The day after Friday

Since I missed my usual Friday Covid-landmark blog, I thought I'd do a second blog. I think my streak of Friday blogs go all the way back to our self-isolation in February, so it is a shame to have broken it.

What has this seven day period brought? The world's daily increase in the numbers of cases and deaths seem to have stabilised, but it isn't dropping. It is rather incredible and it would be interesting to know how this is possible. The majority of the affected world being locked down shouldn't really allow it to keep going with 90,000 cases a day. With almost all social and commercial interactions suppressed, there shouldn't be a way for cases to sustain what is essentially the same rate as before the lock down, but yet there are very few countries on the path to elimination, and fortunately New Zealand, Australia and South Korea are all pretty close to it.

There are some articles recognising the patchwork inconsistent strategy of Australia, which looked messy at first, has reigned in the outbreak while preserving normality by a degree. Doing a "black and white" analysis, they might have stumbled on a better degree of social distancing than the strict lock-down in New Zealand. That is not to say the foolish pundits criticising the New Zealand approach have any merit to say that we have been too heavy-handed. When we went into lock-down, there were few successful suppressions of the outbreak to reference and it is a good thing that different countries try different things, even if there might be some failures. But there is room for individual characteristics in each experiment. Covid-19 might spread in any weather, but warmer, drier, more outdoors-inclined countries may have a greater advantage. There is every chance that the Australian strategy might have failed in New Zealand as the cooler, moister climate would keep people indoors earlier and windows shut. Australia might end with lower cases per capita and deaths per capita, but then our deaths are blighted by the failure in Rosewood Resthome, which makes up over half of our fatalities.

How the real satire that are the United States of America has not yet descended into chaos deserves some consideration. They are racking up the cases and the deaths. And even before cases have consistently gone down, they're loosening restrictions in some states. It would be too easy to say that this will permit the outbreak to continue and burn on - but it is still an experiment of sorts. If Australia could drag its numbers down with more moderate controls in a hot, dry climate, perhaps Texas might enjoy the same success. Either way, their hopes of keeping it under 60,000 deaths is out the window. Their cases increased a third and their deaths by 70% in the week. 2,000 to 3,000 deaths are reported each day. As New York's blaze runs out of wood, the other states are manning up the bodybags.

Fingers crossed for all concerned.

Corona killed the ESOL star

I've realised that I might have not mused in this blog about a trend I often speak to my colleagues about: the end of the ESOL teaching industry (ESOL = English for Speakers of Other Language). I shared it to encourage people to take broader training and professional development seriously. This predicted trend was, going back to 2009, one of the reasons that I made my decision to get into education management instead of teaching, which was the motivation for going to China where there are big organisations with lots of opportunities.

The main factor in the prediction was technology, which, even back then, before I even had a smartphone was already indicating the increasing substitution of the need to either learn a language, or facilitate the learning of language without the vagaries of brute human-to-human impartation of knowledge and skill. Some primordial translation software such as Babblefish was coming on the scene. I'd already learned language with podcasts and Youtube videos; Skype was king back then and it seemed that the cost-benefit for students would be to learn as remotely as possible. When the sharing economy started to disrupt long-standing industries, it seemed even more like the writing was on the wall. Even in 2013 when we visited China, the adult English teaching market had shrunk. If we had stayed in China, we would have been teaching a smaller number of students with a diminishing group of colleagues.

Of course, prediction is not a science. We returned to New Zealand in 2015 and although I did apply for non-ESOL related positions, both of us are in our fifth year of having our lives supported within the English teaching sphere. And our school hasn't been especially technological till recently. The way my teachers have been teaching is very similar to how I would have been teaching in 2001 when I began. It's been successful. Low cost yet personal, rapport-based teaching. But just like the asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs, Covid-19 will either force evolution upon you or render you extinct. 

Within a week, a former colleague at another school went from informing me that an ESOL school in Napier had closed becoming ESOL's first casualty in NZ due to Covid, to telling me on Thursday that his own school, a boutique premium provider, was closing. Our school is intent on evolution and there is a good chance that I'm going to have a heavy responsibility to get things moving. But we're going to be getting leaner and meaner. Staff have gone. Staff will go. 

Of course, this is far from just an ESOL situation. The whole world might be turned upside-down yet. Manning the process of preparation for a pandemic has felt like something that I have the skills to do. Manning the process of change for the post-pandemic world I think gives me a chance to get experience with whole-organisation change, broad technological mastery, methods of incorporating technology into pedagogy (teaching methods) to enhance learning. If I can do this well, pretty much I could make myself quite the commodity. It might be my main way to avoid extinction.

Anecdotes

"3% of Dutch blood donors have antibodies to Covid-19" was the headline. I picked it up from a pleasant vlogger by the name of Dr John Campbell. He is another vlogger, along with Dr Chris Martenson (Peak Prosperity), who has been following and interpreting reports about Covid-19 from a very early stage. He is overall very concerned about the pandemic but also does quite neutral interpretations, i.e., he qualifies comments well and raises not just depressing but also optimistic news that Covid-19 might not be as bad.

This particular result can cause many conclusions depending on the angle you're thinking about at any one time. The Netherlands who apparently have been fairly transparent and complete with their numbers has the eighth most deaths per million, not far behind the UK. Herd immunity, if it exists for this, is at the 80% mark for this kind of thing so it indicates that this crisis is a long way from finishing.

But it was interpreted for another key metric. The heart of a lot of the controversy is to know how many people have had Covid-19, whether confirmed or not, because if you only county confirmed cases, then the current fatality rate in that country, ignoring the lag between diagnosis and death, is an unlikely 11.4% (3601 death divided by 31,589 cases after testing 0.9% of the population). But if 3% of the population have already had it, actually deaths should be divided by 514,046 cases instead, and the case fatality rate drops to 0.7%, which would make it really bad, but not as bad as feared from the official numbers.

Should we breathe a sigh of relief? Well, perhaps it's my innate catastrophism but I'd say no. In any snapshot of any complex situation or phenomenon, you can see it one way from one angle that makes it all look black and white, when reality is prone to being grey. Where is the grey here?

1. Blood donors might be a cross section of the population. On the positive side, it would tend to be the healthier portion, too. (You are questioned before donations and rejected if you've had symptoms of an infectious disease or been to an affected country.) So it could be thought that the prevalence in the Netherlands could be higher.
2. If it was known that blood donors were to be tested for antibodies, it may have biased the group though for those who thought they may have been exposed.
3. There is some interesting fine print: "Preliminary results show that the presence of antibodies differs per age group. 3.6 percent of young blood donors between 18 and 20 years old (688 individuals) have Covid-19 antibodies. That percentage decreases as donors get older. No antibodies were found among donors between the ages of 71 and 80, though the number of donors in that age group is also much lower - only 10 individuals." This could mean quite a few things, from the older group not travelling as much and not being exposed, to the existed of a repository of vulnerable but safe unimmune groups, perhaps through the measures put in place.

4. Maybe more significant though is the accuracy of tests. Any test has two metrics, sensitivity (the ability to signal the existence of the antibody) and specificity (only signalling the exist of one antibody and not others, or other substances). It sounds good to have a test that is, say, 99% accurate, but if it comes up with false positives 1% of the time and false negatives 1% of the time, then it can lead to wrong conclusions at different levels of prevalence:
Note how at a low actual prevalence, 0.1%, the test might give a 1.1% prevalence. If this were the parameters of the 3% test, then it is possible that the actual prevalence could be more like 2% and then the case fatality rate becomes 1%.

For amusement, here is the case of a 98% reliable test, where a 3% test prevalence actually corresponds to a 1% actual prevalence. (And the corresponding case fatality rate would be 2%...):

It is unlikely that the sensitivity and specificity are the same percentage, and ideally for the purposes of a non-diagnostic test, specificity should be as high as possible at the cost of some sensitivity. (And a diagnostic test, for the purposes of isolation, not treatment, should be high in sensitivity at the cost of specificity.)

And you will find even 98% is not a realistic number: The government’s “game changer” antibody tests are inaccurate. What next?

So what does the Netherlands news mean? Well, it is just a data point. Neither a black or white, but a shade of grey that you need to accept till other anecdotes and cases bring more definition in. People who rely on a single case, article or anecdote and interpret it for their purpose, perspective or politics.

