at home, I guess.

Anyways, I'd also had some ground beef and I was trying to figure out  what to make with it. I wasn't feeling any of the more standard dishes... the chicken bake had enough pasta in it already, I didn't want to make more. I had debated making a dirty rice of some sort, but really that'd be better with fresh bell peppers and onions or something, and I didn't have it on hand.

But while looking at the rice options, I noticed an almost empty box of barley, and it had a nice recipe on the back for a beef and barley soup. I didn't follow the instructions exactly, of course, but I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. :) I had some beef broth, a bag of frozen carrot slices, half a bag of frozen spinach, diced tomatoes, some onion, and various spices and seasonings. All in all, worked out well.

Finished off the last bit of my homemade bread, too. Maybe I'll start prepping another batch this weekend, depending on the weather - it's always nicer to bake when it's cool out. Seems silly to bake in the summer. Having the oven heat up the house when you're running the air conditioner is a bit counterproductive.

As for the news - well, it's all still pretty awful, though there are many people who still refuse to believe it. I don't know, I find myself second guessing myself and hoping they're right.

Like that stupid hydroxychloroquine the president keeps pushing. The science behind it seems mixed, with some case studies showing no real effect, and others reporting that it helps. I'd prefer to leave it up to the scientists, of course, but I get that people are worried and desperate and really want to have some sort of hope.

It just seems all too typical, though, that this medicine can have some serious side effects (heart and eyesight), and pushing it when there are other promising treatments will divert resources from those other options, and I find myself hoping that Trump is lucky enough to be right about it... because the idea that people who need the medicine for things like lupus might suffer, and at least a few people will suffer those side effects out of desperation, all for a treatment that doesn't actually work and takes up resources that could have been used to find something else, faster... is just too awful to bear.

There's trying to bring hope, and then there's totally bullshitting people. I have my suspicions about what is what, but right now everything is a mess of information and misinformation. I guess I can't blame those who want to believe there's a treatment, I just hope it's more effective than that case study indicated.

Some Thoughts On, For Lack of a Better Term, Chibitinaism.

I posted a while back that I thought there were more option than just capitalism or communism. I don't like people narrowing our options down to two like that, but at the time I didn't really explore the idea any further.

I recently thought about it again, oddly enough because of some Twitter discussions that were inspired by the recent request for COBOL programmers in New Jersey.

For those who choose not to click on the link - COBOL is a 60 year old programming language that almost nobody programs in any more. The ones who did have long since retired, and we're all using newer languages. But (for those unaware of how tech operates), there is a lot of legacy code that was written in COBOL, and never changed. Mostly because the bugs have been worked out, it's reliable, and it's pretty expensive to rewrite working programs in another language.

There are more problems than that, ofc, but this popped up in the news because of the pandemic. Or rather, because the record demands being placed on New Jersey services are stretching the capabilities of their old systems to the limit, and they need people who can help modify those systems.

In COBOL.

This twitter thread has some excellent discussion on the pros and cons of modifying vs. rewriting such legacy systems, and I thought many of the same factors apply to changing our socioeconomic systems.

That is, a book I read some time ago talked about the attempt to design a great new city - Brasilia - and the challenges that came with it, and I think some of the same issues apply. You could possibly make a similar argument for China's Cultural Revolution, or Russia's attempts to change the peasant system.

I'd recommend reading the twitter thread yourself, but I'll give the gist of it here - old systems may look confusing and outdated, but that's in part because of the way they grew and adapted to fix problems you probably never even heard of. Remaking it from scratch takes significant time and effort, and (perhaps more importantly) you often see the same bugs that were fixed in the old and messy code reappear. In other words, your new, cleaner, more modern code tends to be more buggy and less reliable.

I linked the discussion because this is not all in black and white. There are times where it might be better to throw out the old and start all over, especially since there may be limitations built into the old code (due to the constraints on technology at the time) that might be taken care of in the rewrite. Plus, well... as New Jersey's request for COBOL programmers shows, there's a very real risk that you will lose everyone who understands the original code... and that can make it very hard to maintain or update the system.

Since I brought technology into this, I'll also mention some of our current trends. Namely, making things more modular. It makes it easier to fix things behind the scenes without having to change your application in twenty different places. Or you can write your code in whatever language you want, and still have it communicate with parts of the application that were written in something entirely different. (It makes for a very confusing and complicated place, one I'm only just beginning to get a grasp of, but even though it's a real pain to deal with I get why we're going in that direction.)

So where am I going with all this?

As current events show, there are some serious issues with our current system. Or, to use a more vernacular phrase, "We got problems."

There are some people who want to just throw it all out and start over. There are others who hope to modify or tinker with the existing system (though many have very different ideas of what to modify, and where, and how.) We have some people arguing that the pandemic proves we need Medicare For All, and there are others who are taking the chance to cut payroll taxes (and maybe, depending on the details, in an underhanded way try to stop social security and medicare).

