Category: Covid-19

School Considerations

What exactly are the teachers using to clean the classroom? Stuff like Lysol and Clorox wipes have been on the “back to school” list for years because the school doesn’t have budget for basic classroom supplies.
These kids sitting 6′ apart … where’s that extra space coming from? In our elementary school, the “play” and “group” areas could be removed (no shared toys or sitting on squares together anyway). But kids are going to walk between desks, so you really need 12′ separation to allow a walkway. There’s no way to get 20+ kids into a classroom. And what about upper grades where students move between classrooms? There some large group of new hires disinfecting each desk in the three minutes between classes? Because having the teacher speed clean the desks seems counter-productive.
How do we accommodate both the ‘school shooting safety measures’ like keeping the classroom doors closed and the ‘COVID19 safety measures’ like minimizing contact with high-touch surfaces? The obvious COVID-19 solution is to have all interior doors propped open during school hours and possibly assign an employee to open/close the dedicated ingress and egress doors.
Everyone gets two scheduled times for the bathroom? Or how exactly does that work? Same for recess — hey, it’s your ten minutes to jog around the building. Go!
I’m already being asked to drive the kid to school because they cannot figure out how to bus kids safely. With the ‘normal’ number of kids being dropped off and picked up, there was a queue of cars backed out to the road. How’s this drop-off/pick-up thing going to work with a lot more kids? And what about someone who has kids in more than one school?
A significant part of early childhood education is learning to socialize and interact with others. How much social learning is going to happen this year?
And the biggest question of all — what exactly does the school do when the first person tests positive? The entire class has to be in quarantine for a few weeks? What about kids who have siblings in that class — everyone in their class has to quarantine too? Seems like the first positive test and the whole school needs to be in quarantine.

Marketing Fail

I find it ironic that the Republican, who brought us marketing campaigns such as the “Death Tax” which would cause Paris Hilton to pay taxes on her hypothetical inheritance but didn’t mean jack to 80% of the country seems unable (or, more likely, unwilling) to effectively market pandemic response.
 
Social distancing is a horrible phrase that speaks to isolation. OK, you don’t congregate in one big lump of humanity at the beach or discotheque. Why isn’t figuring out innovative ways to interact a national pursuit? Physically distanced social interactions — either online or in person. A few decades ago, I had friends who would all get on a call to watch a movie or TV show together. Start writing letters again (help out the post office, too). Back in March, when the lock-downs started, I surprised a lady at the grocery store by helping her look for her parent’s preferred type of coffee as I stood on the checkout queue. She didn’t have to get near me, I didn’t have to get near her, but the “social distancing” campaign had her thinking “head down, don’t talk to anyone”. We’ve got patio chairs set up under the big maple tree in our front yard. Two families sitting 10′ apart can easily converse, hang out, enjoy nature, etc. Putting chairs on either side of the fire pit is about 8′ apart too.
 
Then there are the masks. Social trends have convinced people to wear all manner of wild kit. There’s no way it couldn’t have been presented as some awesome fashion trend. I’m curious if it’s *masks* or *orders* that the non-mask wearing public finds so objectionable. Like, would they be down with wearing a confederate flag mask? What about helmets — we can dress up like astronauts, scuba divers, motorcycle riders. I introduced my daughter to pandemic safety by calling it the zombie apocalypse. It’s fun to get the masks and gloves on to take the recycling down the the drop-off point where she stands guard in the car watching for zombies. Or get a superhero cape and mask, adopt a secret identity. Not something I recommend when it’s 95 degrees … but when it cools off again, pretend you’re a less murder-y version of the invisible man with the head wrapping and sun shades.
 
The Republican promotion of preventative actions reminds me of the court-ordered PSA commercials that tobacco companies air. They have technically said what the court has ordered them to say, but there has been no attempt to engage the audience. Or attract attention. White screen, black text, monotone voice-over repeating what the text says.

School’s Out For …

I want to know what schools are going to do in September/November after what they did in August proves to be foolishly optimistic (either ‘the virus will disappear’ or ‘one person will be able to ensure twenty six-year-old kids wear masks and stay 6 feet apart, plus we can have a janitor in each restroom sanitizing after each use’) and they’ve failed to use the intervening 4-5 months to develop a decent online teaching approach.

Ohio Public Health Warning Level

Ohio now has a per-county public health alert level rating that reminds me of the terror alert color-coded system we had after 9/11.

Of course there will be people in red or purple counties heading out to neighboring counties to shop/eat/socialize/party because those neighboring counties are only in orange so they don’t need to wear a mask there. I don’t get why I’ve got to get my car e-checked because my county borders Cuyahoga but we wouldn’t have to wear a mask for the same reason … but it’s a step in the right direction deeming masks mandatory *somewhere* based on *something*.

Pants?