Another similar case, also picked up by the vloggers was: Pregnant women without symptoms are testing positive for coronavirus, study says. This article described some research described the situation for women who came to deliver their babies at one medical centre in New York, 4 of whom were symptomatic for Covid-19 which was confirmed by test. But 23 of the other 210 pregnant women were also tested as positive by the PCR test for Covid-19. The hopeful conclusion reached by some from this was that the vast majority of the infected were asymptomatic (or at worst, pre-symptomatic).

The latter point is a cry for optimism. If over 80% of the infected are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms that would not cause them to be voluntarily tested, then the actual case counts in any country that tests only symptomatic cases would be underestimating by 80% the actual rate that the population has been infected.

There is well-documented asymptomatic cases and asymptomatic spread of this virus, which is not in doubt. The numbers seem quite powerful again in this case, but it is once again prone to the wrong extrapolations. But the virus is more dangerous, and presumably symptom-causing, as you get older, and the more male you are. Pregnant women tend to be younger, and some communities in New York might have even younger average ages of pregnancy too. They also tend not to be male. In this case it is not the cross section you'd use to base conclusions on the whole population. The other conclusion that should have been made from this article was that that, if they were representation of the current infection rate for the population of New York City at the time of the research, late March/early April, over 10% of the city population was positive with the virus and shedding virus particles. Disturbing.

In the so-called Plan B camp (the people who advocate letting the virus do its thing in the population), there is often the desire to find the true infection number, which they surmise is significantly higher than the confirmed case number. This is a way to minimise the case fatality rate and to demonstrate the scale of the overreaction from lockdowns. Anyone who is biased the other way will likely indicate that the confirmed death number isn't accurate either, as deaths at home, care homes and the pre-testing covid-related deaths are also not being taken into account.

People used to raise the Diamond Princess cruise ship as the perfect case study because everyone on board was tested. There were 712 cases and 14 deaths (almost 2% CFR), but again the meaning of this is qualified because the clientele of cruise ships are older and all the fatalities were over 60. (And even at this age, over half of cases were asymptomatic.) And even though this case seems an age ago, there are still many passengers still in hospital. It is possible that the CFR may grow pass 2.5%. There is also a possibility that though the quarantining at Yokohama might have reduced the impact. There was no further exposure to the previously exposed and many of the early symptomatic cases may have been discovered early.

Then South Korea was said to be a good case study as they were the reigning testing champions. Early on the Plan B people were optimistically crowing that there was a 0.6% CFR for a time forgetting the lag in deaths. Now, based on official numbers only from PCR testing, their PCR has slowly grown to almost 2.2%. But again the explosive outbreak that happened may have meant many people got it without knowing it.

Taiwan is also another case study who has managed to be scrupulous with screening and testing to the point that they were barely affected and are harder to judge because of their lower numbers, just six deaths out of 398 cases (1.5% CFR). But an undue number of those are young travellers and tourists. It has never really broken out in the population to get a better cross-section.

Each situation that you could singularly quote has its own parameters, history, idiosyncrasies and quirks. Using any single one is not enough to mean anything for the whole. They need to be all taken in to make any definitive calls.

Downhill

All over the world it's extraordinary the amount of verbiage and criticism spent to say that the lockdowns are an overreaction, and that more moderate plans of mitigation are more appropriate. Setting aside the precautionary principle, goldfish-forgetting those salutary early examples of Italy and Iran, innumerately forgetting that there is a lag in numbers and that the final figure, thus fatality rate, is long away, or medically naïve what long-term impacts a novel virus might have on the survivors, let's just say that almost all the comments come from people without "skin in the game".

"Skin in the game" was a phrase or concept I take from Nicholas Naseem Taleb, whose books I adore. One of his heuristics is that you never trust a pundit who doesn't have skin in the game. What is "skin in the game"? It means some exposure to loss if you are wrong. One of the reasons the markets are a metric for confidence is that shareholders have a stake. (Although there is a certain gamification for short-term gain embedded.) Mike Hosking does not have any skin in the game because he is not held accountable for his words. He can contradict his previous stances or actions he has advocated simply because apart from a momentary blush in a rare moment of reflection, there isn't a loss to him. There isn't even the eating of one's own hat. The man at the bar, the armchair general or the TV pundit can find reasoning or a number, or some doubt in a number, or a perspective, to advocate for anything. Ask them to put money on it and the confidence may wash away, at least by the second round. Decision-makers have both responsibility and accountability, which means that they will always have sticks and stones thrown at them. Idle lips don't.

The classic line of the year is "Hindsight is so 2020". At what point is a reaction deemed an overreaction or an underreaction? It's very difficult to know at the time of decision and that's the unfairness of the criticism. Now that the NZ curve is incontrovertibly flattening, there is a huge temptation to open up and at least get our domestic "show back on the road". The astonishing thing in all this - the most effectively locked down country, China, still has issues with the asymptomatic spread of this virus in their population and are still doing local sealing of towns and cities. The near global lockdown has seemingly halted the growth in infection rates, but not infection. There are still 80,000 new confirmed infection each day and between 6,000 to 7,000 deaths each day. I say again: that, with most countries locked down.

In some ways the granular view of the global infection is the surge in one large area, followed by a plateauing in one area followed by a surge elsewhere. So where China was the first, once the dip came for them, Iran and Italy filled the vacuum. Once they faded, Spain, then New York, filled the vacuum; Spain and New York possibly tending downwards, we have Belgium, Canada, Sweden, the rest of the US, Brazil and Russia charging up. It looks like there is going to a second wind over the next week to push cases up another notch and the death rate too. Sweden is going to be the most horrifically interest to watch. They are avowedly going the moderate view of controlling the virus through mild measures with an emphasis on personal responsibility. Depending if they follow through, they are the ultimate "control" group. They are still early days, and without large scale testing, but their deaths increased by a third in two days.

There is an argument in favour of moderate control, but it is plagued by more assumptions than in favour of the lock down. The assumptions are:
- long term immunity can be gained from exposure to Covid-19
- the health system can sustain the sharp rise in sickness and still address the needs of other medical needs
- prevalent infection in the community doesn't cause greater death to other groups
- the elderly or immuno-compromised can be truly insulated from the virus (asymptomatic spreaders seem to get them in the end...)
- survivors do not have persisting health effects
- the overall economic benefits of a long term moderate shutdown exceed that of a sharp short lockdown ("overall" being a key word as it might take years to really know)
and more.

There tends to be a Faustian deal in it, too, where the "marginal" years of the elderly are being traded in for economic sustainability. The potential economic and social unsustainability of lock-downs are real but again, stamping it out and controlling it is probably a better bet.

The numbers? Well, if I said that New York wasn't Wuhan, after a new reckoning of the numbers, it is now not even the UK, who now lags behind the Big Apple in terms of deaths. It might not have enough gas to overhaul France, Spain and Italy but it is quite a stat... New Jersey's numbers cruised passed China's official numbers.

It has been a week where the lockdown has lead to a slowdown in global cases, which moved from 1.6 million to almost 2.2 million official cases (roughly a third increase). Deaths always lag though, from over 95,000 to over 145,000 official deaths. That's over a 50% increase, a faster rise than the previous 7 day period. This all goes to show the nature of this beast.

My China

The virus might be a scourge but it has been the catalyst for horrendous racism. It was first the prompt for base reactions in fear and mockery of people with vaguely Oriental features by the hoi polloi. It was double-standard reporting by the media. It was "dog whistle" naming of it as the Chinese virus.

Now in China, with the global flow of the virus reversing, it's the shoe on the other foot. I have a friend who got removed from his apartment and dragged down to the police station for testing; Africans and Afro-Americans are now being targeted explicitly: Africans who make up many of the permanent residents have been evicted and even a McDonalds in Guangzhou has banned black people from entering. Why? Because foreign countries have Covid-19, so foreign people are a risk, even if they arrived well before the outbreak even began in Wuhan.

Both are atrocious an incomparably unfair. The politicisation of the virus might be a side-show but it's the thing that leaves me more disgusted than ever. I'm thankful to not be living in China right now. My best hopes for the civility of cosmopolitan Guangzhou is shattered. 

There is a lot of blaming still going on against the state of the Peoples Republic of China whether it be for the original sin of having wet markets with exotic animals where the first fateful animal-to-human infection occurred or their tardiness revealing the extent and data on the outbreak. 

