onfocus

"With few exceptions, almost all of the SSEs took place indoors, where people tend to pack closer together in social situations, and where ventilation is poorer."

That’s it, indoors is cancelled.

"Reinforcing that quarantine is helping to keep others safe, including those particularly vulnerable (such as those who are very young, old, or with pre-existing serious medical conditions), and that health authorities are genuinely grateful to them, can only help to reduce the mental health effect and adherence in those quarantined."

Interesting look at the impact of past quarantines and how we might reduce the harm of our current mass quarantine.

“There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University. “It’s very unusual. None of this variability really fits with any other diseases we’re used to dealing with.”

Another reminder that this isn’t like a flu.

"The answer is no. Until further notice—meaning, some significant developments in testing, manufacturing, infrastructure, and government coordination—you can assume the answer to any and all of the questions you think of in the “social distancing loopholes” genre is no."

With the nice weather and relatively successful social distancing program here in Oregon this message is getting harder to hear. I've been tempted by the let's just stay six feet apart siren song. But I think we should stay home as much as possible. 2020 says no. Can’t I please just visit one friend? No :(. Staying home saves lives.

"The Corvallis study will be completed over four consecutive weekends and will provide important public health information that has been lacking throughout the pandemic. A limited pilot phase of the study in several Corvallis neighborhoods will be conducted Sunday, April 19, to test procedures the study will use in gathering and testing samples."

OSU is doing some randomized testing study to see how much covid-19 has spread in Corvallis.

“This is a movie-like save, it doesn’t happen in the real world often,” Padgett said. “I was just a fortunate recipient of people who said, ‘We are not done. We are going to go into an experimental realm to try and save your life.’"

This is an amazing story about a frontline doctor who is also a cytokine storm survivor.

"As tens of billions of taxpayer dollars from the $2.2 trillion relief bill begin flowing out the door, Ramamurti remains the lone member appointed to the panel. With no colleagues, no staff, and no office, he’s had to rely on one of the few avenues he has to communicate with the public: his unverified Twitter feed."

Sounds normal. Probably nothing corrupt happening here.

"This effort will be guided by data. We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening, and we will be working in coordination to identify the best metrics to guide this."

Maybe we could get all states to band together somehow.

"Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness."

This is what’s keeping me up worrying at night. And stories like: There Is No Plan for the End of the Coronavirus Crisis:

"But while it may not be possible to pinpoint a date, or a month, at which point we can expect to transition out of bunker living, no one seems to have any sense of how we’ll arrive at that determination, how much we will have wanted to contain the outbreak, at what levels, before moving forward, and what steps moving forward would then entail."

No plan.

A number of leading public health authorities, universities, and NGOs around the world have been doing important work to develop opt-in contact tracing technology. To further this cause, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracing.

I'm extremely concerned about privacy related to these companies and I also think this is a great development. We're going to need to trade some privacy for safety to get society going again. Kottke had a neat comic explainer about how contact tracing works: How Privacy-Friendly Contact Tracing Can Help Stop the Spread of Covid-19.

"Your employee didn’t choose this; it’s not like she decided to work with a toddler lurking around in order to save on child care expenses. We’re in a pandemic and a public health crisis. She, like millions of parents across the country, is an impossible situation and is trying to make it work as best as she can."

If you're lucky enough to be able to work from home you're not experiencing standard work from home right now. It feels more like crisis management at home plus work.

In a video posted to Twitter, Cook says Apple has sourced more than 20 million masks through its global supply chain and is working with governments to donate them where they’re needed.

Nice work! Take a look at the assembly instructions for a sense of what the face shields are like.