I lean towards the 'try to modify the existing legacy systems', which is part of why if the Republican party hadn't proven how much they've lost all their moral bearings in the past couple of years I might lean more towards being a conservative, but I also see the burden of trying to work within existing structures.

They do rather limit what you can do, after all, and make it harder to get creative.

So I figure I'll post some things, maybe start off a series, discussing my thoughts on the topic. And although I am most definitely NOT saying we should throw it all out and start over, I think it's useful to try and envision what we'd create if we could do that.

It gives me something to work towards, some idea of what changes would need to happen in order to get from here to there.

Update

It's a nice, sunny spring day. People are mowing their yards, like they often do as rain and warmer weather makes the grass grow like crazy.

It all seems so... Normal. 

And yet we now have over 300,000 confirmed cases. 

It feels like it was just this week when I watched us reach 200,000. 120k, 140k, 160k, 180k... 200k not that long ago. And now another 100,000, just like that. 

What a crazy time. The normalcy, in stark contrast to the news. 

Coronavirus, Science, and Faith

Someone on social media referred to the anecdote of a man who refused life-saving assistance (a longer version here), claiming that God will save him, only to die.... and when he got to heaven and asked God why He didn't save him, God said "I sent you two boats and a helicopter, what more did you expect?" 

It was funny, though, because the person telling the story clearly thought it took place during Hurricane Katrina... and I know I've heard the anecdote long before that.

I was thinking of this, and the Battle of Hattin, which I've talked about before. I wanted to add a little bit of something new this time, though, so here goes:

Doubting Thomas is a figure in the Bible who refused to believe that Jesus was resurrected until he saw Jesus for himself, and was able to touch him (and his wounds). Growing up Catholic, well...

I always understood the implication of "don't be a Doubting Thomas. Don't insist on proof for your faith." After all, blessed are they who have not seen (for themselves) and still believe.

But I was thinking about it, I don't know, some months or a year ago?, and there's a very different lesson you can take from the story. 

Even though Jesus said 'blessed are they who have not seen', he also said that Thomas was blessed. 

That is to say, Jesus answered Thomas's skepticism, was okay with having to prove himself. It wasn't like he said Thomas was going to be cast into the fires of hell for doubting. No.

Thomas was also blessed. 

Sure, I think we generally took the implication that people who didn't require proof were more blessed... but is being blessed a matter of degree? Or is it binary? You're either blessed or you aren't, right? Or do the non-doubters somehow get more... I dunno... the equivalent of a bigger house in heaven.

And really, when you look back on the Bible, you see similar responses throughout. Sara laughed at the thought that she'd get pregnant, and God did not smite her for her temerity.

More problematic was the story of Zechariah, who doubted he and his wife could bear a child, and was struck dumb until the birth as proof. Like - was that punishment for doubting? Or the sign he asked for?

Anyways, I bring all that up because that mentality is, I think, at the heart of the evangelical willingness to continue acting in risky ways even if it means catching COVID-19.

It's sort of this 'God will protect me, I will not doubt Him, and believing in science and expecting proof shows lack of faith' mentality, which comes (I think) with a certain level of arrogance. Well, that and other things. Like the story I opened with, of the man who died in a flood, they are willfully ignoring the current equivalent of rescue boats and helicopters. Trusting in some sort of divine miracle to rescue them from their own actions.

Like the Battle of Hatin shows, I don't think God saves us from our own stupidity. I mean, He gave us brains for a reason, gave us the ability to plan and think... and if we go ignoring basic things (like making sure we have adequate water before fighting in the middle of a desert), He's not going to step in and save us. 

The sad thing is, there is a large part of our population that really does seem to expect that sort of thing. And they'll go to church on Sunday, and particularly Easter Sunday next week, and someone attending will probably have COVID-19, and will probably spread it to other attendees, and it'll be just like that choir in Washington but on a much larger scale.

It is completely predictable, entirely avoidable, and will probably happen anyway.

More Coronavirus Guesswork

As I said before, you really ought to talk to an epidemiologist about what to expect now…

But since I can’t help thinking about the possibilities myself, I’ll just go ahead and lay out some of my guesses here.

 

The first thing to note is this – we have no idea what the scope of the problem is, largely because we haven’t been testing nearly enough.  As South Korea has shown, a large group of carriers don’t show any symptoms at all, so they can spread COVID-19 without being aware that they’re doing so.

If we had locked down the relevant states as soon as they’d had a case of ‘community spread’, and then tested the s*** out of everybody, we might have been able to get ahead of the transmission chain (once we’d lost track of it enough to get community spread in the first place), and perhaps could have limited where we needed to shelter in place.

But that ship has sailed, it’s water under the bridge, <insert cliché making the point that it’s got nothing to do with today’s problems. Mostly because it has now spread far enough and wide enough that there’s almost no hope of limiting it to a few ‘known hotspots’>

We have no idea of the scope of the problem.