The complaints of the cover-up by China annoy me a little bit, because it takes China as a monolith. From my limited view of the slowness to go public, it was actually the authorities in Wuhan who tried to deal with the outbreak without it going public, even keeping it from the central government. The mayor of Wuhan was sacked during the crisis for his handling. It is also easy to point fingers early on - to be clear, even with several months of international collaboration Covid-19 is still a relative unknown and statements made at one time are overturned with new evidence. Now we are much more aware of asymptomatic cases and methods for transmission, but even once public about it, there was still a lot to learn. I still think the audacious decision to lock down cities was a good one. The moves since were good, too. As I often mention, as soon as they sealed Wuhan and other cities in Hubei, I knew it must be even worse than it was actually shown to be. And it was presented as a monster virus. 

There was also a few articles recently expressing shock that "controversial" wet markets had re-opened. From a Chinese perspective, the controversy hasn't been on wet markets per se, but what was sold in wet markets. There was widespread condemnation at the time for the selling, use or consumption of exotic animals. Wet markets might take some time to disappear. They're still a key part of food distribution system in China and it'd take rather huge reform and structural change to move away from these. Is there still exotica available? Probably, and probably at a higher price and a much lower supply than before. Expecting it to disappear completely is as simple as ridding a country of illicit drugs from a country. When there is demand, there will be a market. 

The blame put on China by commentators and American political figure for the current situation in the States is ridiculous, however. Even if you don't trust China's words, you can trust their actions. They shut down the country for an outbreak largely centred on a single city. The Trump administration was the first to move to block Chinese travellers to the US, but effectively blocked one kind of passport coming into their country and did not implement much in the way of safety checks or isolation to their own returned people.(Compare that with New Zealand which implemented self-isolation.) 

Wuhan was finally unsealed in the last week but huge protection measures persist, which must be costly still to implement and have a slowing effect on the economy. Personally I was shocked how long the quarantine lasted for Hubei and especially Wuhan. The official numbers showed that it was just the long-term critically ill who were expiring with little sign of new infection. The official numbers might be a lie but you can take a lesson in reading the actions: take their slowness to open as a sign that it is very difficult to safely open even with an apparent lack of infection. I hadn't followed the province-by-province reports for a while since the international news had gone wild, but recent announcements make it clear that the asymptomatic transmission seems to be the main problem, that the unaware can carry it on, perhaps to another unaware until it lands in some fertile ground. Tomorrow I might translate a few as a general notice what's "officially" happening in China.

Four

It didn't take long for our one death (29 March) to become two (10 April) to become four (11 April). And for all the tracking of cases, recoveries and intensive care, three of them were essentially cases that were barely recorded before they were moved column from cases to fatalities. The first fatality showed how freakish the virus is with its contagiousness. an elderly woman on the relatively remote and unexposed West Coast who caught and died of Covid-19 in a flash. It seemed that the diagnosis was almost an afterthought. There is no path determined how she acquired this virus. She is the clear-cut case of community transmission and was our first death. Two of the others were at the same resthome as Covid-19 like a determined ferret to get into the henhouse finds any weakness to find the defenseless. 

Some people are caught with the bittersweet of the burst in deaths and the drop in new cases. This may be just a result of the expected delay between infection and testing, testing to diagnosis, diagnosis till official release, and infection, to critical case, to death. Each update is like the light from stars, Alpha Centauri's light is four years old by the time it arrives. A distant supernova that suddenly appears in the sky is long after the violence of the explosion. It reminds me of one of the definitions of "report" being the sound of gunshot or explosion, which is slower than the sight of the action.

I have dabbled a little in the world of the Corona-denier recently. There is a hodgepodge out there which doesn't necessarily internally agree but is uniform in its suspicion and its attack of every part of the reporting or the response to the pandemic, or the term that they use: plan-demic. It is interesting to see what counter-evidence they use to sustain their fervour. So far:
1 - doubt about one vlogging nurse at a New York hospital (there is the lamentable use of the term "crisis actors", which is someone who is not a true victim but acts as one for the news).
2 - "empty hospitals" or rather the contrast between the visuals on the news, and those when a correspondent in the area videos the same hospitals at another time
3 - suspicion of the numbers, which seems to focus on the doubt for numbers that support the overestimation, and ignore doubt around numbers that underestimate the damage.
4 - suspicion about the criteria for dying with covid-19, if it is the prime cause of death, or that it is just killing the people who were going to die anyway.
5 - beliefs that the number of asymptomatic or naturally immune people is higher than thought.
6 - quotes from experts qualifying statements taken out of context. (For example, quoting a statistician to say the "case counts" as meaningless; when the pragmatic methods of PCR testing can only lead to an indicative count, and to identify risk and isolate. Random antibody testing that will come on stream soon would be the only ones that should yield statistically meaningful results.)

(The contradiction in some of the messaging is whether Covid-19 is a true health crisis or whether it's overblown, and whether it's natural or a designed weapon. Above I've taken arguments from those who think it's a true, natural but moderately harmless virus. Some of the analysis below would be different if it is thought to be a Chinese weapon, or a true pandemic virus that is being exploited in the spirit of "Never let a good disaster go to waste.")

Anyone of the points above is an interesting rabbit-hole to waste away an afternoon. And if I were to meet someone who was really possessed by this evidence and argumentation, it'd be an interesting but probably fruitless interaction. These points are just the scaffolding to support one plank of a greater belief system that is generally suspicious of the mainstream media, government and science. And the belief system is often a sustaining pillar in their intellectual self-esteem. The above are the reeds of the discussion but it's interesting not to get caught in there but better to contemplate the swamp.

The points above are all parts of the "plan-demic", so it pays to look at the swamp, that is, what "plan" is being enacted by creating a multi-country conspiracy with agents in every level of each society to execute with great loss to almost every level of society. And it is that which I think makes it an easy conspiracy theory to dispel. There must be a pay-off for executing a plan, and the pay-off needs to cover the cost of the plan.

So first, what is the pay-off of this plan? A summary of possible answers to this is: to get control of everyone's information and limit their freedoms, reset the world, wipe out debt, end democracy and implement martial law. It is hard to imagine who exactly would be the dark, shadowy figures who benefit from this, and for the investment they must be sure that this is the result. In most countries the established elite already have huge benefits.

What are the costs of all this? Almost all economic entities have had a loss of wealth and value in the last three months. Even after the smoke clears, it would seem that a whole lot of value has been lost and compared to the salad days of last December, profits will not be flowing with the recovery. A huge portion of the citizenry have lost their jobs and their ability to be the kind of consumers who can reflate the economic cycling of money. If the string-pulling entities had wealth, it's likely their wealth will be diminished, and will not recover for some time. But that's just the bodyblow of the lockdown. To execute the plan, you would need to persuade a huge number of people to act against their own interests. There would need to be bribery or subterfuge to make them think they would be better off in the end. But on top of that, you would have to have enough threats to prevent any one of the actors and agents in the conspiracy from speaking out, blowing the whistle and exposing it. But the only people speaking out are the conspiracy theorists and not any of the doctors, the not-so-dead victims, the testing organisations, the health officials in a myriad of districts in a multitude of countries.

The result you get is an unlikely benefit to a nebulous group at an unimaginable cost to a group who can create unbelievable discipline across an innumerable group of individuals to do their bidding, suffer a loss and not say word. If I were to meet that hobbyist conspiracist it would be these bigger questions that I'd discuss.

All the reeds are an insult to the dead and dying. The term "crisis actor" came to real prominence, at least for me, when victims of the Sandy Hook gun massacre who went public and was met with accusations, death threats and criticism. Sandy Hook was somehow contrived into a false flag operation to take away gun rights. So the victims were not really victims. So the victims were attacked.

For all the intellectualism that can be poorly applied to a tragedy it would be that.

The heuristics of the mystics

Sheep. They're stupid animals, aren't they. They are individually timid toward kind, friendly people that approach. And as a flock, even the safest ewe on the farthest side moves away from the approach of people whom for their whole lives have never done them any harm. A thousand people pass them harmlessly in Cornwall Park and they flee. Of course, the sheep are also equally as wary of that thousand and first person who will succeed in penning, capturing them and taking them to the abattoir or, if they're lucky, the shearing shed.

Of course, even if sheep aren't doing actual decisions to weigh up risk and reward to logically treat different people in a different way, evolutionarily they're applying what is a fairly successful cognitive formula. Approaching humans are an absolutely unnecessary risk because the thousand and first one, if not one before, will do you harm. It is effectively a heuristic, a tool used "to quickly form judgments, make decisions, and find solutions to complex problems" (Wikipedia). You might think they are being unfair and have a bias against humans. But if at the end of the day, it's an effective bias that ensures their lives, what's wrong with it? This heuristic had to precede their domestication, and probably was lessened during the process but still remains and probably still ensures their safety on a lesser extent from rustlers and predators.

