A musing Beam

Let's discuss mortality and long-term primary impacts caused by the pandemic. This is the 6th installment is a series about COVID-19 . We'll save economic and other secondary impacts for next time. World deaths per million (As always, Our World in Data is a great site for finding info.) Sorry for the long break between entries -- I've had a couple things going on, and this one took longer than some of the others to put together. Original reported death rates On March 1, 2020,  China was reporting ~4.1% of known cases ended in death . Italy was reporting over 7% around the same time, and by mid-March Italy was shutdown and recommending others do the same, though they were reporting closer to China's 4% by then.  With a US population of ~310,000,000, a 4% death rate would have resulted in possibly over 12 million dead. For good reason, the whole world was apprehensive. As you likely recall, there was a great push to "bend the curve."  The most immediate need f...

Let's not bury the lead:  When you can't social distance, yes, you should wear a mask, almost definitely. Some of that is for you, but mainly it's for everyone else. If you struggle breathing while wearing a mask, you definitely will struggle much more with COVID. This is another entry in my series on COVID . How COVID-19 spreads The virus is more likely to infect someone when there is a lot of the virus .  There are 3 general ways that it appears to spread : contact,  aerosol, and  droplets . (There's a 4th that is difficult to study and seems less likely to be a major channel: fecal to oral.) For contact, you should not touch others, wash your hands a lot, and avoid touching your face. For aerosolized virus, you should avoid situations where a significant amount of virus might gather together, like an un-ventilated room or a large gathering of people. For droplets, the easiest population measure is masks.  Droplets from singing, coughing, sneezing, yelling, yo...

This is the fourth installment in a series about COVID-19 .  Here's the summary on vaccines:  If things go as well as possible, we'll have some vaccines available in the US around the beginning of 2021, they will likely require two shots, and they will probably work well enough.  Lots of people won't get the vaccine, though, so there may still be many more preventable deaths.  And the timelines could definitely be pushed to the middle of 2021. Here is a decent FAQ-style primer with lots of links if you want deeper dives. What is a vaccine and how does it work? A vaccine is a medicine that, unlike most others, actually prevents you from getting sick .  The major pathway for a vaccine to achieve this is through stimulating your immune system to produce antibodies that are ready in case you are exposed in the future.  Basically, your body thinks it was already sick and is able to fight the disease off. More specifically , vaccines usually have particles calle...

Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining This is the third installment in a series on COVID-19 . How do you deal with an epidemic? A respiratory disease epidemic ends after each person consistently spreads it to fewer than 1 person, on average.  That can happen in many ways . Y ou can choose not to try to stop it, depending on factors like its severity and method of spreading.  If it isn't bad enough and there is no immunity from getting it, it might be reasonable to just let it keep going, and just get used to it. Or maybe it is really bad, but still there is no immunity, so you still just get used to it and treat the symptoms, like with HIV . You might also let it keep going if it isn't that deadly and people become immune once they get it.  Reaching so-called "herd immunity" takes enough people in the population having it that the remaining carriers have almost nobody to spread it to.  Current speculation is that COVID-19 would need 70% to 90%  of people to...

This is the second in a series of posts about the COVID-19 pandemic . This installment is discussing why COVID-19 is much, much worse than the seasonal flu. Here it is, in a nutshell : COVID-19 is more contagious, more deadly, already has more known long-term impacts, has no vaccine or truly effective treatments, and has no apparent seasonality. Contagion SARS-COV-2 is much more contagious. The median R0 (average number of people infected by each person when nobody is immune) is 5.7 , or more optimistically 2.5 . For the pandemic to go away, R0 would need to effectively be less than 1.  The estimate of the 1918 novel flu was between 1.2 and 2.4 .  (An R0 of 5.7 means we need over 80% of the population to be immune to reach effective herd immunity .) Beyond that, the incubation period is long, and the number of transmissions before symptoms begin hovers near half those infected . And the duration of being contagious is longer, up to 10 days after the first symptoms. That means ...

It's easy to find thoughts on COVID-19, but hard to parse through it all.  This series is my attempt to give my view of the state of knowledge about COVID-19, as of late July and early August  through late 2020. Here are the entries (these will become links as I post the others): Finding facts and data about COVID-19 (this one) Why COVID-19 is much worse than the seasonal flu Testing, contact tracing, and quarantining The path to vaccines To wear a mask or not Deaths and long-term impacts Economic and secondary impacts Safely co-existing Bots and divisiveness Leadership You need to find reputable sources for data.  People are rightly skeptical of what they see online.  In fact, the World Health Organization has declared that, beyond the pandemic, there is an Infodemic, which is “a surge of information about COVID-19 that has made it hard for people to know which news and guidance about the virus is accurate.” If you are actually interested in how to find the best new...

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Philando Castile, Botham Jean, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Rayshard Brooks, Sean Monterrosa ... I haven't blogged in over two years, but after the world blew up on May 25, 2020, I decided I should start again.  My issue is that I am not particularly good at raising up other people's voices, and I don't think my own voice is as cogent right now.  I'm going to make one overarching point, and then include just a few links to the voices and stories of people of color, and why I think each one is worth you giving your attention for a few minutes. My overarching point is compounding interest. A common argument by those who find the term "white privilege" to be offensive is that slavery ended a century and a half ago, Jim Crow last century, etc.  The underlying premise seems to be if someone isn't getting lynched or enslaved, and if the laws are not explicitly against them, then black people...