However… There are ways of trying to get an estimate of it. In particular, if the mortality rate is actually fairly consistent (taking into account demographics like age and obesity, as well as increased mortality when hospitals are overwhelmed) then we can make a few educated assumptions.

Namely that South Korea, which did test the s*** out of everyone, has the most reliable data. That is, if their mortality rate is .6 or .7%, then you can argue that most other nations have a similar rate… and it only looks higher because we’re not testing enough to catch everyone. (That’s why I used their rates in my best of the worst case scenario earlier).  It’s not an exact measurement, of course, for all the reasons I listed above, and more. That is, in addition to demographic differences and healthcare resource availability, some people may be dying of the coronavirus without being counted. It’s just designated ‘pneumonia’, or ‘flu’.

Still, I’m just running the numbers to get some sense of scale, not to make a 100% accurate prediction. So let’s roll with it…

 

Currently, as of 2 Apr 2010, we have about 5000 deaths from COVID-19. If we take South Korea’s rate of .6%, then we can calculate how many people are likely to be infected:

 

If 5000/x = .006, then 5000/.006 = x, which is ~833,333 people. (It’s math. You can also say 5000/x = 6/1000; so 5000*1000 = 6x, so 5,000,000 = 6x, so 5,000,000/6 = x… all of which still comes to 833,333 people.)

 

In other words, we probably have around 800 thousand people who have been infected with COVID-19, even though we’ve only tested enough to confirm 215,000 of them.

 

The other thing worth noting, is that if it really takes around two weeks for people to show symptoms, then what this really is saying is that two weeks ago we had 800,000 people infected with COVID-19. There’s various discussions on what the rate of infection is, and when we double, but some of that is also tied in with the utter lack of testing, and the growth in positive cases as we’ve started rolling out more tests, so who the heck really knows? Let’s just say, for the sake of assumption, that the rate of infection normally doubles every week. The confirmed cases are more like doubling every two or three days, but that could be because of all the issues I listed. In the interests of another best/worse type scenario, I’ll just go with ‘doubles every week’.

 

That means we could actually have 1.6 million or even 3.2 million people who have been infected already.

 

Now, this is where the guesswork really comes in to play. Because of course most of the cases started at places where we have travelers from other infected areas (airports, seaports… and it’s no surprise that most of the cases started it places like Washington state, California, New York… and Chicago.)

 

But our first case of confirmed ‘community spread’ came around Feb 26^th, over a month ago.

 

So where are those 1.6 million or so infected people? By now, pretty much everywhere.

 

Oh, it’s probably still primarily in urban areas. But I live in a town of around 230,000 people and as of today we have 38 confirmed cases. Granted, we’re a university town that probably has quite a bit of direct travel to Chicago (and overseas), so maybe that’s not much of a surprise? We’re probably a couple of weeks behind Chicago in terms of the timeline, and thanks to our governor and mayor we enacted countermeasures early enough that I’m hopeful it won’t get too bad.

 

Because you have to figure that all the nearby, more rural, smaller towns? There’s probably people from there that come in to the ‘big city’ for one reason or another. And they definitely have a better chance of NOT catching COVID-19 now that we’re limiting how much we’re out and about.

 

Again, I don’t have any real numbers on how fast this thing spreads. You def. want to talk to a professional on that. But it makes sense to me that we would see spread from areas (like Seattle, or Chicago) out into the smaller towns, and eventually even into places like North Judson, Indiana (which has all of 1,739 people.) We’ve had a month of community spread, so whether it’s already done that or not depends on all the various factors I keep saying you should talk to an expert on.

 

What we can say for sure is that the actions we all, as well as our state governors have (or have not) taken, will play a big role in how fast that happens.

 

I came across another article on social media, from an epidemiologist, discussing what’s likely to happen next. I don’t recall all of it, but he made a point about how some of our actions impacts the success (or failure) in reducing transmission.

He pointed out that each family acts like a single unit, so if one of your kids has a play date with another… it’s as though your entire family has interacted with that entire family, and if they’ve had a play date with another kid, then that entire family has also interacted with theirs… and with yours when you do your play date.

 

In other words, if people are still meeting up with each other – even if it’s in smaller groups – the virus is still going to spread. It’s just going to spread through smaller networks. And, perhaps, at a slower rate (if the kids normally play together at school every day, and it took three days to set a play date, that’s a three day delay in transmission.)

 

As people have been saying, what good is it to tell everyone that schools are closed and they have to work from home, if they still schedule a play date or go out to dinner with a couple of friends or (for the highest chance of mass infection) still go to church?

 

A month, maybe two, of community spread. And it’s already spread to medium/small sized cities like mine.

Which means in the next month or two I think we’ll really start to see the impact of our collective decisions on social (or really, physical) distancing.