A heuristic and a bias seem two sides of a coin, both are quick ways to make decisions and judgements, as there is a limit to what we can know or be sure of. There is connotation to both: a heuristic sounds like a smart, shorthand guide, or a rule of thumb; whereas a bias sounds like it is an overgeneralisation that leads you to error or a lack of equity. Profiling at the airport is probably an effective way to find the majority of illicitly brought it contraband; but there will be those of the non-targetted groups who bring it in with an unfair lack of scrutiny; and there will be a lot of innocent, rule-following members in the targetted groups that will cry foul. To cross the street because of the presence of a young Polynesian in a hoodie coming the other way would be racist; but like the sheep might actually be a heuristic to avoid risk. Murky, huh.

Pretty much any item of controversy is a clash between the heuristics/biases that people use. The easiest one to look at is political labelling, in New Zealand it often goes to the National / Labour brands or the left / right polarity (often at the expense of any awareness of the continuum underneath). Not much of the electorate of any country has the luxury to be completely aware of the exact distinctions between political options; but might know that people similar to them are more likely to vote one way, or benefit from one particular party, without knowing exactly how. When a judgement has to be made, it's easier to go with that party. It works in reverse, too, when your party or a political figure you support comes out with a policy, that is difficult to exactly understand whether it is allowing in migrants, "supporting medicare for all" (a US example) or shutting the borders. You're more likely to support it using your informal affiliations as a guide, that if you had agreed with them before, you probably should agree with this policy, too, even if it sets you up for all sorts of contradictions between this and your private self. Even if you were to think that you had reasons for your support for the policy, it might be because you've heard the arguments in favour that "made sense" and, as a bias, discrediting or underestimating the worth of those from the other side which might also make some sense. 

There is a lot of talk about tribalism in politics but by extension in the way that the tribal evokes the primitive, it's the primal heuristics that are worryingly still present. The fear of strangers is a heuristic, but one that we learn to overcome in most circumstances. There seems to be a heuristic where people are ethically contaminated by association with those who do some sort of wrong, or have some sort of beliefs, no matter how intellectually clear in an civilised society that you should be able to have relationships, and that the fallen should be able to be redeemed. It's a simple heuristic to sort people: Person A does bad things. Person B has been his friend. Person B is thus also bad. Person A likes Person C. Thus Person C is not a reputable person. Person D dislikes person B, so they must be a good person. It's all black and white and not much grey. Heuristics and biases are indeed fast ways to generate a black and white certain answer, judgement or decision, in times when you are information-impoverished, or not inclined towards the effort that accuracy might demand.

At the end of the day, one person's heuristic is another person's bias. In this world of memes (which I'm using in the original sense of the word as transmissible ideas that spreads like genes), there will eventually be some culling of the poor heuristics that turn out to be self-defeating biases. And they must be self-defeating in some sense to be eliminated. Racism doesn't disappear because it is an unfair belief. It disappears when it doesn't confer an advantage. In New Zealand, in this "PC world" overt racism has already been made to be disadvantageous to your social and professional life, for example. In the metaphorical Black Swan event, those who have a collection of attitudes that, "rightly or wrongly" ensure survival are those that will prevail. Survival hasn't really been a big issue in the last 70 years because the human race hasn't been stress-tested for some time. It might be that you could do a regression of memes in societies that prospered (when there is an explosion of ideas, heuristics and beliefs) and then when the crunch came which ones lasted, not just because of fashion but brutal life and death distinctions. Ancient Greece, Rome and China all had periods of intellectual prosperity before circumstances caused their decline and also the culling of a whole bunch of ideas. Many of the ideas might have been idealist, but when the pressure is on the judgements they made in unique situations did not work. During the flourishing "anything can go" but in the eventual and certain unexpected adversity, the beliefs that work not just for the present but also for extraordinary times are the ones that suddenly become key and will survive.

Anyway. It's a Friday. A Good Friday for another landmark week. I quoted New York Governor Andrew Cuomo saying "New York is not Wuhan" and his words are become more and more true. New York City alone will double, perhaps even triple, the death rate of Wuhan. New York State has more infected than either Spain or Italy. The USA as a whole went from over six thousand dead to sixteen thousand officially dead in the space of 7 days. There was a bit of news about Sweden's alternative way where they try to use self-responsibility as the main principle in social distancing but otherwise keep things "normal".  The rest of Europe, including the similar country Norway, did the now standard lock-down. Result: Norway has 108 dead since the beginning. Sweden had 106 dead yesterday.

New Zealand might be on the cusp of pulling off the perfect turn, if the perfect turn was to allow some spread and then pull it back in. Even with two regrettable deaths and possible a few other potential fatalities in the ICU's we might have played our cards relatively well. There is a "what next"-ness about the next step. And what of the world? And what of the border? It's extraordinary to think that here we are with barely any new cases, and countries where there are literally hundreds dying each day are saying that they have reached the peak and looking to allow people release from the lock-down.

The incredible thing to think about is that there are just 50 official deaths per million in the USA. For most people stuck at home, they will feel that the situation is overblown, a hoax, a conspiracy or a power grab to seize the freedom back from the citizenry. There is probably even a sense of that here too, with people feeling the cost of the lock-down outweighs the barely apparent epidemic. With 12 more days of Level 4, at least, to go, it will be an interesting time.

EpidemEconomics

Economics is an inextricable part of pretty much every part of life. Epidemics are no different. Most of the focus of it so far has been the dilemma all countries have gone through, that is, the initial weighing up of suppression of the virus versus a temporary loss of economic activity, that has now morphed into the dilemma between mitigating the damage and a world recession. Now, almost all countries have accepted that the disease is worth the damage of the cure and have done steps to hobble themselves to flatten the curve. Just like China did. So we're all in for an interesting time.

The more interesting thing for me is the smaller, more soluble economic issues. Probably the most interesting is that of testing, which any follower of any of this pandemic will know is one of those key parameters which has differentiated countries. The United Kingdom, after not reacting fast enough to the arrival of the virus, decided that there was not much purpose for testing beyond diagnosis in the hospital. The United States decided to refuse the WHO test and develop their own faulty test which delayed them. On the flip side, South Korea and Germany are now the "stars" of testing, pretty much confirming that the secret to good containment is not a secret; it's exactly what the WHO has suggested: test, isolate, contact trace.

But in almost every country there is the cry of people not being tested who should have, and it's fair enough to feel outraged when knowing or not knowing could affect the lives of your loved ones and your professional life. But my administrator brain does not think it is reasonable to expect that any one who wants a test should get a test and the answer is economics.

I'm no expert but testing as it is done to diagnose people for their infection with the virus has several components. One is the test kit, which has swabs for the nose and throat. The next step is exposing that sample to a PCR process, a polymerase chain reaction. This is when the sample is treated with the enzyme, polymerase, which reacts to any RNA in the sample and multiplies it to a huge amount. Then the final stage is when a reagent is added. The reagent is a chemical that is reactive to the RNA to Covid-19. And voila, you should have a result. What's so difficult about that?

Firstly, you need the test kits, which need to be sent to the testing centres in sufficient supply for the need, and to general practices. Then you need to have the capacity and expertise to do the clinical work with the enzyme and the reagent, and you need to have sufficient amounts of these two chemicals.

The smoke and mirrors of this is that testing is not the same as processing a result. In the US, ashamed by their slowness, they ramped up testing, claiming to send a million test kits out in a week. "Anyone who wants a test can get a test," Trump famously said. But that did not make much difference to the situation because there wasn't the capacity to do the clinical tests on the samples. They used private labs but many of these struggled to scale up their services to the scale that a pandemic required. Once samples are sent to a private lab, sometimes there are too many samples for their daily capacity and the backlog of people waiting for results went into days, where presumably people are out of action and isolated, perhaps needlessly.

To ramp up testing you need to have not just the kits but also the laboratory resources, and an administrator thus will be careful to have measures in place to prevent wastage and overuse. Where there are scarce resources there must be management of them and the moderation of the case definition seems to have been the tool for controlling the number of tests.

The ideal of "testing everyone" is unrealistic, but also dangerous. Certain tests are famous for their "false positives". The process above is one that can result in "false negatives". If you test too soon, you might clear someone who is just a day short of having detectable virus in the sample. New Zealand's terminology of "probable" cases I haven't seen elsewhere. I presume this is the apparent case of Covid-19 but with a currently negative result. 

