While out shopping today, stocking up for the impending self-quarantine of much of my family and active avoidance of anywhere we don’t absolutely have to go, I was distressed by the number of conversations I was overhearing by people who continue to plan to attend or host birthday parties, by people who think social distancing doesn’t apply to them because they aren’t the old or immunocompromised.

So while I’m not a doctor, most doctors don’t have my experience and understanding of data, which is what is of greatest benefit here and now. Also, I am one who always has to learn ALL-THE-THINGS, and the knowledge synthesis skills that I hone constantly there have been of benefit while gathering and curating information on COVID-19.

In fact, I’ve had a number of people specifically seek out my perspective. In one of those conversations I remember saying “This is the first major outbreak of something so widespread and so dangerous, since we became both such a mobile, trackable, and individually broadcasting (eg social media) society. We are actually lucky that this disease ISN’T even more dangerous, imagine if everything about COVID-19 were the same except it was as deadly as Ebola. And that day is coming; the odds just don’t tell us when. What I really hope comes from this is that someone, somewhere, is gathering all of the data. I hope after the fact that data gets analyzed, and we learn all we can from it.”

Some have been managing to gather impressive amounts of data, even mid-stream. And others have come up with much more convincing messages than I have. So instead of trying to re-tell the tale, I’m going to present a list of resources that I highly recommend.

• Education through emotions – https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/who-gets-hospital-bed/607807/
• Education through numbers – https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca
  • This is the first analysis I’ve seen that’s mathematically “felt” right, and you can see how terrifying it is (humans don’t intuitively do mental exponential math well, it’s well known in the biostatistical community and in personal finance for compound interest).
• Or, as my husband recommends, in webcomic format: https://xkcd.com/2278/
• Neil deGrasse Tyson’s take, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB4FUHHMI24
• The value of taking action, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-simulator/
  • More generally – even a small domino can cause a large domino to fall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97rBdSYbkg
• Current world-wide infection map, https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
• Minnesota map https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/coronavirus/situation.html

Other tidbits:

• Leaders always sound confident of what they say. It’s the antithesis of how a scientist works, but it seems to be a rule in the Leaders Handbook. That doesn’t mean they’re right.
• Despite what members of leadership have had to say, the spread of disease hasn’t mapped to what it would if the only ones we had to worry about being contagious were the ones who are symptomatic. Instead, infected people are contagious 2.5-3 days prior to becoming symptomatic.
• In addition to washing your hands right away when you get home, consider also washing your face. If your skin was contaminated by walking through hanging droplets in mid-air, then future movement of fingers on face could easily move those viruses to entry points (eyes, nose, mouth).
• Per the press conference held by Governor Walz yesterday, there are only 150 ventilators in the entire Twin Cities area. That’s not many.
• China has been locked down in quarantine for 6 weeks, specifically a much harder quarantine that it’s likely to be easy to get Americans to accept. During that period, they built an amazing amount of infrastructure in just a few days, to help care for and isolate their sick; a capacity we likely can’t replicate. Only now at 6 weeks of hard quarantine are some people being released, into a different type of larger group quarantine – being sent to work in vital factories, to begin to get production of necessary items back up and running. They’re having trouble filling those positions, and people from other companies that aren’t trying to go back to work yet are sharing their employees for these vital efforts. But these workers don’t get to go home again at night, they have to say with their coworkers at the factory. And outbreaks of secondary waves of infection are expected; they’re not at all out of the woods yet.

Read, learn, and then take action. Your actions may not be perfect, the situation is changing and we’re learning more, but do the best you can. Members of your community, and maybe even you, will benefit* from it.

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* Benefit = live or die