A friend pointed out that pants offer a little protection for me, but they are a lot of protection for you … So we can all stop wearing pants now, right? And protesting stores that require customers to wear pants! Freedom! Liberty!

Ink Chromatography Experiment

Materials:

  • Glass vessels – glass cup, graduated cylinder, etc
  • Coffee filter
  • Scissors
  • Shish kabob skewers
  • Water
  • Colored markers – ideally include a few black markers from different companies

Process

  1. Cut the coffee filter into strips
  2. About 1” from the bottom of the strip, put a dot using one of the markers
  3. Skewer the strip at the top and hang over a glass of water
  4. Hang the strip over the glass
  5. Carefully fill the glass with water until it just touches the bottom of the coffee filter strip.
  6. It will take a few minutes for the water to move up the strip. Once the water has finished moving up the strip, take the skewer and strip off the glass. Empty the glass of water, then place the strip and skewer back on the glass to dry.
  7. Notice how different inks are made of different color combinations. Notice different inks carry different distances up the filter strip.

 

Biosecurity and a return to normal

I’ve been hearing a lot, lately, about the “return to normal” — what do you most want to do when we return to normal, when do you think we’ll be returning to normal, what changes do you think they’ll need to make before we can return to normal. And the questions strike me as wrong-footed. Especially as Trump and Pompeo talk about SARS-CoV-2 coming from a lab. Now “came from a lab” doesn’t necessitate malicious intent. The fundamental, longstanding problem I’ve had with gain of function research (the reason I wasn’t at all upset when the Obama administration put thought into the cost and benefits of this research and subsequently dropped government funding for this research and I didn’t think it was a stellar idea to resume funding) is that biosecurity is so difficult. And the spread of this virus highlights how vulnerable we were.

Sure, nation-states have forsworn biological warfare … but that’s not everyone. This release was probably accidental. I don’t say that because of any insider knowledge, but if I wanted to release an infectious disease … I’d have done a better job of infecting people. Get some infectious people at the Super Bowl – eating and drinking downtown, riding the public transit system, walking around the stadium. Or send people to ride mass transit in a few major cities – spend a day riding trains through Waterloo station, a day milling around Grand Central. If there are suicide bombers willing to literally blow themselves up for the cause … it seems like they’d be equally willing to inject themselves with some infectious disease. And the border agents can search whatever they want — the easiest thing in the world to ‘smuggle’ into a country is your own bloodstream. No explosive or drug sniffing dog is going to notice, no aeroport scanner will see anything because there’s basically nothing to find. Unless this is malicious intent with the forethought to make it look accidental (or a different actor framing the ‘obvious’ culprit) … it’s accidental.

The fact no one has done it yet is rather amazing. We’ve demonstrated our susceptibility to biological attack. We’re in the middle of demonstrating our unwillingness to take actions to prevent the spread of a disease. I absolutely believe this is an attack vector that will be exploited in the future. So why would we want to return to the previous “normal”?!

Protesting the Protests

There are some people protesting the stay at home orders – I see videos from outside of DeWine’s daily briefings, and several other states seem to have similar problems. Apart from the question of astroturfing, problem is that there’s very little opportunity for counter-protests. When you go to DC, there are PETA people counter-protesting the people looking to fund medical research (animal testing). There are vegans counter-protesting people looking to increase subsidies in the meat industry. I’ve never seen an abortion protest that didn’t have both sides represented.

These ‘liberate us’ protests? These are people who don’t think they should have to stay at home – they should allowed to hang out at bars, eat in restaurants, shop, party, and … oh yeah … crowd together at protests. The people who think the stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders are important to protect their health? Seems like a far smaller portion of them would be willing to hang out in Columbus in a protest. Even if they could find masks and whatnot.

Why drive somewhere nonessential? Your car breaks down, and you’re exposed to others (and exposing them to you). You get into an accident and you’re exposed to others (and exposing them to you). Get injured in the accident and you’re adding to the patient load at hospitals. We’re not just staying at home to avoid large congregations. We’re staying at home to create less load for emergency personnel.

Visualization: Percent of Population Infected with SARS-CoV-2

Updated graph for current infection numbers

And the states kinda like Ohio graph where I still think “distance from NYC” is a pretty significant factor in how many individuals are infected. Ohio, going on a month of kids out of school and entering week three of the shelter-in-place order, isn’t seeing the exponential growth some states with similar population numbers have encountered.

Reopening

I keep hearing Trump talk about his decision to re-open the country (and how it’ll be the biggest decision he’s ever made). Begs the question how. And I don’t mean “what is the plan to resume somewhat normal inter-personal interactions” (although the process question needs to be answered). I mean procedurally how is he going to *open* the country? He’s never closed it! Individual states have enacted various protective measures as they see fit. He really think he can overrule, say, Ohio’s shelter in place order? Issue an executive order mandating we all eat at a restaurant this weekend and … what? The FBI is gonna haul me out of the house if I don’t?