Strolling the world

It's been a seemingly unprecedented run of fine weather since December. It has barely rained. When it has rained, it's been barely at inconvenient times. It would be a shame to spend it at work. It would be worse to just spend it at home not going out. During our self-isolation, we had walks and driving lessons. Based on the principle that under lock-down, you should avoid risks that might put us in situations requiring help, we are left with just walks. Walking during a lockdown in a major suburban area is a continuous state of awkwardness as everyone else is desperate to be outside, yet distant, in unusually crowded streets.

Many people though do not self-contain and don't like to be contained. It is not surprising in a country of five million that there are those that either think the danger is overstated, or are complacent about the risks, or feel that the rules do not apply to them. And they stick out like a sore thumb. And are eyesores to boot. And there is the eternal doubt you have for the conduct of others. Three kids playing basketball in a school court. Are they brothers from a same bubble? They're unsupervised. Did they touch a gate on the way in? That one's leaning against a wall. Has anyone else touched it? An adult should really be there if they were brothers. But what can you do?

Of course any one transgressive act have very little chance of random transmission; but in a country even as small as New Zealand it's going to happen to someone. My initial confidence of the strategy has been dampened by the sheer number of infected. It's astonishing to go from 39 cases two weeks ago, just before the level system was introduced, to 868 now, with a death. But it means the timing was right. We can only hope that this lock-down is well-timed.

Friday is a comparison day. In just the last 7 days, the cases in the US have tripled to almost a quarter of a million; deaths quadrupled to over 6000. How's that for a reality check? The biggest reality check was the American people hearing that even with best mitigation practices at least 100,000 people are expected to perish, probably more. Fortunately most states have done what is essential: shelter-in-place orders are in effect.

Compare that with a country less fortunate than us but at least better than the US: Australia. In the same period their cases haven't quite doubled; but deaths have. Even if their method has looked mad, they have seemingly done "relatively" well.

An "interesting" addition in the numbers today was that that the French decided to do something that really exposes the weakness of the numbers. They added 884 deaths to their death toll for yesterday. They thought the deaths that had happened in rest homes up to this point presumably due to Covid-19 should be added even though they hadn't happened in hospitals. The common man screams that this goes without saying, that a death is a death regardless of where it happens. Chinese numbers are suspect not from deliberate obfuscation but the same art of qualifying numbers.

The plain-sight UK version of this is that when their Department of Health and Social Services announce those grim statistics daily with the same explicit qualifier, they say: "As of 5pm on 1 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus, 2,921 have sadly died." This has been noticed and the common man yet again pounds his fist about the lying technocratic elite. But then again some qualification of the fact is imperative, because there will always be some grey and something has to be stated about the criteria to be counted has to be said for figures to mean anything at all. Numbers must be qualified. And it is only with an announcement like France's that suddenly there are indeed apples and the oranges counted together to give a 53,000 death toll at this moment, reveals itself as a bottom bedrock number on which the real has to be much greater.

Deaths in rest homes would be a feature of any overrun city or country by covid-19. America's early numbers were marred by a king-hit for the virus, which like a ferret seeking out chicks in a birds nest, wiped out a third of the residents of a rest home in Washington State. It was a precision strike, which if it had triggered a national response at the time might have saved at least 100,000 more lives.

When the fog of this is dispelled, the estimates will be scary. It won't be just the undercount of rest homes deaths, but home deaths, homeless deaths, pre-outbreak deaths (in hospitals before countries realised they had it) and post-breakdown deaths when there is no testing available for the already dead, being saved for the still alive. If you don't mind me repeating the analogy, like a ferret hunting and slaughtering chicks in a nest, this virus tests and probes every country and it will ransack the weak and disorganised. My favourite vlogger on the topic calls covid-19 the honey badger virus. I'd call it a ferret and I wish it could just be exterminated.

Numbers

It would be interesting to know how people in different industries have experienced this Black Swan event. For our organisation, it's been a massive administrative and logistical challenge which I believe we have managed adequately for, but we are in an industry that can go on under lock-down. For some retail organisations, it's been just a case of initially rolling out safety policies (social distancing; cancelling events) and then with the Level 4 starting, doing the communication for a shut down of trade. The shutdown affects staff, and staff do need clear guidance of what will happen in this scary new world. 

The experience would be heavily influenced by the approach of the government for the particular countries. Take a shopping mall shop assistant, who in NZ should be getting at least 80% of their wage to stay home. The flow-on effects are all different for each person. 80% might seem like a pretty good rate to have essential staycation and watch Netflix, but many people might struggle with a sudden 20% drop in income. Staying at home does restrict your ability to spend but it probably doesn't make up for the 20% loss. (Not to mention, the feeling of additional loss because your KiwiSaver took a hit.) But the wage subsidy programme is a great idea to enable companies to switch out of the lock-down and back into full gear. In Australia, apparently they didn't think to do a policy to protect jobs and instead allowed companies to shed jobs to keep going and be profitable, and instead increase funding for the unemployed.

But a shopping mall shop assistant in the US might have no pay whatsoever to stay at home. A new word, "furlough", is now increasingly common parlance, for temporary halting employment and pay. How can one prepare for that? Perhaps in such an environment the insurance market fills that gap - income insurance is a product for this kind of scenario. 

I worked through this weekend. It was a blessed weekend of work because it seemed no-one else was doing the finicky stuff, the cerebral stuff, the big picture stuff and the wish-I-had-a-moment-to-do-it stuff. I was almost undisturbed and got enough stuff done to mean I could have a cruisy week while garner a few plaudits for being organised. Today I relaxed on the sofa knowing everything was in its right place.

Numbers are a thing for me. Despite my pursuit of languages, I'm a mathshead from way back. I remember learning calculus and thinking it was a bloody good idea. I love a rule that unlocked the minutiae. When I started my long gradual march into management in China, my organisation weakness at the time was compensated for almost entirely with my ability to use numbers as both a shield and a blunt instrument to get my way. Managing upwards is a cinch if you handle your numbers better than those above you. It takes a very on-the-ball superior to have the time to dismantle a numerical defence or blockade. Usually, without a grasp of the detail to unpick it, they let you have your way. It takes either the bloodyminded or the maniacal manager to take you on and try to wrestle your digits off whatever you were wielding in defence and force an issue. 

Anyone who has read this blog for a little while knows that the numerical side of the pandemic has attracted me. Tomorrow, the United States will clock over twice the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases yet just the same number of official deaths as China, the original OC for Covid-19. The contrast between those two facts could be puzzling. Some might conclude that American healthcare is better than Chinese; or more evenhandedly, China was caught unawares and took a hit before it knew what it was grappling with. I'm no expert but both explanations don't consider the temporal aspect. China's numbers are final, they've gone through the cycle of what is now typical in covid-19 control: (0) outbreak, usually with the initial deaths of the vulnerable; (1) wider spread beyond and sudden accumulation of cases in health systems; regional lock-downs; (2) national lock-down; (3) levelling out and then a decrease in new cases; (4) a levelling out then a decrease in the number of deaths; (5) Attrition of the considerable number of people who are critically ill and on respirators. Most of the dying happens in the last three steps and the US is only up to step 1. It's the second step that they could have done but it seems they can't get past the idea that it has to be a regional approach. Several states have implemented so-called "shelter in place" which is essentially the same as the New Zealand lock-down rules, but with an important difference: they aren't islands. You can drive from one shelter-in-place state to a less affected state, and why wouldn't you? Also due to the lag between infection, symptoms, testing, confirmation of diagnosis and hospitalisation, there are a lot of non-lock-down states who will soon be in the same situation that precipitated the lockdowns. You can almost see California and New York emerging from their lockdowns to find that Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Pennsylvania suddenly carrying the burning torch of coronavirus, ready to pass it back. 

"We are not Wuhan," the Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York said, when saying that his state could not be quarantined like a Chinese metropolis could be ("feng cheng"). It is true but for the wrong reason. Wuhan was a "bloodbath", quoting myself in January and the quarantine. When Wuhan was unfolding the stories were blood curdling. There could be reason to doubt the numbers but accepting the numbers: over 2500 of Hubei's 3148 fatalities were in that one city; which were the vast majority of China's 3314 death to date. During the worst of it there were about 12 days where the daily deaths for China, mostly made of Hubeinese, were between 98 and 149. It makes for a quaint reflection now because Spain and Italy have put up daily death tolls in the 800s and 900s as countries, but they're already at step 3. Cases are tapering out; they are almost set to sit down and let some other countries take the lamelight. New York state, with a population of less than 20 million people, has an increasing number of deaths, now over 250 a day and rising. New York State is not Hubei, it's worse. The rate of increase of new cases is dropping so the shelter-in-place rules do work but it's going to drag out, and the worst of the deaths are yet to come. Probably the only determiner of whether they can keep it to a less than catastrophic number will be if they can prevent the health system collapsing under the weight. The death toll for the state of New York currently stands at 1,342. Wuhan's official death count was less than 100 when it was sealed.

Only god knows it's Friday

Lockdown. Officially only the end of the second day, and already it's hard to know what day it is. In the confinements of ones home, the days all seem the same. I've lived it of course in self-isolation but this time is qualitatively different: when everyone is under lock down, everyone is in the same twilight life. The last two days have been the most frenetic work-from-home days ever. It was apparent during the self-isolation that I'm relentlessly more productive at home but also still wall-to-wall busy. There is a obstruction quotient that causes interactions to be slower; and a competing non-distraction quotient which causes all tasks to be done easily because JS or SS aren't at your door asking the same question they did yesterday.

Even though the days are merging into one, I've used Friday as a my measuring stick day to mark the progress of Covid-19, so just to shock you a bit:

• if New York State were a country, it would have the 6th most cases and the 8th most fatalities, despite being much smaller than almost all the states in the top, bar Switzerland.
• in 7 days, Italy's fatalities doubled from 3,405 (shockingly surpassing China) to 8,215, where China is no longer a relevant comparison.
• if Italy felt bad for doubling deaths in a week, Spain went from 831 to 4,365 to make it seem like it had been "flattening the curve"
• Diamond Princess fans were shocked when the model sample went from 8 fatalities to 10. The now ignominious sisters, Diamond, Grand and now Ruby, have a lot to answer for but Diamond has often been taken as a perfect sample to prove that Covid-19 isn't as fatal. There were 712 diagnosed cases and for a long time only 7 fatalities, which for a cohort of older people might appear decent. Except for the fact that they would be receiving the high quality unburdened care in Japan, and even with that they had a large number of still "Serious/Critical" cases (15 is the number quoted on worldometer.info). If that number of deaths continues to rise, some of the viruskeptics will have one less straw to pull. 
• Horrifically for our neighbour, Australia has gone from a mere 756 cases (and 7 deaths) to 3,166 cases and 13 deaths in a week. And still they don't think to pull the cord to stop the bus.

The inanity of the US/Australian cases for a mottled lockdown is that it even if it puts out the fire in parts it allows the cinders to burn and reignite. New York State might heroically lock down and smother out the virus locally but it will still be surrounded by dubious states with unknown degrees of contamination. Same for Australia who have the worst parts of a lock down without locking down and then still allow it to burn. Perhaps the Australian example is a Machiavellian plan to flatten the curve while still preserving economic life. Or perhaps it's just an ill thought through, inconsistent, incoherent plan. Next Friday we'll see where they are. 

I used to get my figures from Chinese sources when this virus only had a garnishing of non-Chinese cases, but now I use https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries as it's the quickest to update. It's crowd sourced so subject to change but it's still the best out there, and the best statistics. best of which is the logarithmic charts. (Nerdy, I know.) One of the side benefits of a pandemic and comprehensive tracking is the abundance of geographical locations that you feel you must know. So your task today is to state where the following places, with confirmed Covid cases, are:

• San Marino
• Aruba
• Andorra
• Guadeloupe
• Martinique
• Curacao
• Cabo Verde
• Eswatini
• Turks and Caicos Islands
• Sint Maarten

Anyway, none of these places are like Cocomo, where you're not gonna go. 

Masking the flu (a bit more grey)

Two persistent Corona-topics that come up again and again: comparisons with the flu and evaluations of the efficacy of masks. They are rapidly getting into "that old chestnut" territory but their persistence make them tough nuts to crack.

The flu thing is irritating because of the aversion people have to "grey" I raised in a previous blog. People still want to yanny/laurel Covid-19 to being either the average lurgee or the 1918 "Spanish" Flu. Every time there is an article that minimizes this pandemic I feel the threat rise and more people take it lightly.

But the attitude to face masks is also irksome. It seems a loaded topic and there are experts who come out to downplay their efficacy and discourage their use. It is true that mask use require a little guidance for best use, and you can see lots of people using them unnecessarily, I would say that it is irrational to discourage use if it's an available resource.

I'd like to explain it with some evidence and reasoning. Feel free to dispute it. The first thing is that mask wearing cultures have fewer cases. Early on South Korea, Japan and Singapore all were the secondary epicentres to China. Right now, South Korea has slide down to the 10th most cases, Japan the 27th most cases, Singapore 44th. Of course, this is not to say masks are responsible for the relative improvement, the clear "flattening of the curve" but it coincides. No mask wearing culture is having a hard time with this after they were collectively ambushed by this pathogen.

My second argument is about what's called inoculum, that is the amount of contagion that you take in. Young health workers die of Covid-19 because they don't just have casual contact with the infected, they get it again and again, small and big amounts. They are inoculated with different amounts, and in this situation more means less chance of living through infection. The experts may say that masks still allow viral particles to sneak past the sides. But if you are in the early phases of infection, most of your shed viral particles are not likely to go out to others if you are wearing a mask. If you are sick, you'll definitely have access to masks in a culture that values masks. That means your contacts would have much reduced inoculum and are also less likely to die from their infections. And if you are a healthy person in situations with repeated exposure to possible infected people or in enclosed environments you have less likelihood of breathing in droplets. Infection is not a binary thing. It too happens in degrees and the degree of infection is affected by barriers such as masks.

The focus on hand washing in western countries is noble and there is now a spotlight on the touching of the face by hands. People unfairly pick on the health ministry people who just like us are compelled to scratch, rub and pinch their faces, with their ill luck that they're often filmed doing so while advocating that we all shouldn't. My nose is forever uncomfortable and I know that I have terrible habits in this area. I thought of putting plasters on my fingers to make me aware when I did. It didn't work. You know what stops your subconscious touching of your nose? A mask. Experts point out that you might touch your mask and transfer virus to your hands. True, and that's why masks and handwashing go together.

It's a no-brainer. There has been some conspiratorial perspectives why masks have been discouraged. Firstly, western countries aren't well stocked with masks. If the whole population needed a mask (should be one a day at least, or once every 4 hours if you follow the directions), we would need almost 30-40 million masks a week. By discouraging the public use, the health sector can buy out the available imported stock and secure all the local production. I agree with this but would prefer that there was increased production. Our country had two months' lead time to stockpile and I heard our local production could do 200,000 a day. Still, on the news tonight it showed nurses in South Auckland without masks. You see staff for "essential service" not wearing masks.

Masks may be a cultural thing. Service staff do not want to mask up because it's hardly a welcoming thing to wear. How do you feel when you are welcomed by a person in a mask? Cold and alien. In China, dare I say it, service has no such scruples. But there is a messaging in it, too. Now we too have our daily updates on the TV about the local outbreaks and case numbers. In China, all the officials doing the presenting did it masked. The reporters asked their questions masked. Even Chairman Xi got masked. You could tell immediately that this is a serious thing. Even my in-laws on the farm who themselves would barely think of wearing a mask wore them, not just because their children begged them to but because the leadership showed that it was the thing to do. In China, you could say it might get to the point of virtue-signalling, but you could also argue that it's legitimate hygiene-signalling: I'm safe. I care about your safety. In Guangzhou you couldn't take public transport without one, and it was seen as socially irresponsible not to.

I haven't yet donned a mask in New Zealand because I genuinely have thought that the cases prior to the current week have all been people who travelled in and still at a low incidence. My line was crossed with community transmission. When I go to the supermarket this weekend, it'll be in a mask.

Lock it down!

It's a quintessential scene in a disaster movie: the peril is impending, the people surge for their lifeboats, their security from zombies, their escape hatch and their dangling rope from a leaving helicopter. The protagonists of the movies just make it to their refuge, and the camera sweeps to those who just missed as the velociraptors sweep in, as the lava pours down the valley to cut off all hopes of escape. It's time like these that almost evoke the cinematic. I was told of a real scene today that made me think of these movies. Yet in this actual story, it wasn't the apparent threat, this virulent disease, that was surging forth but the measures to ameliorate it that are an existential danger to companies. It was the sign of an organisation sitting on the beach when the tsunami roars in. There were tears and there will be tears, but before I tell you about that let me set the scene from a mountain top where I peered to the beach below:

"Going online" might sound like an easy process but for any school its a massive undertaking. I've never been tempted to move our school online, and I don't think we've been depriving our students of much by not. The virus indirectly got our feet wet though: in February we were going to send a teacher to China to prepare students for study in New Zealand but just as we got all of our ducks in a row, the covid-19 outbreak in China shot the plan out of the air. Instead we chose to prepare them remotely. The platform was chosen while I was still in a lock-down in China but with my acquiescence. I eventually returned and supported the teacher and learned a little bit along side him. I even covered a part of his class to get my first taste. Perhaps it was because I'd already been under one lock down, when we had our first case I proposed setting up our academic pandemic plan and promptly held a non-standard team-meeting to focus on safety procedures and an initiation into the platform for the whole team. We then did a whole organisation, whole study body campaign of information, then I helped teachers do a session in their classes to have the students download the app with support from the different language team members. Then we were to have a "trial" day where everyone would do a class online. Our problem was this week was meant to be a 6-weekly test week. It would usually be a Tues/Wed affair with Thursday for marking and result approval. I targeted Friday 27 March as my day to have all classes online as a trial for everyone to learn.

Then the PM raised us to level 2 on Saturday and I went fully for pulling testing to one day, Monday, and the online trial to Tuesday. Then there were another 30 cases on Sunday and the CEO put all programmes on pause for the current week at our sister school and asked what I wanted to do. I insisted on plan A, saying we'd complete testing on the Monday and do Tuesday as an online class and pause from Wednesday. Everything just worked. Even the announcement of level 3 on Monday didn't shake the plan. All testing was done. Online classes were scheduled. Communications went out. Monday was done. 

And today is that Tuesday. Our teachers were plunged online. It's hard when you're used to one mode and you're forced into another. Even though they had two weeks to familiarise and even had me to coax them into trying it out with me on the weekends, many still weren't sure before classes. There was a bit of panic and floundering but also some realisations and learning. There was one student complaint. One teacher who couldn't follow directions. Today is done. We have a few days to consolidate how we're doing things before we properly launch next Monday. I'm just glad we scrapped through to an acceptable way of doing things.

That takes me back to that beach: The actual setting was an educational industry meeting, perhaps as recently as yesterday, where there was an educational leader from an English language institution which had dragged its feet, or perhaps didn't move them at all, to get "online". This person was crying in front of the group, not knowing what to do. Their organisation was not ready and the virus had moved fast and, now, to actually implement online teaching is tantamount to impossible. Teachers, even techsavvy ones, might not "get" how the new platform works or how to prepare and present material. Language learners of low levels, with varying technology are no longer concentrated in the one room for "easy" training. (Actually even explaining to them step by step in person can be a challenge.) There can be no classes. There can be no training. There can be no teaching. Many of them communicate just with e-mails and phone calls and they have no tools to really even overcome the chasm that they're about to dive into. The tidal waves washes in with torrential tears.

And now it's a game of 28 days later... Not the zombie movie, it's the length of a notice period and also the length that the Level 4 Alert is pencilled in to last. If the alert were just to be 4 weeks, it'd be the most ironic notice period ever. But it is hard to say when real normalcy will resume. For our own school, students will end their enrolments but many students will almost have to extend their study as there are no flights back to their countries. (Aside: What does a government do with people who are overstaying their visas or have rejected visas?) For a period we worried that we would have no more students coming in. Now it's possible that our students won't be able to leave. We've now entered the twilight zone. We're in lock down. 

I'm now an expert on twilight living: I spent about two weeks of my three week China trip in lockdownesque situation in the village. I spent another two weeks in self-isolation after returning from China. And now I'll be in another lockdown here for at least another four weeks. Lockdown. Lockdown. Lockdown. But there's no safer place than the home. The global deaths from this thing went from 10,000 to 15,000 in five days. That's a 50% increase in five days for something that pretty much has always seemed devastating. Die in, die out. Who would want to be on the streets?

Strategising the peaks

It's easy to get rub ourselves into a soapy lather over the rise in Covid-19 cases in New Zealand but if I wanted to cool myself down, I assure myself that there must be a tactician, probably a chess player, behind the scenes planning moves, feints and stratagems that fit into a grand plan. Go back just one week to that "Self Isolation policy for all arrivals". At that time there were only 5 cases - and that 16 day strategy lasted all of 5 days before the announcement of a complete closing of the borders. In some ways it might seem that the self-isolation policy was a misstep, but you don't need to be too generous to think that it was actually a telegraphed phase in a bigger strategy.

The day she announced the self-isolation policy, the Prime Minister, with just five cases, said that the plan was to "flatten the curve", the curve being the surge of cases. Without any prevention measures, the outbreak would have a large peak that would overwhelm the health system. So to flatten the curve it implies that there would be measures deployed in the face of the virus to dampen that surge. For there to be a surge, there needs to be the spreading of the virus. For there to be a spreading of the virus there needs to be cases and community spread. The plan of flattening the curve was clearly informed by the need to have a long term plan of herd immunity through gradual spread, rather than containment. This article in the New Zealand Herald it elaborates clearly a strategy of "managed peaks" as New Zealand's best bet.

It was actually possible at the five case mark to shut the door. It was already pretty clear that wherever the disease landed it burst through any line of defence. We could have contained the disease outside our shores and extinguished whatever signs of it there were within. That would be an easy strategy - but also it's a very temporary strategy, unless you want New Zealand to become an autarky a la North Korea.

The key is to have a few cases, not too many cases at one time. Like a captain on a ship planning to tack, they waited to a particular time and then slammed the door to the entry of imported cases on Thursday night. Today it was announced that there were two cases not from travel. For some this is a moment to fret, not realising that the strategy is clear: the majority is going to get exposed, slowly, with the contagion slowed with social distancing, and tracing easier with movements restricted. Local transmission is how you get the virus to the non-travelling population.

It is not a politically easy statement to make: we want you to be sick, at some time, in an orderly way. Britain, of course, made a similar statement but with negligible testing, existing wide community spread and fatalities already emerging. It will be interesting to see how our Prime Minister would answer if asked directly if they were intending people to get infected, even though she has coded it. 

Which brings me to China. Their official numbers seem to indicate that the community spread is negligible, the outbreak extinguished and that the only source of cases was from the outside. But they still haven't started the school year; there are anecdotal stories that there are still lock downs and the sealing of towns. My theory is that China is also maintaining a low level controlled infection of the populace. But also that is not a palatable fact, hence the suppression of accurate numbers of true local transmission.

It could be possible that New Zealand has too many cases - we just don't know how many cases are actually out there. With the speed of this outbreak, a week is a long time. Every week from here to Christmas will be a long time. With a bit of luck, we'll have vaguely normal lives and a slow inevitable infection, while treatments and vaccines are eventually developed. Fingers crossed.

Blindingly grey

In my teens and my early 20s, I often dabbled in Taoist (Dao) philosophy and sometimes aspired to get my head around the esoterism of Buddhism. But I was a shopper of ideas, I took what I liked and called myself what I wished. One of the core beliefs for both of those though was a negation of duality. Even if the Yin-Yang symbol was a swirl of black and white it was clear that there were degrees. And even the complete black could collapse into white and vice versa. It was a bit like a tonic for the mind when I was young, but the conclusions are all the more obvious as you age and gather experience. The black and white truths that you hear around the place become a bit ridiculous.

From chapter 2 of the Daodejing (Laozi/Laotzu):

"Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty,
only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Being and nonbeing produce each other.
The difficult is born in the easy.
Long is defined by short, the high by the low.
Before and after go along with each other.
So the sage lives openly with apparent duality
and paradoxical unity."

Paradoxical unity where good and bad are part of a single whole. Can you find a pole on a circle?

Anyhow, the more I manage a team the more I wade in the grey. The more I cross cultures the more hazy things appear. I can't live in apparent duality when its only really apparent to others. In this interminable moment in time, the duality is crisis/no crisis; pandemic/common cold; correct approach/foolish incompetence; infected/pure; young/old; others/self; overreaction/prudence. Why does it really have to be one or the other? And how can you know when you're in the dark in world of paradoxical unity. 

Truth and reality are textured and not polar. Perhaps it's only in the spheres of life that we're familiar with that it's clear things are in degrees and the art is clear; perhaps it's only the unfamiliar terrain of other topics where we use duality as a heuristic. There are some many angles of this pandemic where a little grey goes a long way. There is a lot of dispute how fatal covid-19 is. From the "official" statistics for any country right now, an initial fatality rate can become clear, but it almost every place but China and the Diamond Princess the "smoke has not cleared". There is still some grim accounting to do... But the Diamond Princess shows a 1% fatality rate; China has a 3.5% fatality rate, although all provinces apart from Hubei have barely 1% fatality. Trump famously spoke from his gut and said he thought it was below 1%, more like the flu, and that most cases aren't counted. But not all flu cases can be counted either. And now Italy and Iran seem to be outdoing even Hubei, and even if they had tested everyone. Previous I did mainly through the prism of response time and approach. But there are other angles, too.

What is infection? I speak now with no epidemiological knowledge, but just empiricism. Being marked as "infected" is not actually whether you "a virus detected" It touches some and even with exposure doesn't others. The first drop of grey is the assumption that all people are the same in the face of a virus. Texture. The other assumption is that we meet the virus in the same way, that it's either a hit or a miss, a binary. What an infection is whether it be viral, bacterial or fungal is when a particle or particles of the disease successfully establish and propagate themselves. For covid-19, the action is mostly in the lungs so how much of the virus gets in them, where it manages to get to and whether it is on more than one occasion must be a factor. So grey. And then is it detectable? Maybe a healthy well slept person inhaled one particle and overcame it without it becoming noticeable or even detectable, did it really make a sound? A paler shade of grey? And in many countries they are more thorough and transparent than other countries so 

On the contrary, there had been a lot going around that this disease only kills the old and for the rest it's a bad flu. So much black and white in that thinking. Chinese will be quick to raise that Li Wenliang, the whistleblowing doctor and many other doctors died young, showing that the amount of exposure and stress does a lot. There is a chain reaction when the virus becomes so prevalent that people can't avoid multiple infections and the fear and anxiety deprives people of sleep and immunity. I believe in the other provinces in China, there was never much density in cases, and people masked up quickly, especially the sick ones, so the infected people only ever had a few particles to deal with, and so then it was only the elderly failed to cope. 

The only duality should be whether you live or die. (Unless you're Buddhist.) Deaths may be absolute but causes of death are not mutually exclusive. If someone with "pre-existing conditions" has covid-19 and in the stress of the disease has a heart attack, what exactly killed him? (What really killed Rasputin, anyway?) It doesn't take bias to induce some different standards in reporting. And if the fatality rate is officially assigned deaths over official verified detected cases, any single percentage is not really comparable. 

But at the end of the day, over 400 people died each day in Italy over the last two days. No matter how you cut that, it's a slaughter. I like to go back a week, the global death count was just below 5000, with just over 3000 of those in China. This evening it topped 10,000, with about no movement in the Chinese numbers. Outside of China it essentially went from 2000 to 7000 in just 7 days. It is clear exponential growth. Italy was also locked down 7 days ago. It's been speculated that with the usual course of the cases, it takes 3 weeks for the cases done before an action to fully bite. That means that they need to hold themselves together for another 14 days before the worst will be over.

Back last Friday we had just 5 cases and now we're at 39. Currently all of them are considered to be imported cases. That might change. We're in the early stages where people who get it might only get a single particle and fight it off asymptomatically, perhaps even undetectably. The actions to close the border might have been timely enough to create a "small peak" of infection, which is ideal. But with 2 weeks for symptoms for the sicker of them to become apparent and 3 weeks for the worst of those to hit the ICU's and respirators, it's far too early to tell. At 39 cases, it's already close to the point that we may have a death. And that's when people really start to lose their minds. Crisis/No crisis.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! pt 2

After waiting almost a week for our 6th case, 7th and 8th cases rolled in today. Both of them were recent arrivals back to NZ almost immediately adding an exclamation mark to the new policy that was released yesterday. 

Yesterday I spoke positively about being in this 16 day experiment. It might be the case that this new mode will persist for some time. With a bit of luck there will be small outbreaks that will be controlled. In the event of a larger spread in one area, there might be some regional quarantines, where healthcare staff and resources from other areas could be diverted until the crisis has abated. It would be a slow but sure flattening of the curve.

One experiment that I'm happy not to be a part of is that adopted by the United Kingdom, or at least the experimental approach they released at the end of last week. (There is some sign they have already waivered.) The initial approach was that they were not going to mandate restrictions on gatherings. The philosophy was to let the virus in and get the population to gain the immunity by allowing the majority of the population to get it. There is a perverse logic to it but the standard understanding of this virus is that that would be a very bad idea. That would be to heighten the curve, or keep the curve where it is. That is essentially what happened in Italy and Wuhan, although deliberately. 

But already there might have been some hesitation. Perhaps it was the death toll shoot 11 to 21 in a 24 hour period. 

I've never really been a Twitter user, probably because I preferred long-hand blogs, and anything short went on Facebook. But the SkyCity Convention Centre fire showed me that it was a quick way to get important official information. The pandemic again is showing it as a place I can go to for much needed information or commentary. I probably will never be a regular Tweeter but I think it now has its own unique place in my social media.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Today was an interesting day. After the having the end of the world as we know it on my mind for much of the week, and feeling like I had to personally bid modernity goodbye, I did wake rather positively this morning. I can't remember the exact hopes I had for the world but things seemed more in control. Then there was news of the inevitable sixth case, a traveller from America, showing it wasn't just Italians and Iranians "seeding" foreign countries with the virus. (Trump literally pointed the finger at Europe for seeding the virus in the States!) But then the blockbuster news rolled in: New Zealand will require all arrivals to self-isolate for 14 days. The implications of it took time to parse. All the international sporting competitions suddenly hit a very hard wall. An overseas based Kiwi friends quick visit home was nixxed. I had thoughts of my students who were due to land after midnight Sunday but who will now not be able to start class; thoughts of our potential students who were due to depart but now might be left in the lurch. But the really unconsciously from behind the fluster of thoughts, there was relief. There needed to be some change to the status quo that left the country in a brace position. And it was good to see the Prime Minister speak in the language of flattening the curve.

To be clear it's a policy that will be reviewed in 16 days. Even though this is going to be a pain for our company short term, I can see some good things even commercially. Currently we are the only English speaking major country without wild community spread. For all schools of New Zealand, we could be the safest haven from this scourge.

16 days is a long time. Just a little peek back to 27 February, 16 days ago, Italy had but 12 deaths. Now it has 1266 deaths. In fact even in those quaint days when it seemed so bad, it was just 53 people dead outside greater China. Now we're perched in the low 2000's. The world might have changed a lot at the end of this tunnel. Switzerland and the UK are on 11 fatalities - will they replicate Italy's carnage and be near 1200. The US has just crept into the 50's. Will it play its outbreak like a microcosm of the world and also be in the 2000's.

We also aren't out of the woods. Because the door was essentially open to a huge number of outbreak countries with unfettered entry into New Zealand until tomorrow night, there could be further cases. There's been an astonishing absence of cases after the bans on Italy, Iran and South Korea stifled the rise. It's very plausible though that we'll have a few other American or European originating cases. Closer to home, with 8 deaths from a certainly inaccurate 64 cases, the Philippines could also have potentially given us a case. Australia also with its 199 confirmed cases represents a potential risk. More likely, and I'm thankful that it hasn't happened yet, there must be some virus in the community. It might be bouncing around a few healthy people, knocking them down for a moment, before they get well; but not before infecting another one or two. It's possible that we might have even had an unnoticed death, because it could have been the final nail in a lost cause, or two. When there is only testing with strong cases, as we're doing now, it's hard to know whether there is some community transmission or not.

16 days is a long time. If we do have some more challenging cases to contract trace and quarantine, it'll make for coronavirus's first real battlecries in NZ. There is no way NZ can keep itself 100% Corona-Free. In fact, it will need to let it in one step at a time almost in a controlled way to really "flatten the curve". The worst case scenario would be that we don't get it because our vulnerability will remain - the populace would have no immunity. Ideally we have pockets of people gain immunity so that for each outbreak the chances of the non-immune encountering an infected person are reduced. The more we get into that territory the less chance there is to everyone.

Covid-19 does present a rather unique global threat. I'm proud our country has so far been unscathed and also proud of the bravery to make the move today. Let the 30 March 2020 be an important milestone for the world and New Zealand. 16 days will reveal a lot.